Phones, Boycotts, Secrets, and Middle Names

Thursday, March 10^th -- Telephone Day

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on this day in 1997, on the now-semi-defunct WB network. It was a hit because it wasn't played for camp, it was as earnest as could be, juxtaposing horrific threats from the underworld with ordinary high school life. In fact, allegorically speaking, it was ordinary high school life -- but with monsters who were easier to spot.

The Salvation Army came to the United States on this day in 1880, when Commissioner George Scott Railton and seven women officers landed at New York to officially begin the work of the Salvation Army here.

Today in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the first telephone message to his assistant in the next room: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." It used to be that every phone call involved a personal interaction with an operator. It used to be that you were tethered to the wall by a cord. It used to be miraculous when you could talk by telephone to someone in another city, another state, another country.

It used to be that teenagers were criticized for tying up the family phone for hours, talking complete nonsense to each other. But the fact is that the telephone did not change the content of our conversations a whit -- any more than the cellphone or texting did.

Whenever I hear somebody sneering at people who are always texting or talking on the cellphone, I think (but rarely say), "People talk as they have always talked, and none of them are saying anything stupider than your criticism of them." Telephones (and their modern derivatives) do not change the content or substance of human interaction, they only make it possible to chat with people who are not present.

Now, if someone invented a cellphone to allow you to talk to the dead ... oh, but what's the point? We'd just gossip and snark and quarrel and coo just the way we do with live people.

The first official paper money issued by the United States government came out on this day in 1862, during the Civil War. The denominations were $5 (Hamilton), $10 (Lincoln), and $20 (Liberty).

Paper money had been issued before, but as scrip from banks, and if the bank failed, the money became worthless. The same is true of U.S. paper money, of course, but it would take stupidity or malfeasance of colossal proportions to make U.S. paper money valueless.

But never underestimate the ability of American politicians to achieve the exact opposite of what the people desire and need.

Friday, March 11^th -- Middle Name Pride Day

Bureau of Indian Affairs was established on this day in 1824 -- under the auspices of the War Department. Once we had subdued the tribes of Native Americans and confined them to the large concentration camps we called "reservations," usually on the worst land we could find, it was the job of the BIA to obliterate as much of Native American culture as they could, while making sure their subjugation was eternal and unresisted.

Sadly, the BIA was far more successful than most government bureaucracies, and while some in the BIA may have meant well, there is little historical evidence to support such a claim. Imagine having your entire life ruled by the Division of Motor Vehicles and you might get some idea of what it has meant to be an Indian on a reservation.

This is Johnny Appleseed Day because it's the anniversary of the death of John Chapman in 1845. Chapman went about frontier America planting orchards and befriending wild animals and spreading a Christian message; he was regarded by the Indians as a great medicine man, and by whites as a cheerful loon. But the apples were delicious.

I know you're of my generation if you know the tune that goes with these words: "The Lord is good to me / And so I thank the Lord / For giving me the things I need / The sun and the rain and the apple seed / the Lord is good to me." Because that's what Johnny Appleseed sang in the Disney cartoon about him -- with crooner Dennis Day voicing the role and the song.

This is Middle Name Pride Day. To commemorate it, you're supposed to tell your middle name to three people who don't already know it. Depending on what your middle name is, it might require honesty and boldness.

In my case, it was my first name that I was desperate to conceal when I was a kid. I went by my middle name, but when the teacher read out "Orson Card" on the first day of school each year I suffered mortification that lasted for days.

My parents meant for "Orson" -- the first name of my grandfather -- to be safely concealed as my middle name, but then they realized my initials would be SOC. Fearing some absurd nickname like "Socko," they changed the order of my name, to my great misery.

But then, when I was in college, I noticed that my name was very short on play programs. I put the "Orson" on the front, even though no one called me by that name, solely to make my name longer and give it some weight.

By then, you see, I had become proud to have my grandfather's name, and Orson Welles had done a great deal to dignify it. (In the Mormon Church, there were already several very dignified Orsons -- Hyde, Pratt, and Whitney -- which is why my grandfather had the name in the first place.)

