What's In A Name?

For the last fifty years I have named things: given them personal names to replace their corporate names. It started with cars. My first Volkswagen, in 1961, was named "Dilsey." She is one of William Faulkner's characters, of whom Faulkner says, generalising, "They will endure."

Then I named refrigerators, stoves, vacuum cleaners, furnaces, typewriters. I named them as you would pet dogs and cats and gerbils, and then they were significantly--by that signifying name--my property, and I was responsible for them.

(I had a television set once, briefly. I wasn't hooked up to get any stations, and it went to its grave nameless the afternoon that I buried it in the back yard.)

Two years ago I named my current car "Fitz." He's a little Honda Fit--or Jazz, as he would be identified, corporately, in Europe. But I've now changed his name.

On a small label, I copied the name of a young American soldier who has been killed so we can have cheap oil. And I glued it onto the car. Every time I buy a tank of gas now I add the name of another young soldier or marine who died so we can have cheap oil. I put the names on the back fender, around the gas cap.

But I can't keep up. Since 2003, two American soldiers have been killed a day, on average, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't keep up, let alone catch up. 6,036 young Americans have died fighting for cheap oil as of 26 May, 2011. How many more from other countries? And how many tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians--who (to us) don't even have names?

Maybe I should start calling my little car by its names. Maybe I should make myself think of it by its many names. And maybe if a number of us could find some way to remind ourselves of what we are doing when we buy our gasoline, we would learn, together, in a moment of outraged awareness and sympathy, to say somehow an effective, absolute NO to our war for cheap oil.