And Now for Something Completely Different: Sweet Home Alabamovsky
A mind-bending interpretation of the southern rock classic by the Leningrad Cowboys...
and the Red Army Choir.
(h/t: Dark Roasted Blend)
« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »
A mind-bending interpretation of the southern rock classic by the Leningrad Cowboys...
and the Red Army Choir.
(h/t: Dark Roasted Blend)
While reading Michael Totten's review (h/t: Instapundit)of Sandra Mackey's Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict, I was fascinated to find the following sentence:
Rather than look at Iraq as an echo of Vietnam, she finds a closer parallel in the ferocious civil war that pitted sect against sect and local against foreigner in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s.
I came to this identical conclusion in a piece I posted in 2006:
The violence is caused by the same noxious mix of motives: sectarian hatred, private militias supported with funding from other nations (such as Iran, which is dabbling in this conflict just as it did in Lebanon 20 years ago.), and plain vicious street crime.
With that in mind, I'm linking that piece here. Please overlook any broken links or mild anachronisms; after all this post is two years old.
History, Rhyming and Repeating
The first time I ever walked out of a church service, I was 15 years old.
It was the Fourth of July and the minister- a kindhearted, moderate soul who had been heading this particular church for over a decade- suddenly began sermonizing about the U.S. vs the Godless Communists.
I couldn't believe it.
I sat and listened and thought to myself: We're supposed to have separation of church and state in this country. This is wrong.
Then I got up and walked out, leaving the rest of my family in the pew.
To their credit, my parents never gave me any flak about it. When the service was over (they stayed on till the end) and we met up in the parking lot, my mother asked if I was sick. I proceeded to explain (in the heated, haughty way that only teenagers can) my objections to the sermon.
They shrugged and said, ok, that's your right.
Then we all went home and had lunch.
Maybe it just runs in my family. Years after I grew up and left home, that particular minister (who, it must be said, never ventured into politicking again) left and the church hired a new minister.
Things immediately began going awry. I followed the situation from a distance in telephone conversations with my mother.
The new pastor was far more flamboyant and charismatic. He quickly gathered a group of acolytes around him- a kind of 'inner circle' almost. Decisions about the future of the church and its finances became- opaque.
One Sunday, the minister declared from the pulpit that the faith of himself, his family and some others was so strong, that when they prayed could actually levitate.
He began inviting select worshippers- mostly women- to special "prayer sessions" where they could learn this trick.
The story goes that one afternoon the church cleaning lady was passing by the minister's office and opened the door to go in and empty the wastebaskets. When she poked her head in, the lights were out and there were several women lying on their backs on the floor with their eyes closed.
"Come in!" roared the pastor. "Come in and be with the Lord!"
The cleaning lady gazed at the scene.
"I don't think the Lord is in here," she said quietly, and closed the door.
Eventually the "inner circle" decided that the church should start its own parochial school. Those who tried to ask where the money would come from were shushed. When the school opened, only about half a dozen students registered.
The rumblings from the congregation grew louder.
Eventually, the minister was forced into calling a special church meeting to discuss the finances and future of the church. Attending worshippers were handed a printed "budget" that was barely 6 lines long and concealed more than it revealed. Questions received non-answers.
That was enough. My parents, along with a small group of other members, left the church.
They could have split up and drifted around town, trying one church after another in a Goldilocks quest to find something "just right." They could have simply given up churchgoing altogether and wallowed in their sense of alienation.
They did neither. They passed the hat and started a new church.
They met wherever they could get a space while they raised funds to put up a building. They invited travelling guest preachers rather than immediately hiring a new minister, carefully testing out each one. Eventually, the group was able to buy a piece of land and put up a modest building. No great, imposing architecture; just a big, barn-like structure- the literal expression of the "big tent" they all wanted. And after much testing and sifting, they found a permanent preacher as well.
Today the place is quietly thriving.
I said earlier that the first time I ever walked out on a service, I was a teenager.
I was forced to do it again in middle age.
