Time After Time

Still in crisis mode, Americans are needing to expand their vocabulary yet once more. The word for today is tick-tock. Obviously, the sound of a clock, but in the world of political journalism, a much bigger concept. While reading various blogs and reports here and there on the net on Wednesday, I ran into the word three times, and then on Thursday, Kevin Drum sent me to Joe Nocera’s tick-tock at the New York Times.

A tick-tock, it appears, is a minute by minute account of events. By analyzing the tick-tock, one can derive some greater meaning from or about the outcomes of those events. Now, it’s not entirely clear to me from jargon dictionary definitions whether the ‘tick-tock’ is the chronicling, the analysis, or the combination of the two, or whether anyone cares. It’s American journalism jargon, so those folks may have not carefully worked out a definition, but we can see how it works.

Thursday tick-tock.
7:45. My brain awakens and notes that a bird is calling, meaning that it is past 7:30, which is the time the computer randomly chooses a bird call to awaken me every morning. In theory, I would learn to identify the calls of birds from this, but ten years of experience has shown otherwise. I do not learn because the bird refuses to say its name.
8:00. My eyes open and see in the overhead skylight that the sky is gray and I consider changing my plans for the day not to include gardening because it is probably going to rain again.
8:15. I get to the computer to read the news headlines and the morning blogs, mostly political. I find myself reading the same analysis over and over, just written by different people.
9:00. With coffee, I settle down to read the most recent New Yorker. It is providing me with a long analysis of Lionel Trilling’s work by Louis Menand. I think about how, in 1960 when I was in graduate school, I read Trilling’s work and talked endlessly with my colleagues about the meaning of literary criticism, and now it is 48 years later and I am reading about it again, although I no longer have colleagues. Louis Menand is not my colleague.
9:45. I am finished with Lionel Trilling and move on to an article that questions the wisdom of pets inheriting millions of dollars. I think about how, also in the 1960’s, I audited many law school classes instead of writing my English Literature dissertation, and finally quit going to the law classes after I spent two hours listening to arguments about whether the law should allow people to leave millions of dollars in trust to their pet. In the particular case at hand, the pet was a turtle. And now, 45 years later, I am reading about it again.
10:30. Took a walk to the beach and found that the tide was in again. Very reliable, the tide.
12:00. Lunch, day after day.

Well, you get the idea. Reading the Thursday tick-tock suggests that the outcome of Thursday, for me, was largely influenced by repetitive events. Much like the failure of the financial system: deregulation leads to financial crisis; belief that there is a free lunch, leads to no lunch. I am reading about it again.