Timekeepers Read online

  When I arrived in Toronto three months later it turned out everyone else had precisely 17 minutes too. I learnt that TED talks were all intended to be precisely 18 minutes, a period that Chris Anderson, one of its curators, defined as the sweet spot: it gave the speaker enough time to be serious, but not enough to be academic; the ‘clarifying effect’ of concentrating a message into just 18 minutes worked equally for both the speaker and the audience, with neither party having enough time to get bored; and it was the ideal time for a talk to go viral online because it was about the length of a coffee break.

  But at IdeaCity, the 17 minutes was, in the words of Moses, ‘a bit of a fuck you’ to TED. Connie Diletti told me that IdeaCity began in 2000 under the name TEDCity, in partnership with TED co-creator Richard Wurman (TED began in 1984). For a while, each speaker at TED and TEDCity had 20 minutes on stage, but when TED changed to 18 minutes and the organisation expanded and changed direction a little bit, Moses decided to go his own way by formulating the ‘fuck you’ element. (Plausibly, sometime in the future, a rival organisation, inspired by IdeaCity but wanting to better it, would just reduce the time again, to 16 or 15 minutes. Or even 8. It was all about essence, reducing it down like a good French stock.

  Moses was Moses Znaimer, a Jewish Lithuanian septuagenarian media tycoon, a local combination of Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Hefner, albeit more liberal. He was a charmer, but I sensed that he hadn’t got to his elevated position by being a charmer all the time. The television and radio stations and baby boomer cultural/political magazine called Zoomer outlined in the email were all his, and he also liked to surround himself with beautiful women and beautiful cars (he ran a DeLorean and a classic Jag). He also ran the show at IdeaCity, introducing each session and speaker, posing for photographs with each participant, and would act as the unofficial timekeeper. The official timekeeper was a prominent rectangular digital clock on the stage that began its countdown as soon as you opened your mouth. But the unofficial timekeeper was stealthier. As soon as you reached your 17-minute limit, Moses would appear on the side of the stage. If you exceeded it by a minute, Moses would slowly edge towards you, and if you went over beyond that, Moses would creep closer still, until he’d be standing beside you, ready to intercede with a witty and possibly deflating remark.

  Fortunately I was on in the morning of the second day, leaving plenty of time to absorb the previous timekeeping of others and get unusually nervous. The event was held at Koerner Hall, a horseshoe-shaped venue seating more than 1,000. It was the home of the Royal Conservatory of Music, and so the sightlines and acoustics were both magnificent, as was the screen technology for your PowerPoint. Of course, this only served to crank up the nerves, as did the fact that it was being filmed and, as the initial email promised, ‘hosted on our site forever’. The world could meet its slow and terrible end, quite possibly caused by one of the terrible ecological or humanitarian catastrophes described in an IdeaCity lecture, but my talk would still be up there, somewhere, being enjoyed by no one.

  When you’re speaking for almost an hour you have time not only to meander and lose your thread, but to pull it all together again before the end. If you miss something out in the first half, you can thread it back in during the last quarter, or perhaps even during the Q and A afterwards. But 17 minutes is unforgiving; there can be no longueurs, no recaps, no sidesteps. Besides, the audience had each paid $5,000 Canadian dollars to be there, so you better be hot.

  My morning arrived. The lavish ring-bound programme stated I was due on at 10.01. Initially I assumed this was a misprint, but then I saw that other speakers began at equally precise and stupid times: 11.06, 1.57, 3.48. In the hour or so before I was due on I learnt that many speakers rehearsed their speeches down to the last twitch; they trimmed and trimmed until it came in at 16 minutes 30 seconds, allowing time for mid-talk laughter, gasping and breathing. I used to have a great fear of public speaking, something I traced back to my debilitating stammer at school. Words would simply take ages to come out, and some words, such as those beginning with ‘st’, I just couldn’t say at all. The school environment is not a good place to work on such a handicap. Addressing the class was one dread, but it was nothing compared to addressing the whole school at assembly, something we were sporadically required to do. My other problem was that I liked to show off, and my stammer meant that I was doubly frustrated. My apprehensions continued when I was asked to publicise my first books, but gradually the anxiety eased, and my speech improved, and I began to look forward to book festivals. I liked the idea that I had conquered my fear. But now, watching others deliver perfect 17-minute sequences in smooth succession, my doubts returned.

  Fortunately, the woman who was on at 9.31 a.m. – a talk about a new form of dating in which she would offer valuable presents to her friends if they set her up in a relationship that lasted (if it lasted until marriage she would reward the friend responsible for the set-up with a vacation worth $2,000) – mistimed her talk dramatically. She ran out of material after 11 minutes, and the rest of her session was spent answering tricky questions from Moses, such as ‘it does sound a little cold-blooded, don’t you think?’ The man who was on after her and just before me, at 9.41, was a pro, and had a carefully ordered pile of cards and a funny set of slides. His topic was a gift to any audience members weary from the heavier issues of the day before, which had included ‘Therapeutics for Age-Related Disease’ and ‘The Vegan Advantage’; now we were going to hear how the emergence of self-driving cars would be a boon to vehicular sex. He went down extremely well (ha ha).