I had not been a churchgoer for many years. As kind and loving as it was, the version of Christianity I had been raised with had become too conservative for me in adulthood. It simply did not speak to the world that I knew. Then a controversy began brewing in my community. A little church was making the papers for deciding to perform a gay marriage and then ordain a gay minister. I listened to the controversy unfold in radio reports and read about it in the news. I also began listening the the sermons broadcast on the radio from this church on weekends.
It soon became clear that the people of this church were not mere publicity-seekers or trend-setters. They had discussed this issue among themselves and it had already cost them a large portion of their congregation, who left in protest. Religious organizations on both the national and local level began striking the church from their membership roles. And through it all, the message from the acting pastor at that time was as simple as it was sad, and brave: We are sorry to cause such trouble, but we have to do as our conscience commands. There is no other way, if we are to worship honestly.
That was enough for me. I put on a dress, my husband put on a tie, and we began going every Sunday.
For a long time we were quite content there. The sermons were intellectually gripping as well as morally challenging and we walked away nearly every Sunday feeling we had learned something new and interesting.
Then the minister decided to retire.
As part of the retirement process he began asking the assistant minister to deliver the sermon more and more often.
And this was the beginning of the end, for me.
Previously it had not been an overtly political church. While the minister sometimes used recent headlines as a "hook" for his message, he was always careful to criticize the hypocrisy of politicians both left and right, always emphasizing that their flaws were human, above all.
With the gradual elevation of the new minister, all that fell away.
Rather than current events being a hook for scripture, scripture became a hook for current events. The message became ever more strident from week to week: far left politics was Christ-driven; far right politics was worldly hypocrisy. Sermon after sermon revolved not around scripture, but condemnation of the current administration in Washington.
The end for me finally came in a long sermon attempting to tie the Tower of Babel to open borders for immigration. To my astonishment, the minister began strongly implying from the pulpit that U.S. soldiers had been sent to the border with "shoot to kill" orders. This was not spelled out in so many words- it could not have been because there would be no supporting evidence- but the message was clear.
I realized I was looking at a minister willing to twist the truth from the pulpit in the service of politics.
For the second time in my life, I stood up and walked out. I have never returned.
I refuse to place community above conscience.
Much has been written about mosques in this country falling under extremist control. Investigations have exposed hate literature being distributed in some places, pamphlets and books calling Jews apes and pigs and saying that uncovered women are whores.
How can we expect peace-loving, moderate American Muslims to openly reject such teachings if we do not require the same thing of ourselves? Those raising the complaint should set the example. We must make a safe place in the public square for the believing, but unchurched. Or unmosqued.
America has been called a "symphony of faith," but it is more than that. It is a place of rebirth and reinvention. The freedom to examine and re-examine one's conscience and then strike out on a new path is the foundation of that symphony. It's words are sung by thousands of plaintive, seeking voices- finding faith, changing faith, abadoning faith altogether. Together they keep our nation's conscience strong and questing and alive.
And to that I say: AMEN!
Well, it looks like I'm about to come down with some kind of late-season flu crud. But before I succumb, let's check in with some of the sites on the Deafening Silence blogroll:
Well, it looks like Citizens Against Sharia has certainly been hosting an intense discussion on the punishments required by Sharia law. Scroll down to the comments for an interesting, extensive, no-holds-barred 3-way debate. And throw in your two cents!
Free Frank Warner is running an interesting post on whether or not Dr. Martin Luther King would have supported the Iraq War. Not sure how I personally feel about this idea, but it's worth heading on over for a look.
Isaac Schrodinger is posting a link to a piece from The Apostate that I can't help having a guilty chuckle over in spots:
"High school has found me again in the guise of white girls with dyed blond hair and ugly shoes. God help us."
While some of the post goes a bit too far for me, I have to be honest- I just quit a job with a "work culture" that sounds like this one, and with similar complaints.
Yes, that's right- I'm currently unemployed. <sigh> But it was my decision and I look forward to a better future. With fingers crossed. Whistling past the graveyard...
