Keep messing with the clocks

It’s that wonderful time of year in the northern latitudes when we have all the daylight we could possibly want and more. We are embarrassed for riches, so much so that we sacrifice an hour of daylight in the morning when no one is awake and tack it onto the evening so that we can stay out later enjoying ourselves in the nice weather. Daylight savings time is a wonderful and distinctly American tradition, now adopted, like all our best cultural exports, by nearly every western country.But like every good innovation, it has always attracted its share of noisy malcontents. For my entire adult life people have been complaining about the unbearable burden of changing their clocks twice a year. Decades ago the proposal from the stop-messing-with-the-clocks crowd was to stay on standard time year round, like Arizona and Hawaii already do — every state has the option to do so under the Uniform Time Act of 1966. But today’s clock carpers have converged on a proposal to make daylight savings…