Immediately afterward, however, Mork & Mindy came on the air, with Mork's weekly reports to Orson of the planet Ork, whom he always addressed by some honorific that referred to his huge size. Thanks a lot, Robin Williams.

Traditionally, middle names have often been a dumping ground for names of relatives that you don't want to forget or offend, but whose moniker you don't really want to saddle your kid with; they preserve many a name that has gone hopelessly out of fashion.

Middle names have also been used as a repository for the mother's maiden name. Thus what used to be a last name became a middle name and, upon the whim of the family or the child who was given that name, it could easily become the name the child went by. That may be the origin of the trend of turning last names -- like Leslie, Shirley, Courtney, Smith, Ryan, or Sidney -- into given names.

Originally, all such names were given to boys -- in fact, girls were often given no middle name at all, since it was assumed that on marriage their maiden name would become, in effect, their middle name. But in recent years those last-names-turned-middle-names-turned-first-names have almost all shifted from boys' names to girls' names.

That's a one-way road. While many boys' names have become names for girls, I've never heard of a name making the migration in the opposite direction. Once a name catches on as a girl's name, alert parents shun it as a name for boy-children.

But middle names are still fair game for practically anything that parents want to stash there. And kids still choose, from time to time, to show their individuality by making their friends start calling them by their middle name, however weird it might sound to them at first.

Saturday, March 12^th -- Boycott Day

Even though Austria and Germany shared a language, they had not been a single nation since the days of Charlemagne. In fact, Germany was never really a single nation at all, despite being part of the nominal "Holy Roman Empire," until the 19th century, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck maneuvered to unite all the German-speaking principalities that were not already part of Austria.

Austria -- Osterreich, or "Eastern Kingdom" -- had been a nation and then an empire for many centuries by then. But Austria was the biggest loser of World War I, its empire being divided and recombined to form the patchwork of nations of Middle Europe. Left without a seacoast, Austria was a sad scrap of a country with little but memories of greatness when Adolf Hitler decided that all the German-speaking people (a.k.a. "the master race") should be united under one leader ("fuhrer")-- himself.

It was on this day in 1938 that German troops moved into Austria and, with overwhelming force, tossed aside any attempt to resist the "anschluss" or "unification" (a.k.a. "conquest"). Hitler only dared to do this because the spineless "peace-loving" British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought that he could negotiate with a man as ruthlessly ambitious and belligerent as Hitler. Hitler never kept a treaty with anyone, ever, anywhere, but people kept thinking they could negotiate with him again and again.

There are still idiots in the world today who think negotiation is a replacement for a strong military, when the truth is that you can't negotiate with lunatics unless they believe that, if negotiations fail, you can and will crush them and remove them from power.

Charles Cunningham Boycott was born on this day in 1832. He has been immortalized by having his name become part of the English language, though he was not the perpetrator but the victim of the first boycott.

In County Mayo, Ireland, the tenants' "Land League" in 1880 asked Boycott, an estate agent, to reduce rents because of poor harvest and dire economic conditions -- you know, the way the taxpayers, in the last election, asked public employees to reduce the amount of money they forcibly take from them through taxation.

Boycott responded by serving eviction notices on the tenants. If they turned to violence, the tenants knew that the government would send troops against them. So instead, Irish hero Charles Stewart Parnell, then president of the National Land League and agrarian agitator, led the retaliation against Boycott by formulating and implementing the method of economic and social ostracism that came to be called a "boycott."

Ostracism -- or shunning, or excommunication -- is still one of the most powerful tools in the social arsenal. Even the most arrogant people can be devastated by being cut off from any normal social interaction.

However, boycotts have come to be economic alone -- a refusal to do business with an offending company. (Or, if it's a country, we call them "sanctions.") The onus therefore is financial rather than social, which means that as long as anybody ignores the boycott and keeps trading with the offender, the boycott is not likely to have much effect. Boycotts depend on near-perfect unanimity to be effective.

Sunday, March 13^th -- Check Your Batteries Day

Daylight Savings Time begins today -- the second Sunday in March -- at 2:00 a.m. In spring you set your clock forward an hour, so that you reach your wake-up time an hour earlier than usual.

