I am the 11th Earl of Sandringham. I was told that when I was young, and I never was able to get any member of my father's large family to deny it. Nor could I get them to tell me how it came about that my grandfather was the 9th Earl, although they insisted to the last aunt that he was.
So, in the absence of a challenge, I am. It's not important, but it may have a bearing (if you squint at it) on the remainder of these musings.
Elizabeth Warren's family legend has American Indians in the family ancestry, which is a whole heck of a lot more likely, btw, than my earldom. I note that the Tribes mentioned were Delaware and Cherokee, which are more exciting than basket-weaving and pot-throwing Hopi. In fact, white folks I know who claim Indian blood are more likely to be related to tribes that looked flashy in the movies. Just like people who know about their previous life were cup bearers for Charlemagne or asp ropers for Cleopatra, not Chinese rice farmers.
Well, Donald J. Trump has trouble with smart women, and he figured an Indian in the woodpile could be his ammunition. So, combining a bit of racism with a bit of sexism, he calls Warren "Pocahontas." If Warren wanted to return fire, she could take note of his claimed German ancestry and refer to him as "Heinie" or, even more accurately, "Katzenjammer."
I would have preferred that than what she did do. She referred to the palpable fact that he "may not even be a free person" by 2020.
Hoo boy, just what we needed. Dueling rally cries.
"Lock her up," meaning Secretary Clinton.
"Lock him up," meaning President Katzen... um, Trump.
Giving people assigned names, the psychologists tell us, is a means of getting control over them. God changed names in the Bible when he gave out new assignments, and tagging someone with a nickname is a way of claiming godlike power over them. George W. Bush used to do it, with Putty-Put-Put and Fart Blossom (for Putin and Karl Rove), and of course Trump does it as a substitute for rational conversation.
Everybody in my father's generation had a nickname. If you read old baseball almanacs, you see the players of those days were all Lefty or Dizzy or Goose or Schoolboy or Gabby or Jolly Cholly. My father's closest friends into adulthood were Flap, Twitchell, Stiffie and Delirious. How he ever came out of that maelstrom as the relatively reasonable Doc (he was doctor of nothing) I never discovered.
But it was harmless fun for the most part. It wasn't until recently that such material for family meals and golf foursomes became federal cases.
You may address me as "My Lord."
If you wish.
Warren is an intelligent person. But intelligence appealing to the intelligence of the American public can be very risky, in my opinion. I am not beyond emotional appeal. A picture of a pile of steaming testicles in the middle of Wall Street that says "Vote Warren" would get my attention.
ReplyDeleteEr, "Stiffie"?
ReplyDeleteA pretty little house your Lordship apparently dwells in. And you modestly withheld that HM Georges V and VI both kicked the bucket in your billiards room or thereabouts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandringham_House
Just for the record, I don't think Trump actually invented "Pocahontas" for Warren - not that it's any cleverer than his nicknames, it's just not his kind of not-clever. If left to his own limitful imagination, he'd come up with "Lyin' Liz" or some such. To be sure, once he was made aware of the "Pocahontas" knee-slapper, he latched onto it - because whenever given the choice between the more presidential and the less presidential, he will choose the latter, approx. 100% of the time.
My friend David Leonhardt at the NY Times, in his daily personal missive to me and possibly a few ten thousands of his other nearest and dearest, decreed that the top tier of Democratic contenders is Kamala Harris plus Joe Biden should be decide to run. He's relegated Warren to the second row, along with Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar.
Well, certainly Harris and Biden are not likely to make waves for the corporations. Warren could bring in some real regulation to the financial and corporate sector and we can't have that. It is imperative that she be neutralized. As a somewhat related aside, my friend, the OR nurse, he brought an interesting thing to my attention. For years now, it's been known that dogs can smell cancer with 90% accuracy. Are they training an army of poochies to identify cancer? No, just enough to identify what the dogs are smelling and then developing a lab test or an expensive machine. After all, why reward a tester with a squeaky toy when you can transfer $300 to big pharma?
DeleteJim, I think Stiffie came from stiffening up and having a stiff bourbon and water. Stiffie was sometimes referred to as His Stiffiness. But that's because my father was 10th Earl.
