Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Taking Their Names in Vain

95 TakingTheir Names inVain “You’re so sluggish!” Thus spake my lively mate one recent morning, when my late-night reading and early a.m. torpidity conspired to bring about yet another tardy departure for the city. Of course she was right, and her frustration was righteous. Nor was her metaphor inappropriate. Like our damp land’s wondrous banana slugs, I function on average at a more deliberate pace than her pet rabbit, though I (like the slugs) am actually capable of a speedier slither now and then.On the whole I was not offended by the comparison. People have always described one another’s traits in terms borrowed from the bestiary:sly as a fox,quiet as a mouse,blind as a bat,slow as a turtle (is that slower or faster than a slug,I wonder?).Meddlesome or raucous or clever as a jay or a crow or a magpie.We’ve got hawks and doves,WASPS and crabs, shrews and moles. Animal similes that anthropomorphize animals and zoomorphize people have been used and used and will be used again to portray our own species’ qualities. Never mind whether the attributions fit.True enough, bees and beavers are pretty busy, and bugs in rugs are probably snug. But are eagles actually brave? Owls truly wise? Geese really stupid? When such name calling is meant as an insult, it may carry an ironic compliment. Calling your uncle a turkey, you have in mind a butterball of an inbred, domestic version gobbling inanely as it bumbles about the barnyard brainlessly, and the likeness might not be inapt. But when I saw a sleek, bronze-backed, Crayola-tailed wild turkey pacing cannily beside the Blue Ridge last fall, the insult lost its punch.As all hunters of wild turkeys know,there is nothing bumbling or dumb about their quarry.I think too of the three-toed sloth I once watched in all its slo-mo elegance, negotiating the canopy of a Costa Rican rainforest.Here was an organism so exquisitely suited to its domain that it scarcely needed to move,supporting an endemic flora and fauna in its dense,lichened,gray-green coat.Yet to most,the word “sloth” evokes nothing more than one lazy louse. TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 96 Our animal pejoratives begin gently enough, such as catty and birdbrained , but then deteriorate through dirty rat and hairy ape and on to louse, skunk, hog, and horse’s ass, peaking out at just plain “animal.” Before long we’re in the territory of genuine slurs—women as bitches, chauvinist men and police as pigs, anyone in the wrong tribe as running dogs—never mind that we consider all three categories honorable when describing Lassie,Porky,or OldYeller.Slander is bad wherever it occurs,but to co-opt animal names in its service leaves me doubly uncomfortable;not because of the nasty animal attributes such names are meant to imply about the people thus anointed, but because of the nasty human traits with which they tar the innocent creatures concerned.By describing insufferable hangers-on as leeches, ciphers and sycophants as toadies, craven cowards as chickens, and liars as snakes in the grass, it is the animals we really slur.Through no fault of their own, critters end up in the kind of company we’d prefer to avoid. When the first U.S.-Iraq war was underway, I noted that a well-known John Bircher’s billboard along 1-5 concluded its slogan of the week by labeling Saddam Hussein “a human worm.” The worst aspersion that farmer could think to cast was the name of Charles Darwin’s darling:“It may be doubted,” Darwin wrote,“whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.”During the second invasion,an interviewee on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air” referred to Saddam as “a lying snake,” and once caught, he became “a rat in a hole.” But this sort of infamy by association cuts both ways.As momentum built for GeorgeW.’s Iraqi adventure, a San Francisco columnist described the administration as“vile power-mad slugs and lizards ...snakes and pit vipers.”The writer went on to admonish his readers,“The world does not consist of simpleminded and reductive good/evil polarities, but, rather, is a living organism, interconnected and breathing and dying and renewing in constant flux.” But what manner of Gaia is this, where all sorts...