For those who are easily confused, the sun rises and sets on exactly the same schedule as usual; but by changing our clock settings, we fool ourselves into waking up sooner after sunrise, so that we don't waste as much sunny-time sleeping in the morning.

We could accomplish the same thing by leaving our clocks alone and simply getting up earlier in the morning or requiring employees to come to work an hour earlier between equinoxes, but then there'd be endless grumbling and complaining. By making it a matter of law, the government changes the behavior of the whole society, bringing the economic benefits to all with a minimum of complaint or divergence.

It's no coincidence that this is also Check Your Batteries Day. Since you have to go around the house resetting all the clocks, you might as well change their batteries -- and while you're at it, change the batteries in your smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, thermostat, and the remote controls for your TV, DVD, DVR, stereo, garage door opener, and anything else that has a battery.

By changing the batteries now, without worrying about how much power they might still have, you do lose some money -- but you also assure that these devices won't fail (or start beeping annoyingly) when it's not convenient to replace the batteries.

Earmuffs were patented on this day in 1887 by Chester Greenwood of Maine. I love earmuffs, mostly because I get earaches from cool breezes, let alone icy gales. However, earmuffs are inconvenient to stuff into a pocket, so I have grown accustomed to using athletic headbands that I draw down over my ears when the wind is perilous to my auricular health. Still ... I own several pairs of earmuffs and wear them with pride in my eccentricity.

This is National Wildlife Week. The idea is to connect with nature. The degree to which you do this is entirely up to you. My connection with nature is to feed wild birds in our yard and refrain from killing the squirrels that still occasionally leap past all my barriers to get to the birdseed.

Other people think that "communing with nature" is best done by hiking long distances, eating food badly cooked over a fire, and then sleeping on hard and bumpy ground, even though they have a perfectly good bed in an air-conditioned room at home and hotel rooms are never very far away. I think of these people fondly as "boneheads." Or Boy Scouts, the difference being merely a matter of age.

Monday, March 14^th -- 10 Most Wanted Day

Albert Einstein was born today in 1879. He was very bright as an imaginative physicist, but was no mathematician. So it is puzzling that his birthday has been designated as Pi Day -- a day to celebrate pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Oh, wait -- they chose today for Pi Day because it's the fourteenth day of the third month. In America, we note that date numerically as 3-14, and since a course approximation of the value of pi is 3.14, it makes a weird kind of sense.

In Europe, however, where dates are noted numerically in the much more sensible order of day, month, year, the way to get 3, 1, and 4 in order is to choose the 31^st day of the fourth month: 31-4.

Unfortunately, because calendars were originally devised by drunk people, the fourth month, April, doesn't have thirty-one days. So I guess Europeans are not entitled to have a pi day at all.

Which makes me wonder -- will pi be resentful of those who don't commemorate it? Will pi become sulky and begin to oscillate in value? Will round things suddenly become elliptical, and ellipses round? Will tires need refilling with air to restore their round shape? Or will even that remedy fail? How does a geometric ratio show its appreciation or lack thereof?

Do we all need to join hands and form a circle and say, "Thank you, pi, for making us round!"? Are there special badges to wear? Should we all inscribe pi on our driveways with chalk?

Or do we just dose ourselves with banana cream, pumpkin, or apple pi?

The FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list debuted on this day in 1950, in an effort to publicize particularly dangerous criminals who were not yet in custody -- or who had escaped. Once you're listed, the only way to get off the list is to die or be captured. From 1950 to 2010, 494 fugitives have appeared on the list; 463 have been located.

Compare these numbers with the 813 individuals who have received Nobel prizes since 1901, and it averages out to nearly the same number per year. You just have to decide which list you'd rather be on, and whether you are prepared to meet the requirements. Remember -- no matter which list you try for, it's a competition, and somebody else might take away "your" slot.

Tuesday, March 15^th -- Godfather Day

A baby's "godparents" are, in Christian tradition, a man and a woman who promise, at the time of a baby's baptism, to guarantee that the child will be raised a Christian. In practice, this could mean promising to care for the child if he or she is orphaned -- or it could mean nothing at all.

