April Fool’s came late this year

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from a fellow editorial writer over in beautiful North Carolina a decade ago. How nice to know that a letter to the editor we published here in Arkansas’ Newspaper was being cited all over the Internet. I’d gathered as much from the flood of emails at the time wondering if that letter could be for real.

I only wish our editorials were as popular, but right now we’re just trying to expand our influence in growing metropolitan areas here in Arkansas like Hogeye, Smackover and Standard Umpstead. Not to mention Ralph, Waldo and Emerson. (Although there is apparently no truth to the rumor that one of our country routes goes from Tinker to Evers to Chance.)

To only slightly modify a line from Stephen Vincent Benet, I have fallen in love with Arkansas names—the sharp names that never get fat. But if I ever do aspire to expand our circulation across state lines (and I certainly do), Hot Coffee, Miss., sounds nice. Especially early in the morning.

But where was I? Oh, yes, the letter in question (“Daylight Exacerbates Global Warming,”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 16, 2007) drew attention from Juneau to Timbuktu. It came to us from the Sage of Hot Springs, Ark., Connie Meskimen, a lawyer there who kept his powder dry and tongue firmly in cheek.

There’s no need to go into the scientific details, but the burden of his missive was that by moving Daylight Saving Time up a month that year, thus providing an extra hour of sunlight in March, Congress had thoughtlessly brought summer on in spring.

Well, sure. It makes as much sense as anything else Congress does from time to unbelievable time. Personally, I don’t buy it. My own theory is that global weather patterns have been out of sync ever since those softies in Washington cut out nuclear testing in the atmosphere.

Scientific theories abound, and you’re welcome to your own favorites, including proofs that turn out to be spoofs. When I was growing up, it wasn’t global warming that was going to wipe us all out, but a new ice age. Time magazine said so. Or maybe it was Newsweek—as late as 1975.

I am sure, however, that it was Paul Ehrlich who warned that social chaos was unavoidable because the world’s population was exploding. (“The Population Bomb,” 1968.) Mr. Ehrlich was to scientific prediction what the

New York Times’ Paul Krugman has long been is to economic analysis: mistaken but always absolutely sure of himself.

I can recall writing a more than slightly hysterical editorial on the subject at the time for that leading scientific journal, the Pine Bluff

Commercial. It would be remembered to this day if I’d had the wit, or maybe just the merchandising savvy, to head it “An Inconvenient Truth.” Nobody ever went broke overestimating the American public’s capacity for panic.

Naturally, the Heinz Foundation would later give Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne a lifetime achievement award or some such, complete with a check for $250,000. The disaster-predicting business does have its upside.

As for whether Connie Meskimen meant his letter to the editor to be taken

seriously, I suspect he was out to have some serious fun.

Counselor Meskimen was said to conduct these Rorschach tests for the depths of American gullibility from time to hilarious time, and he may not have hit bottom yet. Because we all seem to have an oceanic capacity for mistaken assumptions.

I’ve lost count by now of the oh-so-serious inquiries from graduate students and members of science faculties, including one or two at Ivy League universities, who have asked whether said letter writer was serious. These people wouldn’t be able to detect satire if it showed up under their microscopes.

Then there were the folks here in Arkansas, image-conscious as ever, who were infuriated that we’d publish such a letter, fearing it would leave the impression that Arkies are a bunch of scientific ignoramuses. As opposed, one supposes, to all those literalminded, sober-sided, absolutely humorless scientific twits who were appalled by the letter and eager to set the writer straight.

Sure enough, despite daily alerts, Yours Truly missed the time change this year. It’s happened before, and the first time it did, I felt exhilarated—as if my life had been extended a whole hour. Why, I could even put off meeting the little hellions I taught at Sunday school back then for a whole hour. But by the end of the day it had hit me that I would be exhausted an hour early, too. Spring forward, all right, then fall back into a delayed torpor. There’s no cheating old Father Time, whose clock never needs resetting.