Meet John Doe
As the forces of rebellion
gathered momentum this spring in the Republic of Zaire, commentators felt
obliged to offer a thumb-sucking retrospective on the country's embattled and
dying president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had held power for more than three
decades. All the commentaries at some point brought up the subject of the
departing leader's full name. Born Joseph Désiré Mobutu in 1930, he changed his
name, after consolidating his dictatorship, to "Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu
wa za Banga." In Mobutu's native Lingala language, according to one group of
press reports, the name means "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his
endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving
fire in his wake." An alternative translation, according to a second group of
reports, is "the cock whose prowess leaves no hen untouched."
In an age
when national power inheres less and less frequently--or, at any rate, less and
less legitimately--in the hands of an all-powerful individual, the adoption of
a symbolic personal name by way of an aggrandizing personal epithet has sadly
fallen out of favor. Among world leaders today the few practitioners of this
form of personal rule include Syria's Hafez al-Assad ("Assad" means "lion" in
Arabic) and Turkmenistan's Turkmenbashi--"father of the Turkmens," the form of
address favored by President Saparmurat Niyazov, the landlocked republic's
opéra - bouffe strongman who has commissioned a stunted replica of
the Eiffel Tower, with a revolving statue of himself on top, for the center of
his capital city, Ashkhabad.
Most of the world's remaining monarchs possess a number of
colorful inherited titles ("Defender of the Faith" in Great Britain, "Custodian
of the Two Holy Mosques" in Saudi Arabia), but these are functional
designations and little more than quaint vestigial appendages, like a whale's
arms. There is certainly no contemporary leader with an adopted name as coldly
presumptuous as "Stalin" (meaning "man of steel," an epithet adopted when Josef
Dzhugashvili was still more than a decade away from power), much less one
comparable with "Richard the Lionhearted" or "Vlad the Impaler." The one place
where adopted names retain an organic vitality is in occupations where
professionals can still claim some prestige based on a perception of personal
exploits or exotic capabilities, such as organized crime (Gregory "The Grim
Reaper" Scarpa, Anthony "Gas Pipe" Casso) and pornographic entertainment (Lisa
Lipps, Sandra Scream--to name two of the more serene).
As
decision making has devolved from the autocrat to the ordinary citizen, it is
the ordinary citizen--the anonymous Everyman, an embodiment of rights and
responsibilities shared by all--whose name is increasingly invoked. There are a
number of generic possibilities. A 1992 New Yorker cartoon showed one
campaign worker talking to another in an office near the Capitol, and bore a
caption that read, "So what you're saying is that Joe Sixpack and Joe Blow are
one and the same person?" Yes--and he may also be "John Q. Public," "Joe
Zilch," the "Common Man," and the "Unknown Citizen" invoked by W.H. Auden in
his poem of that name. (The epitaph on the monument to this Citizen reads, in
part: "The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day/ And that his
reactions to advertisements were normal in every way./ Policies taken out in
his name prove that he was fully insured,/ And his Health-card shows he was
once in hospital but left cured.") John, Joe, and the others are probably also
related to the people whose names are found on the credit cards and driver's
licenses displayed in advertisements, and I assume they all know the mysterious
"M. Marts" whose name appears on dunning letters from American Express, above a
signature that looks like it was drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch.
The most venerable among the common names in
the English-speaking world for an ordinary male citizen, or indefinitely for
any male person, is "John Doe"; and for his female counterpart, "Jane Roe."
Both names (along with the no-longer-common "John-a-'nokes" and
"John-a-'stiles") derive from legal custom dating back almost to medieval
times, in cases where suit needed, for arcane reasons, to be filed against a
legally fictitious person. They served precisely the same function that the
names "Gaius," "Titius," and "Seius" did in ancient Rome. John Doe, Jane Roe,
and a handful of similar variants are used today to shield the identity of an
actual person whose identity is known (as in the famous abortion case Roe
vs. Wade ), or to indicate (as in a so-called "John Doe summons") an actual
person whose identity is not yet known. Law-enforcement officials investigating
the Oklahoma City bombing spent months looking for a suspect who, within hours
of the crime, was given the designation "John Doe No. 2," eventually tracking
the man down and also establishing his innocence. The lawyers for Timothy
McVeigh, who was designated "John Doe No. 1," argued that the bombing was
actually the work of a broader conspiracy. The chief defense attorney, Stephen
Jones, stated, "We certainly will contend that there is a John Doe 2, and maybe
3, 4, and 5." Such a plurality of Does is typically cause to invoke the variant
forms. The Supreme Court this month will hand down a decision regarding a pair
of cases, from Washington state and New York, involving the legality of
assisted suicide. The individual plaintiffs in the Washington case were listed
in the appeals-court opinion as "Jane Roe; John Doe; James Poe; Harold
Glucksberg, M.D." ("Glucksberg," of course, is not some ambitious new departure
in the field of generic fictitious names, and there will not soon be a movie
called Meet Harold Glucksberg . Glucksberg is just the real name of a
doctor involved in the case.)
New words
for Everywoman and Everyman are proliferating, albeit with a qualitative
difference. Whereas Jane Roe and John Doe at least give a nod to status based
on the fact of mere personhood, the new terminology seems to confer status on
the basis of some salient generic attribute--consider "occupant," "head of
household," "user," "the consumer." This has come about owing to the continuing
merger of demographic science and marketing, and the tendency is probably not
reversible.
All the more reason, perhaps, to insist on a little more
bravura individuality on the part of our world leaders. One could stop well
short of anything as elaborate as the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie's old
tag line ("King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah") or the array
of distinctions paraded by the young ruler in Evelyn Waugh's Black
Mischief (a proclamation begins, "We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Lord of
Wanda, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University ...") and yet still provide an
evocative garnish. One possibility might be to allow sitting American
presidents (for example) to add the name of at least one former president or
other historic American to their official names. One can easily see, though,
how in some hands this could lead to pandering--the nominal analogue of
ticket-balancing ("I, William Jefferson Roosevelt Kennedy Patton Rosa Parks
Harvey Milk Sitting Bull Clinton, do solemnly swear ..."). A more promising
direction is simply to require American leaders to absorb their Secret Service
code names into their proper names.
The Secret Service, perhaps
owing to the quotidian proximity that the role affords, has demonstrated a
proven knack for understated aptness in its selections. Ronald "Rawhide"
Reagan. Dan "Scorecard" Quayle. Edward "Sunburn" Kennedy. Jimmy "Deacon"
Carter. Bob "Patriot" Dole. Should an unelected tribunal be entrusted with such
power? That is a question for the political philosophers. For myself, I'd be
willing to let the creators of Roger "Headache" Clinton at least give it a
try.
