A people-item journalist takes on the history of mankind.
BEFORE LAST WEEK, A couple of noted precursors reached the postcursing stage: for Java Man and Java Woman, it was the end of something. “We met in a tree,” recalled J.M., “and just totally flipped over each other”—but then came twelve and a half years of rough-and-tumble. “We did the whole number, the bonking on the head, the dragging by the hair, the clawing and the biting and the names. ‘Animal!’ ‘Troglodyte!’ You know.
“Finally it dawned on us this was getting us nowhere. ‘After all,’ we said, ‘we are two fully upright adults. Let’s start acting like hominids.’ Now I think we know each other better. Because we know ourselves better. And we realize we are two very different people.”
So with jaws still ajut and brows still ridged, but personally more together, the Javas announced their separation. Observed J.W., who under terms of the settlement will keep the cave and brood (he, the club): “We were both evolving all the time. It’s hard on a relationship.”
Heliogabalus … Jacob Riis … Magellan … Oswald Jacoby … Luke.
Some millennia the third and second B.C. turned out to be for those Sumerians! That’s the invention-of-writing people. In the old oral days, “ha” had meant “fish”; then came cuneiform, and the fish symbol meant “ha.” No problem—until the Sumerians’ northern neighbors passed from barbarism to civilization.
If you write, you share. The Sumerians, whose lower-Tigris-and-Euphrates stomping grounds lacked stone and metal, turned the new crowd on to Fish and Owl and all the other symbols. Pretty soon everybody was cuneiforming—and there were no more Sumerians to speak of. They’d been absorbed.
“They had the first ‘ha,’” quipped an absorbent Akkadian as he hooked up a nice chunk of metal to a likely block of stone. “But we got the last laugh.”
Eugène Sue … Tito Fuentes … Elena Blavatsky … Georg Simon Ohm.
And I. You heard me. I. I, by the standards of tidbit journalism, may not be a “person.” I may not be “notable.” But I am a … consideration. I occupy space, I breathe, black out; experience systole, diastole, longing, and a “zimmezimme” sound in my ears that I can’t quite identify. I go home at night and face Ciel, and little Uwe and Honoré and Willadean and Umbra and Fleming and Pud and the dog Tippy and old Uncle Pancoast and our life together.
I voted for Kropotkin in the recent mayoral contest.
And I write the items.
Remember that tooth dislodged from Hammurabi by Babylon’s then-minister of brick during their late-night “all in fun” bout of tackle-the-man-with-the-tablet? Well, it seems the tooth will not be compensated for along the usual lines. According to a government spokesman, the code does not apply to officially recognized sporting events. In any case, the minister’s teeth were termed “much smaller and browner” than the King’s, after each was removed and considered. The minister was reportedly placed under 777 new bricks, where he will await reassignment.
Maud Gonne … Mary I … George Romney … Jubal Early … Epaminondas of Thebes.
And You? Dear idling soft-news reader. Maybe an electrician? Maybe a Burmese woman? With soft translucent eyes? You can reach me here at the office. We’ll meet, we’ll talk, we’ll grab a couple of Blimpies and get out, get away from all these … snippets of vicarious popularia. This “people.”
And have you noticed that “the people” went out as “people” came in? Bringing with it “people issues,” the kind of person who describes himself as “a people person,” the expression “he’s good people,” and the neutron bomb?
Or have I lost you already? Has your attention span been brought to this—that it can no longer take in more than thirty-five words without a name and a
slug of white space?
Apparently the Yuletide was not all triumph for Charlemagne. What with all the coronation commotion, remarked the Holy Roman Empire’s new head, his family didn’t get a chance to open presents together. “It just didn’t seem like Christmas,” he has confided to friends. “I know it disappointed the boys.”
Vespasian … Wolf Mankowitz … Eva Marie Saint … Li Po … Al Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult.
Back to You. Don’t just sit there reading with your head bent forward: bad for your neck, makes you look like a serf. Take sides. Let them go at it, one on one, and tell me, who do you like? Gato Barbieri or Lazarillo de Tormes? Cher or Moussorgsky? Lon Nol or Hughie (Ee-Yah) Jennings? To this observer, it is Kropotkin over any or all, though Uncle Pancoast plumps for Thutmose II.