Please allow me to introduce Byzantium's Shores, one of the newest additions to the Deafening Silence blogroll. I have found that after a hard day of Worrying About What's Wrong With The World, Byzantium's Shores is a good place to be. Go relax in its aura of gentle whimsy.
Netherland's Parliamentarian Geert Wilders has made a controversial film about Islam- and now a Muslim network in the Netherlands wants to air it! Go have a look over at Poligazette.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I am an occaisional contributor to Poligazette. There's an interesting range of ideas there; always something new to see.)
That's all for now, till Sudafed, kleenex and strong coffee work their magic. I'm planning another long post as a companion to Unsafe in Any Generation, and as soon as I have an ETA on that, I'll let you know.
Happy Spring!
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold...
...And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
and social injustice...
Easy to Be Hard
Hair, 1968
James Rado and Gerome Ragni
Don't throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again...
Peter Allen
Everything Old is New Again
The buildings burst into flame around dawn on October 19, 1998- eight of them, clustered across the mountaintop. By 7 a.m. the inferno was visible for miles. Residents began calling the local fire department: the top of Vail Mountain is on fire.
Fire crews rushing to the scene may have passed the passenger truck already on its way to Denver. Two days later, a statement taking responsibility for the fire was emailed from a computer in a Denver public library:
"Putting profits before Colorado's wildlife will not be tolerated. This action is just a warning. We will be back..."
They called themselves the Family- 16 men and women ranging in age from their late 20's to early 40's who conspired to create a terror campaign lasting 6 years and stretching across 5 states. Their arson and sabotage spree included bombing a police station and collapsing an electrical transmission tower in an attempt to start a "Y2K-"type meltdown. In all, the Family committed 17 violent actions whose "primary purpose," according to court documents, was to
"...influence and affect the conduct of government, commerce, private business and others in the civilian population by means of force, violence, sabotage, destruction of property, intimidation and coercion...to retaliate against the conduct of government..."
Everything old is new again.
"Tens of thousands have learned that protests and marches just don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," proclaimed Bernandine Dohrn in June, 1970.
Shortly thereafter, the Weather Underground, Dohrn's own terrorist group, bombed a police station.
That bombing was merely one in a string of violent attacks intended to coerce both the U.S. government and public opinion. The Weather Underground's terror campaign would not officially end until a botched Brink's robbery in 1981 ended in a shootout with police. By then Dorhn and her partner, Bill Ayers, had abandoned their underground lifestyle. Dohrn would spend a token 7 months in prison for refusing to testify against her old comrades-in-arms at the Brink's robbery trial.
Ayers faced no charges at all.
With much of the police surviellance declared inadmissable and statutes of limitations expired, the two Weathermen quietly returned to the bourgeoise, upper-class lifestyle they had once scorned. Ayers is now listed as a 'distinguished professor of education' and 'Senior University Scholar' by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dohrn is the director of Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Life Center. The pair are influential in Chicago left-of-center politics; the Weather Underground's dangerous, decades-long tantrum has been politely forgotten.
But not by all.
For the generation born after 1963, the Weathermen became part of "The 60's," a group with some vague name recognition but with most of the violence airbrushed out. The ugly reality of terror and destruction was replaced by romantic notions of "resistance" and "revolution." Even New York Times writer Dinitia Smith succumbs to the insurgent allure in an otherwise critical piece about Ayers and Dohrn:
"He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books written by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century."
Dig it, Baby!
The distortions of nostalgia make rational assessment of groups like the Weather Underground all but impossible for today's young people. Writing in Yes! magazine, student organizer Joshua Kahn Russell explains:
"...a lot of us had a warped understanding of how social change is made. We were constantly measuring our activism up to some mythical idea of "the 60's." U.S. soundbite culture chronicles the past as one big crescendo after another- as if our movements were just a series of isolated earth-shattering events."
The limits of that "warped understanding" are now being tested. On Martin Luther King Day in 2006, a group of young activists and 60's veterans announced that they were re-launching Students for a Democratic Society.