Delete(My mother always said there couldn't be an earl of Sandringham because Sandringham House was a royal residence. But my Uncle Jim (who wasn't much older than I) told me I would do a disservice to my No. 1 son if I listened to my mother.
Tom, when you said "Earl of Sandringham" I thought for a minute you might be referring to a character in Diana Gabaldon's voluminous "Outlander" series. Trust me, you don't want to be related to *that* Earl of Sandringham.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe Trump is still getting mileage out of the Pocahontas meme. He just keeps flinging fertilizer until it sticks. As misrepresentation goes, Warren's Indian heritage is pretty minor league. Trump himself has told so many whoppers that the fact checkers have given up keeping count. Warren needs to learn the schoolyard reply to taunts like that: look 'em in the eye and say, "So?"
My grandma had a personal rule about nicknames. She didn't call anyone by a nickname that was demeaning, referred to their ethnicity, or called attention to a physical characteristic. Which meant she pretty much called everyone by their formal name. I must have picked up on it, because I usually don't call anyone by a nickname unless asked to. And it jars my teeth a bit when people who don't know me well call me by a diminutive of my name.
ReplyDeleteI have always been fascinated by the geometric progression of ancestors. That means Tom had about 2000 other potential ancestors at the time of the first Earl of Sandringham. Maybe he should investigate the others, might be a Duke or a King among them. Why settle for being an Earl?
ReplyDeleteOr going back to about 1492, we all had a potential 33 million ancestors, probably most of Europe for most of us but perhaps some Asians and Africans on the distant edges of that large fold.
Of course some of us must have had some convergence to a smaller number of ancestors because for periods of time our ancestors intermarried within a narrow geographic area, thereby producing the same ancestor through multiple paths. But there was still a lot of opportunity for people to move and marry outside their immediate geographic locations over a long period of time. So our kinship lines must go beyond our immediate ethic lines which in my case are British, German, Polish and Lithuanian. They may have covered much of Northern Europe.
My mother had a theory that we were descendants of German Jews through the mother of the mother of her mother, which would mean that I am Jewish since descent is traced through mothers. Ever once in a while I come across experiences from strangers that support this theory. Once in graduate school I directed an elderly couple to the Hillel center. They responded “you are Jewish, right.” Then when I lived one summer in an inner suburb of Boston which had a Jewish population, some at the laundry through I was Jewish. Most recently some people who do not know me, nor my political views have told me that I remind them very much of Bernie Sanders! So it is possible to see how a little bit of family folklore based upon very little evidence could snowball.
Jack: "My mother had a theory that we were descendants of German Jews "
ReplyDeleteI suspect a fair number of American christians may have at least some Jewish ancestors in their long ago family background. I am pretty sure that I do not - pure Irish on my mom's side,but we can't trace it really far back, and German on my dad's. But the German ancestor whose name came down through the generations to my own (and now two younger generations)was actually born in France and was taken to Germany as a child after his parents were killed. The family myth is that they were killed because they were Huguenots. But the family who raised him in Germany was Catholic so he became Catholic and his name was changed to theirs. That stuck. So as far as I know, my ancestors were Irish and German peasants, along with a few French peasants in the 18th century and earlier.
No titles anywhere. We did have a Jesuit though. My grandfather's mother died when he was young. The children were farmed out to other family, and he drew the priest uncle. I'm sure he got a decent education courtesy of the Jesuit uncle who raised him, but he also left Germany and moved to the US as soon as he was an adult, and apparently did not keep up any contact with the folks back in Germany, including his uncle.