  Only now did I wish that I had rehearsed and timed things. I thought I began okay, if a bit washily. Before I came on, the producers had shown a brief clip of Benedict Cumberbatch reading a love letter from my book, and so I began by apologising that Benedict wasn’t here to read it in person, which got a generous snigger. I then talked about how letters had told our history for 2,000 years and that tweets would make a poor substitute, not least to historians, and by the time I first glanced at the countdown clock I had already used up eight minutes. I had seventeen slides to show, and at this point had only clicked through two. I didn’t quite panic, but I was aware that my brain was telling me several things at once, none of which I could share audibly: I was running out of time; they had paid for me to come all this way, and I wouldn’t be worth it; Moses would encroach; I was about to be found out; why, with all this fancy technology, did the person in the control room not put my PowerPoint in ‘Presenter View’ so I could see which slide was coming up next? These were clear thoughts, and may have taken far less than a second to process, but I remember looking at the audience blankly for at least five seconds. (Neurophysiologists suggest we may be able to process information from visual stimuli in just 13 milliseconds; non-visuals connect faster still.)

  The rest of the talk became an exercise in compression and how to maintain a sense of coherence in a limiting timeframe. As such, it was like life itself. Time had become my enemy. On the practical side I had hoped to inform and entertain and do a little pleading on behalf of the value of letters (terrible irony: letter-writing had ultimately been defeated by time and the speed of the alternatives), and suddenly I had nine minutes in which to flick through 13 slides and tell stories that usually took at least half an hour. There is a limit to how well one can shorten a story before it crumbles to nonsense. I had now entered into a dimension I couldn’t remember being in before: a sad and immediate private battle against a clock. But the clock was only visible to me, and the audience was oblivious, although perhaps aware that I was talking faster and looking slightly frantic.

  With three minutes to go I had eight slides left. I didn’t have to show them all, or tell all my stories as intended, but I had a possibly funny line at the end that I was wholly reluctant to jettison. I scurried on. Air seemed to vanish from the hall. I now couldn’t keep my eyes off the clock, and its pace was alarming. Moses made an appearance stage left and hovered. I zapped through the slide
s like a panicky boy listing over-learnt facts in a history exam. Then my time expired and the clock turned from green to red and started flashing. I said something like, ‘I’ve got two or three very quick things to leave you with.’ I glanced to my left: Moses trod water and politely stayed where he was.

  I went about seven minutes over. I thought I’d botched the whole thing, but afterwards people were complimentary. Although this had been an extreme case, and self-imposed, the experience made me realise how destructive an over-concentration on time could be. Designed in this instance to provide a framework, a focus of concentration, it only succeeded in restricting those areas of my brain engaged in free thought and imagination. It was as if I was falling from my bike all over again, my brain automatically closing off all the pathways except those essential to not talking nonsense as fast as I could.

  At the other extreme, could something be said for talking nonsense very slowly? What would happen if, as in the example that follows, the clock never flashed, and time looked as though it would never run out? What if one could go on speaking for ever?

  ii) Talking It Over

  If nothing else, the Democratic senator Strom Thurmond was a conviction politician; it just so happened that the thing he most believed in was keeping black people in their place. In practical terms, in the mid-1950s, this meant segregated schools, restaurants, waiting rooms, cinemas and public transport, and a judicial system that would turn a blind eye to lynchings.

  But there was something else about Strom Thurmond: he achieved lasting political fame not only by being the only US politician to sit in the Senate at the age of 100, but also by delivering, at the age of 54, the longest continuous speech in the history of American politics, and, as far as can be known, worldwide.1

  The length of his speech came as a surprise even to his family and political aides, and when he rose to his feet at 8.54 p.m. on 28 August 1957 no one knew when he would stop talking and sit down again. After the first three or four hours, as the clock moved beyond midnight, few had either the curiosity or stamina to find out. But some dug in for the night, with a local hotel bringing in makeshift beds to the Capitol for those who wanted to doze through what Thurmond had to say. One of the things he said was (astonishing as it may seem to us now, not least from a senator with a long career ahead of him), ‘I will never favour mixing of the races.’

  At the beginning of the 1950s, the notion of civil rights was a highly pertinent issue, if not yet a focussed movement. But in the first half of the decade a growing sense of injustice collided with the flashpoints we now recognise as turning points: the murder of teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi; Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the subsequent mass boycott; the politicisation of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1957, following the prolonged violent fallout from the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education three years before, in which the legal segregation of blacks and whites in public schools was ruled unconstitutional, President Eisenhower and his advisors rallied around the idea of a new Civil Rights Act. This would enshrine the voting rights of African Americans by removing barriers to registration (such as literacy tests and poll-tax requirements), as well as providing protection against supremacist intimidation – a move both humanely and constitutionally proper and, his administration hoped, politically advantageous. But there was one huge hurdle: the Southern Democrats had successfully blocked every attempted piece of civil rights legislation for more than 80 years.