Students for a Democratic Society- SDS- began in 1962 as an umbrella group for student activists. More a coalition than a single entity, by 1967 SDS was devoting itself to protesting the war in Vietnam. But it's own internal factions began warring against each other and in 1969 the turmoil gave birth to the Weathermen.
SDS collapsed. Peaceful protest was overtaken by terrorism.
While the actions of the current SDS have included, at worst, some disruptive theatrics, it's unclear whether the distinction between civil disobedience and violent coercion is understood by it's members. SDS activist Tom Good was quoted in the Orlando Weekly in 2006:
"We think that the whatever you call it- radical democratic, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist- approach to a nationwide organization is the way to go."
If the new SDS (with over 200 chapters nationwide)looks to Bill Ayers for philosophical clarification, they aren't likely to find much; Ayers has never admitted to committing terrorist acts. This is not say he does not believe in terrorism. He does, and defines it this way:
"...the destruction of human beings and/or their property, their livelihood, their homes, for the purpose of exacting a political agenda; and it's the indiscriminate destruction of innocent people to enact a political agenda."
Yet he says of the Weathermen:
"What we did was never terrorism, although we contemplated it, we thought about it, we might have done it but we never did."
Call it the Doctrine of Ayers Exceptionalism. Or perhaps Committing Terrorism in Your Heart. In either case, this refusal to draw bright lines and take personal responsibility brings us back to the Family.
Unlike the SDS, the Family was a successful cohesion of violent splinter groups. Members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) pledged mutual support, trading members and expertise until the two groups became indistinguishable.
They also claim not to be terrorists.
They like to call their violent attacks "direct actions" and compare their "actions" to the Boston Tea Party.
They could also be compared to burning crosses and dangling nooses.
Spokesmen for ALF and ELF like to point out that no one has ever been killed or injured by their actions. This is not strictly true. Anyone researching ALF and ELF in the United States soon learns that they are transplant organizations. ELF was founded in Britain in 1992; ALF in 1976. SHAC also originated in Great Britain, and includes members of ALF and ELF.
This is the loophole. Using the model of autonomous cells and leaderless resistance, members of ALF and ELF can commit violent acts against people in the name of SHAC. For example, in 2001 Brian Cass, Huntingdon Life Sciences' managing director in Great Britain, was savagely beaten by three men armed with baseball bats. When told of the attack, Ronnie Lee, founder of Britain's ALF, expressed his approval:
"He has got off lightly. I have no sympathy for him."
The man eventually apprehended for the assault, David Blenkinsop, had ties to SHAC.
The Justice Department is another group in Great Britain organized along the leaderless resistance model. Thus far they have specialized in letter bombs and their efforts have impressed the London Independent, who called their attacks "the most sustained and sophisticated bombing campaign in Mainland Britain since the IRA was at it's height."
Investigators in Great Britain believe that Keith Mann of ALF founded the Justice Department.
The violent groups of the 60's were limited by the tools available to them: meetings that could be survielled, vulnerable telephone lines, letters that could be intercepted. They were dependent on the cooperation of radio, television and newspapers to air their threats and spread their propaganda. Today's autonomous cells can accomplish all these tasks using the internet. It's one-stop shopping for terrorist wannabes: the ELF website features manuals with such titles as Setting Fires with Electrical Timers: an Earth Liberation Guide and Arson Around with Auntie ALF; sympathetic websites offer instant gratification to terrorists who can post communiques and photos of their attacks.
No more smuggling dog-eared manuals from safe house to safe house; no more anonymous tips to newspapers or demanding air time on local TV.
Add to this fluidity of communication an ambiguos, irresponsible definition of terrorism and you have set the stage for a self-righteous, self-reinforcing cult that can jump borders with its ideology intact.
Which is precisely what ALF, ELF, SHAC and the Justice Department have done.
In the 2003 documentary The Weather Underground, ex-Weatherman Brian Flanagan told an interviewer:
"When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things. That is the dangerous ethical position we fell into."
