Debbie Nathan
Subprimal Baby Names … and Nicholas Corbett and Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera
Joann Wypijewski has a fine piece in The Nation’s Sept. 29 issue, about McCain’s political exploitation of Sarah P.’s MILFy, B&D, Book of Daniel sex vibe. This reminds me of how Sarah’s trotted her kids out. Not just their bodies and faces but their names, which Mom flashes like medals (go to CafePress.com and you’ll even see “Trig” themed GOP campaign buttons).
Trig. (Palin says it means “truth” in Old Norse. Of course, it’s also short for the thing you cock to fire a gun — in US English.)
And Track. Bristol. Willow. Piper.
Compare those techno-sporto-Anglo-Saxo onomastics with Barack Hussein and his daughters, Misha and Sasha. The Baracks sound a little like that sad, creepy chapter in Freakonomics, where the elite, white authors warn Negroes and trailer trash that naming their kids Lashawnda, Kondaleeza and Brittany will keep them down and out, so their only hope for success is blue-eyed, freckly monikers from lit crit and the Bible, like Zoey, Tovah and Zach.
But for the past several years now, white people of various classes have been bypassing squishy and porny-sounding Noah and Sierra. A decade ago when I was living in Alamo Heights, a heavily Republican, yuppie neighborhood in San Antonio, I noticed my neighbors were naming their boys hard, clean things like Madison, Tyler, Hunter, Carter and Austin. Dead presidents, Confederate cities, and medieval English trades. Even more striking, female babies were getting the same macho treatment. And still are. Look at the 150 most popular girls’ names for this year and you see Taylor, Morgan, Bayley, Avery, Kennedy. As for Madison, it’s higher on the girl’s name list than the boy’s. Still, the boys have Jackson, Parker, and Chase.
Chase could be the financial institution, and I think this is what such names are about. Defensively, they evoke white people’s yearning for crisp, steely, take-no-prisoners clout and wealth. Black people are often accused of violating social dignity by naming their kids impulsively, purely on the basis of some word they heard just as the cervix dilated to 10. (Recall the urban myth about maternity ward nurses throwing their hands up after a new mom from the projects names her baby girl “Urine.”). But the new white names sound just as improvised. And they have a basic, flashcard-vocabulary sound that’s easy to expand on. Back in Texas I started my own list.
It includes (for boys): Banker, Hampton, Dow, Prep, Crew and Cheney.
For girls: Annuity, Gramercy, Spa, Coach. And now a new one: Palin.
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US-Mexico Border Flash: A new trial is now scheduled for October 21, for Nicholas Corbett, the Arizona border patrolman accused of murder in the killing of Mexican immigrant Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera (also known as Francisco Dominguez Rivera). For more information on who Francisco Javier really was, see a piece I wrote for The Nation in late March, posted on this blog (click here) and also available in its original format from The Nation.
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Days of Awe(ful) Department
Speaking of names: LaShanah Tova! from LaShawnda and Tovah 
or maybe just Barbie