The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, and the government
aims to keep it that way by prohibiting the exotic. By statute,
names too unique and distracting are forbidden. As a fig leaf, the
legislation poses as the guardian of the individual by adding: “any
name that makes a person the object of ridicule.” Clearly, though,
the goal is to replace branding with blanding.
Darling Velez, a Colombian immigrant to Spain,
has just had her citizenship approved, providing she modify her
first name from the familial to the familiar. “Sorry, darling,” the
official explained. “I can’t call you Darling, darling. It would
subject you to being the object of ridicule.” “But Darling is so
darling, darling,” Darling complained. “And I don’t object to the
subject.” Her plea was rejected, making her dejected. So outraged
is she that she threatens to take a Basque name to make her
point.
This should give us an inkling how opposed European socialist
thinking is to our political culture. From our red-state rednecks
to our blue-state bluebloods, from our outright righties to our
left-out lefties, we treasure the right to festoon our progeny with
garish tags. O. Henry’s yellow dog griped that his name, Lovey, was a “nomenclatural tin
can on the tail of one’s self-respect,” and perhaps we should
better seek other media to bespeak our idiosyncrasies. But to cede
to the government the right to confine our in-house nomination
process? To boil it down to a plain-vanilla approved list? No way;
here is a rare patch of common ground for Dinesh D’Souza and
Moonbeam Zappa.
“What’s in a name?” you might ask the barred. After all, a rose
by any other name would still smell as sweet: “Oh, honey, a dozen
yellow methanes. Really, you didn’t have to. Ooh, they smell
heavenly!”
On the other hand, the Talmud tells how Rabbi Meir avoided
depositing his money in the local bank because the owner’s name was
Rob (or the Aramaic equivalent). When the man later absconded with
the kitty, only the rabbi was left sitting pretty. The recent
best-seller, Freakonomics, showed that certain names
predict success, with the most powerful being the Hebrew name Dov
(meaning bear). And when my neighbor was reminiscing how Ray Strack
used to beat him up for his lunch money as a kid, I burst out
laughing: “I guess we all lose money to the racetrack.”
Names do shape us in various ways. In the song “Goodbye Norma
Jean,” written by Bernie Taupin and performed by Elton John, the
title makes the point that the homey Norma Jean is first subsumed,
then consumed, by the worldly Marilyn Monroe.
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on a treadmill
And they made you change your name.
Then cognition of the cognomen was twangily serenaded in I Got a
Name by the late Jim Croce, who highlights the tension within the
name as representative of both selfhood and a parental legacy.
Like the singin’ bird and the croakin’ toad
I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name
And I carry it with me like my Daddy did
But I’m livin’ the dream that he kept hid.
In the Spanish system, names are no longer worn as a uniform —
they are uniform. My friend John Smith groans he can’t take his
wife to a motel without being winked at conspiratorially as a
philanderer; they hear his name as myth. The Spaniards avoid this
problem by making everyone into John Smith. Perhaps they should
append sequential numerals, like a license plate or an e-mail
address: “Hi, I’m Luis the fourteenth.” Try this over a PA at
Madrid Airport: “Maria Ramos 1142, please pick up the red courtesy
phone.” Or carved into a Barcelona oak, a heart with the legend:
“Jose 816 loves Elena 544.” I guess when those Commies said they
were against naming names, they were not kidding.
So fight for us, our darling Darling. Do battle for your
identity and ours. Honor your parents and their vision for your
life. Don’t let government types whisper into your brain about the
security of the nondescript. Never sacrifice your fiesta for their
siesta. Today you’re number one, tomorrow you’ll just be a number;
eventually they will discount you as a supernumerary. Only they,
with their imaginations compromised by conformity, could see you as
an object of ridicule.
Blandishing you into blandness is soft fascism, but in the end
it is just as tyrannical as brandishing the branding iron.