The Justice Department feels it has right on its side. Since its establishment in North America in 1993, the Justice Department has mailed 80 razor blades dipped in rat poison to researchers, hunting guides and other victims. The poisoned blades are positioned inside envelopes so that no one opening them can avoid being cut. They come with a note:
"Dear animal killing scum! Hope we sliced your finger wide open and that you now die from the rat poison we smeared on the razor blade."
Scientists have long been favorite targets of such hate groups; their homes are vandalized and their families threatened. In July 2002, Dr. Michael Podell abandoned his research and resigned from Ohio State University after receiving a photograph of a British scientist whose car had been bombed.
"You're next," was scribbled on the picture.
On February 24th, 2008, a University of California at Santa Cruz researcher and her family- whose names have not been released- were the victims of an attempted home invasion. The family was hosting a birthday party for one of their young children when six masked attackers began trying to batter down the front door of their home. The husband ushered the rest of the family into the rear of the house and then returned to face the attackers. They struggled briefly with him before they fled.
Someone inside the house tried to place a call to 911 during the attack, but all the operator could hear was a woman screaming and children crying.
"We who have an affinity with non-human animals and nature are finding it increasingly difficult to love our fellow man," Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer told the Australian Herald-Sun in 2002.
Another ex-Weatherman, Mark Rudd:
"All Americans were legitimate for attack...I was overwhelmed by hate; I cherished my hate as a badge of my moral superiority."
Belief in their moral superiority has led some domestic terror groups to broaden their agenda. An ELF video declares that the group wants to destroy "the entire capitalist system." A commenter on Infoshop News, a website catering to anarchist views, wrote in May 2007:
"As things get worse for the planet, and for working people, more and more people will be doing these radical actions. Capitalism has to go. It ain't going to go easily."
Enter Recreate '68.
A group calling itself Recreate '68 began issuing media communiques in January, 2007, announcing that "activists representing diverse communities" were organizing a "week of political solidarity in resistance and protest" to coincide with the Democratic Convetion in Denver, Colorado. A November, 2007 communique promises that "tens of thousands of people will participate in a Festival of Democracy and the Days of Resistance that will bring back the spirit of the sixties..."
In this instance the "spirit of the 60's" was the sight of young people being cracked over the head with police batons while chanting "The Whole World is Watching!" This does not seem to be what Recreate '68 has in mind, however; in an odd combination of time-travel and role reversal, the group presented a list of demands to the City Council designed to discourage any police presence and give the group unlimited access to any desired city park or venue. The Recreate '68 website also features helpful discussions of how to "fight the pigs who want to take your rights away."
All of this in liberal Denver, whose City Council passed an official resolution protesting the Patriot Act in 2002. What will happen in such a city if, as R-'68 predicts, "tens of thousands" of demonstrators show up- and, sprinkled among them, terrorists committed to advancing their agenda by means of arson, death threats, and attempted murder?
Will the past be prologue, or simply an ugly, ragged circle?
And the seasons, they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go 'round and 'round and 'round
In the circle game...
References
From Push to Shove/Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser
Earth Liberation Front Arsonist Sentenced/Jeff Barnard
Verdict in Ecoterror Case Likely Today/Paul Shukovsky
11 Indicted in Five-State Ecoterror Campaign/ADL
Backstory: Eco-vigilantes:All in "The Family"/Brad Knickerbocker
No Regrets for a Love of Explosives/Dinitia Smith
Terrorists Who Never Have to Say Sorry/Jonah Goldberg
Obama Once Visited 60's Radicals/Ben Smith
Who Is Bill Ayers?/Michael Miner
Homegrown Terrorists-The Weather Underground/Matt Kapko
Environmentalists Classified as Terrorists, Get Stiff Sentences/ABC News
Not Your Grandfather's SDS/Joshua Kahn Russell
SDS, New and Improved/Adam Doster
Yacht Racer To Arsonist/Allyn Harvey
Arson in the Name of Activism/Mark Freeman
FBI Joins Probe of Violent Protest/San Jose Mercury News
Researcher Victim of Home Invasion/Tomas Roman
UCSC officials: Animal rights activists targeted researcher's home/Tom Ragan
UC Berkeley Library: Anti-Vietnam War Protests
I have just begun work on a rather large piece which I hope to post on or about March 20. In between I'll log in with some shorter posts as I'm able.