What of Napoleon Bonaparte? The former French Emperor, reached in Elba, said he was working with aides on his forthcoming memoirs, stretching his 24-inch-inseam legs with daily strolls on the beach, and puttering around the governor’s mansion. “Mais maintenant, il fata courir,” he concluded. “Il faut ‘cultiver mon jardin.’”
Listen, this “people” stuff is not the bargain it seems. It’s fast folks, makes its way into the bloodstream like bacon substitute. But—we are not obliged to nibble away submissively on processed “people.” We can take a hand.
Pick somebody—anybody: Carmen Basilio … Saint Crispin … Leon Trotsky. Think about him. “Oh, yeah, Trotsky—better-natured kind of guy, wasn’t he, than Stalin? Communist, though. Hit with an ice axe in Mexico … but how’d anybody look innocent carrying around an ice axe, down there, oh well what the hell, etc., etc.” And on to the next “person,” be it Elihu Root … Colley Cibber … Imre Nagy … Ned Buntline … Herod … Julia Ward Howe … Gorboduc … or August Gneisenau.
But wait a minute. Would you have hit Leon?
If so, with what?
We headline our columns “Notes on People,” or “Newsmakers,” or “Names … Faces,” but are these in fact the lowest common denominator? Are they even units? In the process of some random paragraph’s filtration through your household perhaps you have caught a glint of this microbiological hypothesis: that all of us, even Henry L. Stimson, have been host organisms for that master race by which we are, so to speak, peopled—those wee, ineffably knowing, intimate, unconfrontable intracellular bodies that live our inner lives, even carry our genes, the Mitochondria.
Are the Mitochondria just laughing up our sleeves? They must have hummed to themselves while those scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory bred a person-plant: cancer cells from a Baltimore woman fused with cells of hybrid tobacco. And what has she/it developed? No doubt foliage, ratiocination, limited enthusiasm for the Orioles, and a hacking cough. But the Mitochondria don’t care: to them it’s just a kicky new split-level home.
The reunion after sixty years of Dr. Sigmund Freud with his school soccer team was a hit with all concerned except Freud himself and goaltender Sandor Ferenczi, whom Freud steadfastly maintained he didn’t remember, even after Ferenczi did a certain droll thing with his ears and fingers that had made him highly popular in school, then donned an old team jersey and produced a ball that he kicked toward the father of psychoanalysis.
Freud ignored the kick, and seemed to be incensed by the thing with the ears and fingers. Ferenczi said he found the Freudian lapse “interesting.”
Atatürk … Dana X. Bible … O. E. Rolvaag … Sacagawea.
His “Principle of Uncertainty” he called it, in no uncertain terms. It is impossible to determine exactly and simultaneously both the position and the momentum of any body, stated Werner Karl Heisenberg, thereby weakening the law of cause and effect.
“What makes you so hot? What makes you so sure?” exclaimed a policeman in the audience. In the ensuing confusion a series of shots was heard which struck the rostrum.
But Heisenberg was gone.
Vasco da Gama … Vaughn Monroe… Huey, … Dewey, and Louie.
It’s a brand-new White House pet for Amy Carter: a baby chimera swapped to her by an unnamed classmate. The President’s daughter would not reveal to reporters either the quid pro quo or the chimera’s name, or whether it liked peanuts or understood the role of the press.
Diderot … Capucine.
I slim. I put on weight. My belt also shrinks and stretches. Ajax. Alaric. (I sometimes feel that someone on the copy-desk made up Al Kaline and Dr. Armand Hammer out of whole cloth, just to see if I was paying attention.) Bhutto. Qaddafi. I am paying attention. To what is there. To what is not there. To the people who move their lips concerning me, in such a manner that I can’t quite make out the words or the tone. To the media. Which engross us in taglanguage, which take us for granted, which never remember our name.
Eugène Delacroix.