My husband's ancestry is more intriguing. He is British on his mom's side - tracing his family back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony on his maternal grandfather's side and to Scotland in the 1700s on his maternal grandmother's side. His father's ancestry is German. This is where it gets interesting. The father's side is traced back to mid-19th century Germany on the existing family tree. Nobody has taken the time in the age of ancestry.com to look any farther back. My German side is Catholic, his is Protestant. But my husband's family name is seldom found in families that aren't Jewish. People hear the name and automatically assume that my husband is Jewish. My sons too, even though two of them look amazingly Irish. Since we live in a majority Jewish community, over the years we have received countless invitations from various Jewish groups - including ads that traced our sons growth - ads for Jewish pre-schools to mailings from the colleges our sons attended, which welcomed them to the Jewish student community there. My husband and I even got a mailing from Hillel at Univ of Michigan when one son went there for grad school. It assured us that he would be able to find kosher food, a vibrant Jewish community, and weekly Shabbat there and that his Jewish heritage would be well cared for. Our sons share their father's surname, of course. I suspect that if we traced his ancestry back far enough we would discover that some ancestors lived in one of the towns where, at various times of history, the "christians" forced conversions on the Jewish residents - "convert or die". Or sometimes "covert or your parents and wife and children die". Not everyone is willing to be a martyr for religion, or to subject their family members to torture and death. Since it wasn't safe to be Jewish for long periods of time during the last 2000 years (and still isn't in many places, including some in the US), it seems likely that many who were descended from Jewish roots eventually forgot this heritage as the centuries rolled on. But, it is a bit surprising that the Jewish family name was never christianized in some way during all that time.
Our family doctor when we lived in another town was a Sephardic Jew whose family had come from Mexico. I thought that was an interesting background.
DeleteAnne,
DeleteYour description of your husband, a name that could be Christian or Jewish, is very similar to what happened in my mother's family. They were also all merchants and townspeople in contrast to the farming backgrounds of the rest of my family.
One of my comments apparently never made it.
DeleteKatherine, did your family doctor have a Spanish surname or a Jewish surname? He does have an unusual background.
I once sat next to a woman on a long plane ride who was friendly and wanted to talk. She was a natural redhead (you can always tell if it came out of a bottle. My mom was a redhead, as was her dad and other family members. Alas, I did not get that hair color - stuck with boring brown). She was of Irish-Jewish heritage. Her parents moved to the US from Dublin when she was a baby. One of her uncles who still lived in Dublin was a rabbi.
The doctor's surname was Jinich, which isn't a Spanish name that I had ever heard of. So possibly a Jewish name, but the J was pronounced as an "H".
DeleteThe most charitable construction I can put on Elizabeth Warren's listing herself as Native American is that she was motivated by some misguided sense of solidarity with her distant Native American ancestors.
ReplyDeleteIt was a bone-headed move on her part, and leaves me feeling she might be a bit ditzy, but it raises a larger question about why anybody has to list ethnicity on a bar application--or any application.
Full disclosure: I had to fill out a form every year to apply for financial aid in college. The form required that I select ethnicity, though it stated this would not affect aid eligibility. I regularly checked different boxes.
So I guess I won't be able to run for public office.
Katherine, apparently Jinich is a Jewish name, originating in eastern Europe, and transferred to Latin America by immigrants.
ReplyDeleteThere is a TV celebrity chef in Mexico named Pati Jinich. She wrote an article titled "What am I? Chef Patricia Jinich on being Mexican-Jewish and reflecting her culture in the kitchen"
Jack: The most recent episode of the PBS series "Finding your Roots" featured three politicians. Both Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan said absolutely wonderful things about how immigrants are "go-getters" (Rubio's term) and made America what it is. Too bad they don't think that when it comes to the current cohort of would-be immigrants. Paul Ryan expressed amazement that some of his German immigrant ancestors actually walked 50 miles from the train to where they eventually settled. Amazing. What of the central Americans who have walked 1000+ miles? I wish Dr. Henry Gates wasn't so darned polite with his guests and would ask questions like that. But, it's not supposed to be a political show I suppose.
Paul Ryan learned that his DNA shows 61% Irish/Scottish (surprise, surprise), as well as a lot of German on his mother's side. But he did not know that he has ashkenazi Jewish DNA also - 3% - about the same as Elizabeth Warren's % of Cherokee DNA.
I suspect that a whole lot of descendants of German and eastern European immigrants have some Jewish ancestry that they don't know about. I'm intrigued enough to maybe research my husband's lineage back into Germany - what we have starts when his direct ancestor immigrated to the US in the mid 19th century. I'll have to see if the info includes the town he left in Germany. If it does, that would be a good starting point.
That's interesting about the Jinich surname. I had always assumed that they were Sephardic Jews, arriving in Mexico by way of Spain. But from the article on Pat Jinich, they are Ashkenazi from central Europe.
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