Thanks for your patience.
What's all this I hear about Presidential candidates' middle names?
All the fuss has set me to thinking about the role of middle names in U.S. history- and beyond.
Set aside all the offense and defense for a moment and think about this- who was the first U.S. president to actually use his middle name on a regular basis?
Did you guess John Quincy Adams? That looks like the answer to me, too. In fact, when you start making a list of some our most important Founding Fathers, there is a surprising dearth of middle names:
George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
Benjamin Franklin...
Of course, there is the odd "Richard Henry Lee" in there, but for the most part, their middle names have not come down to us.
According to Genealogy.com,
Few Americans were giving their children middle names in the 17th century until the German immigrants introduced this naming custom to America. They were in the habit of giving their children two given names at baptism. The first given name was a spiritual name, often a favorite saint's name, and the second one, which would later be known as the middle name, was the secular name. The secular name, or "call name" was the name by which the child was known and the name used in legal records. It was not uncommon for the spiritual name to be the same for all the children of the same sex within the family.
While the Germans would bring this custom to America, it was not until the early 19th century that the custom caught on with others. By the 1840s, it had grown into a popular practice. According to a study of college records, in 1840 about 92 percent of the students at Princeton had middle names. This custom would continue to grow and by World War I it was assumed that everyone in America had a middle name.
This thesis might explain the paucity of middle names used by American Presidents before the mid-twentieth century. Consider: does the average American know Abraham Lincoln's middle name? How about Martin van Buren's?
An article in Slate reminds us:
The middle name has a distinguished history in presidential politics. Middle names—often the maternal maiden name—came into fashion in the United States in the middle of 19th century. Only three of our first 17 presidents carried middle names: John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, and James Knox Polk. Most modern presidents sported middle names or initials. Today, "a name without a middle name or middle initial sounds unfinished or unsubstantial, unpresidential," said Anne Bernays, co-author with Justin Kaplan of The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters.
Many presidents have exploited middle names—and even more so, middle initials—to good effect. John F. Kennedy was fond of his Fitzgerald, which came with a distinguished political heritage. (John Forbes Kerry also held Kennedy's middle name in high regard. The future presidential candidate marketed himself as John F. Kerry during his 1972 congressional race, but after losing "the striving hero worshiper dropped his middle initial and his pretensions to the J.F.K. narrative," wrote the Washington Post.)
Thomas Woodrow Wilson valued the alliteration of his middle name and ditched his first name altogether. According to Rick Potter, curator of collections at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Wilson worried about being cast as "Tommy," which struck him as unstatesmanlike. "Woodrow Wilson knew early on that he wanted to go into public service," said Potter. "The guy was a bit of a dreamer. In college, he had cards made up that said … Senator Woodrow Wilson."
Indeed, it isn't until we approach the middle of the 20th century that most Americans can begin to recite Presidential middle names: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower, Lyndon Baines Johnson. (For a list of presidential names, see here.) By then, the fashion of using a middle name to infer gravitas had been well established. (Never mind that Harry S. Truman always maintained that the 'S' didn't stand for anything, or that Jimmy Carter found his middle name so irritating that he even refused to be sworn in using it.)
Perhaps this is because the bestowing of middle names in the west was for so long a class-conscious act. According to genfiles.com:
Initially, middle names tended to be lineage-related. When the practice first arose among the aristocracy these names were typically drawn from within family. One study of aristocratic families showed that three-quarters of the middle names bestowed in the 1700s and over half in the early 1800s were taken from inside the family.[5] The maiden names of mothers and grandmothers were particularly popular. But they sometimes went further afield; John Quincy Adams, the first President to bear a middle name, was named for a maternal great-grandfather.