  No one would oppose it more than Strom Thurmond. Thurmond believed he was fighting a pro-constitutional campaign against the suffocating encroachment of federal control over American lives (he also managed to link desegregation with Communism).2 He also believed that the system worked fine as it was: everyone in their place; an insignificant amount of protest; black people treated better than they were in the North; an incalculable improvement over the centuries of slavery; and boundless possibilities for domestic employment as maids and menservants. At the heart of this belief was the feeling – genuinely held, not merely a lie that was told so many times that it assumed a level of truth – that both whites and blacks were ‘happier with their own kind’.

  He reasoned with his usually supportive allies, including Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia who led the Southerners’ tactical response on reform issues, that they should not only vote against the bill but attempt to wreck it.

  According to his distinguished biographer Robert A. Caro, the compromise negotiated by Lyndon Johnson was one of the most skilful pieces of operational politics in American history. He managed to convince both sides that he was one of them; using midnight phone calls and cloakroom bonhomie, he persuaded everyone that the passing of the bill was inevitable, and that they alone would be the victors.

  Johnson’s own conviction that the bill should become law appeared to be above political self-aggrandisement. In later years he often spoke of the disgust he felt when his long-time cook, a black woman named Zephyr Wright, drove with her husband in his official car from Washington to his home state of Texas, but when she stopped for meals she could only eat at designated restaurants, and when she stopped to pee she would squat in the road.3

  The biggest sticking point of the Civil Rights Bill, the amendment that would ultimately decide whether it would pass or fail, concerned the right to trial by jury. With an act designed to protect potential black voters registering to vote and then going to the ballot, there had to be a provision to prosecute those who held the law in contempt. Accordingly, one section of the bill gave the attorney general increased powers to protect civil rights with court orders. But in another section, a new amendment purposely declared that those charged with obstruction would be entitled to trial by jury; this was specifically designed to appease opponents of the bill, for with juries composed exclusively at the time of whites, the accused would see their acquittal as a certainty. The bill’s proponents were outraged at the new clause, arguing it rendered the entire act useless, but there was more chicanery to come. Just before the amendment came to a vote, Lyndon Johnson appeased the liberals and unions with a further addendum, a guarantee that Southern states would permit black members of a jury to sit along whites; it was, after all, a bill to ensure equality of democracy. The amendment passed, and at the end of August 1957 the bill was ready for the decisive vote. And at this very moment, Strom Thurmond entered the debating chamber.

  The filibuster – an act of sustained objection whereby a minority may wreck or at least delay an action proposed by the majority – is politics with time at its core. One may regard it as reassuringly constitutional and democratically essential, the equivalent of chaining oneself to the railings, the sole reason one entered politics in the first place. Or, if one has a busy day and a lot to get through and a belief in majority rule, it may also be regarded as rigorously undemocratic, sheer bloody-mindedness from a picket line of crazies. To distinguish between the two, one often has to spend a lot of time listening.

  Only later did it become clear how well Thurmond had prepared himself for a long session. Earlier in the day he had attended the Senate steam room to dehydrate; the lower the level of his body fluids, he believed, the slower would be his absorption of water, and the longer he would resist the urge for the bathroom. He filled his jacket with emergency supplies: in one pocket malted milk tablets, in the other throat lozenges. His wife Jean was in the chamber as he began to speak, and he would be grateful for the steak and pieces of pumpernickel she had brought in for him in foil.4 His press assistant Harry Dent, later to become a key aide to Nixon in the White House, had noticed Thurmond gathering a lot of reading material that day, but assumed it was for research; in fact, much of what he had collected was soon to be part of his performance.

  Standing at the back of the chamber, stocky and almost bald, addressing an audience of about 15, Thurmond began: ‘There are mainly three reasons why I feel that the bill should not be passed,’ he began. ‘The first is that it is unnecessary.’5 He then
started reading election statutes from each of the 48 states, in alphabetical order, in an attempt to demonstrate that a grander federal law would be superfluous, and that further intervention would result in ‘a totalitarian state’. Thurmond then argued the finer points of trial-by-jury legislation, expanding upon English military courts’ martial precedents from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and taking particular interest in a case involving Charles 1 in 1628. In the course of the next few hours he would read the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address and the Bill of Rights. Shortly before midnight, Everett Dirksen, a senator from Illinois, a Republican supporting the bill and presumably eager for his bed, noted to his colleagues, ‘Boys, it looks like an all-nighter!’ Paul Douglas, the other senator from Illinois, this one a liberal Democrat, later offered Thurmond a jug of orange juice. Thurmond drank a glass gratefully, but before he could refill it, Harry Dent, fearing a rush to the bathroom and thus the end to his marathon, removed the jug from his reach. Thurmond in fact enjoyed only one break from the chamber, as Barry Goldwater asked for an insertion in the Congressional Record, and Thurmond rushed to relieve himself.