Doting godparents traditionally took an interest in and did favors for or gave gifts to the child they had agreed to take some responsibility for. If the godparents happened to have magical powers, they might also end up in fairy tales. Oddly, however, fairy godparents were usually female, at least in the stories (which is the only place where fairies actually exist -- I mean it, you can look it up), so that "godmother" is linked to "fairy" in the public mind.

"Godfather," however, is firmly linked to the Francis Ford Coppola movie that premiered on this day in 1972. I remember reading about The Godfather in Time magazine when I was a missionary in Brazil. The news story talked about how some audiences stood up and cheered at the series of revenge murders that took place while Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) was attending the baptism of his baby.

Since this response was not exactly defensible, morally speaking, social critics were much relieved when The Godfather: Part II, in 1974, made Michael Corleone's ruthlessness far less sympathetic, so that that movie's round of murders at the end left the audiences in chilled silence.

Together, the two movies (we'll pretend "Part III" was just a hallucination) make a moral whole. Part II, especially with the flashback to young Vito's life (played so brilliantly by Robert de Niro), both explained and condemned.

But back in 1972, as I read about the movie, I remembered very clearly the novel by Mario Puzo, which had also been a smashing bestseller. I remembered it as quite an entertaining book, though it bogged down considerably toward the end as Puzo worked through the lives of characters I hadn't cared so much about.

The movie contained everything that I valued in the novel -- and cut out everything I didn't. In effect, it was the "good parts version" (cf. William Goldman's The Princess Bride). But the moral vacuity of the first movie was also present in the book; it took the second ilm to bring balance to both the book and the movie.

Still, before the movie existed, the book had already had an impact that can only be compared to, say, Twilight.  Just as Twilight has made it so that the Young-Adult sections of bookstores look like a clearing house for slightly-used vampires and werewolves, so also there were "Mafia" sections in bookstores. No, I'm not joking. Whole shelf units, shelf after shelf, devoted to books about Mafia families. And real mafia families loved the books so much they started to try to imitate them so they could be as cool as the Corleone's, instead of being the half-educated brutal thugs they actually were.

When people quote The Godfather, I just think it's worth remembering that most of the time, they're not really quoting the movie, because the movie is quoting the book, which was devised by Mario Puzo, and not Francis Ford Coppola.

Wednesday, March 16^th -- Freedom of Information Day

On Freedom of Information Day, the American Library Association "supports free and open access to government information." ALA urges libraries and librarians to join in celebrating the public's "right to know."

But in fact there are many things that the public has no right to know, and many things which, if the public knew them, the public would be greatly harmed. There are legitimate government secrets, just as there are legitimate trade secrets and family secrets.

While the Freedom of Information Act has been, in my opinion, a great boon to good government, despite the burden it places on public servants to make records available to inquiring reporters and lawyers, important negotiations, relationships, military operations, and intelligence contacts have been compromised and lives have been lost because of irresponsible revelations, not just by the WikiLeaks tyrants but also by our supposed "mainstream" media, whose arrogant assumption that they knew which secrets were right for the government to keep ended up destroying some of our best intelligence methods for tracking terrorists.

Whenever somebody pontificates about the public's "right to know," I always want to raise my hand and say, "How much money do you make? Have you ever been fired from a job? Can I see your tax returns? How much do you weigh? What is your social security number?"

Because even though this is all information that somebody knows about you and that, on occasion, you can be required to divulge, nobody actually believes the public has a right to know anything about them except what they jolly well want to tell.

The balance between privacy and the public interest is a delicate one, and no one person is fit to decide it for everyone -- and as far as I know, librarians have no special insight as to where that balance ought to fall. When it comes to government, I know that secrecy is invoked far too often.

But that does not change the fact that our success in war and diplomacy and even in making good laws depends on secrets being rigorously and honorably kept. If the doors of the Constitutional Convention had not been locked, and the deliberations kept secret, it is doubtful we would ever have had a constitution at all, since candor cannot exist without a reasonable expectation of privacy.

If governments knew that every word they said would be publicly known, then all that would ever be said is lies. Secrecy is one way of lying; but it's also very often the minimum condition for truth-telling.