By the time the middle class adopted the custom a generation or two later, lineage names were still popular but most children were given the names of unrelated persons. The single most popular namesake of children born in the early 1800s was George Washington -- which single-handedly accounted for the significant increase in the popularity of the name “George” in the 19th century. By the time middle names became the norm, the proportion of lineage-related names had declined significantly, and the middle name was often just a second forename, with little or no lineage-related context.
Of course, who has a greater investment in lineage than royalty? Multiple middle names are used as honorifics and indications of status- and that can make a person's name pretty complicated.
Who can forget Princess Diana's famous slip at her own wedding, addressing Prince Charles as "Philip Charles Arthur George" instead of Charles Philip? As I watched the wedding on TV I remember thinking that if my guy had that many names- and I had to recite them in front of millions of viewers- I'd probably mess up, too.
Which is ironic, since according to many genealogists, the whole purpose of middle names was clarity, originally. Again, quoting genfiles.com:
Exactly why middle names suddenly became popular within the space of a few generations is not completely clear. To some extent it may simply have been a social trend that eventually became the norm. But it must have been encouraged by its obvious practicality. With increases in population density and the size of extended families, the incidence of multiple persons in the same vicinity carrying the same first and last names eventually became quite common. Distinguishing among several persons of the same name became, for the first time, a practical problem. Whatever the driving forces, the custom eventually became just that: a custom.
Which reminds me of some of the other ways various other societies have used names as identifiers. Consider the example of Icelandic names, explained here by radio-blonde (in itself a great online name):
Well, it's simple really. The Icelandic people are descendants from Vikings and they kept track of people by recognizing who was their father, as in "Helgi son of Ólafur the Brave, son of Leifur the Lucky" (not an actual example!). Thus was born the tradition of naming children after their father's first name.
So the way it works in Iceland is that boys are given first names and then their father's first name + "son" as a "surname". Girls on the other hand are given first names and then their father's first name + "dóttir" (as in "daughter") as a "surname".
Let me give you an hypothetical example:
Father = Ragnar Helgason
Mother = Inga Bjarnadóttir
Their son = Leifur Ragnarsson
Their daughter = Anna Ragnarsdóttir
Referring to the family by their "surnames" is therefore pointless and everyone goes by their first names! :) Women also don't take their husband's surname when they get married as it would mess everything up!
And then there's the traditional Russian method, according to foreigndocuments.com:
Russian people received their last names (surnames) 100 years ago. It was during the first population census in 1897. Till this time last name was widespread in villages as nicknames.
Then during the population census last names (surnames) was given after father's names. For example, if father's name was Peter, then the last name (surname) was Petrov (it is form of word Peter which is answer the question "whose you are?"). That is why the most widespread Russian last names:
Ivanov, Petrov, Vasiliev, Nikitin, Tarasov, Titov, Fedoseev, Fedorov, Sidorov, Alekseev, Egorov, Demidov, Mihailov, Andreev, Alexandrov.
In Russia women usually adopt the surname of their husband. Most of Russian last names ending change depending on gender, for example, male - Ivanov, but female - Ivanova. In most cases ending "a" is added in female last names. Petrov - Petrova, Eltsin - Eltsina, Gorbachov - Gorbachova, Putin - Putina. There are some disputes about translation of Russian female last names, for example, last name Gorbachova can be translated as Gorbachov and Gorbachova. Variant Gorbachov is the most widespread.
I once worked with a colleague who emigrated to the U.S. from Communist Bulgaria. She had given birth to all three of her children while living there. Middle names were completely forbidden- so bourgeois!- and after the birth of at least one of her children she was handed a list of "good, socialist" names from which to choose.
At least she knew in advance which names would meet with social approval. I'm reminded of the late astronaut "Gus' Grissom, whose middle name- at the height the Cold War, yet!- was Ivan.
Recent Comments