Another Thinkpiece About A Celebrity Couple's Kid's Name

I have thoughts about the name of the Musk/Grimes child. Should he read this one day, I’d like to apologize ahead of time, because the only people who should feel bad about his (apparent) given name are his parents.

Maybe this makes me some species of curmudgeon, but I’m really over the use of creative orthography in the naming of children.

A human’s name is not the title of a conceptual artwork. It’s a gift from a parent to a new person, and as such it belongs to the person who bears it, not the parent. Treating the process of naming a person like performance art is, frankly, an abuse of a highly personal trust.

When I was a kid, I was extremely adamant that my name was David and I was to be called that, because I was often bullied and made fun of, and I didn’t trust people with “Dave” or especially “Davey”. Looking back, I feel I was overly stubborn at times, but all the same it was my name and I was within my rights. To this day, I insist that most people call me David.

When I got a little order I loosened up a bit, and I used “Dav” a lot in writing, especially online (pronounced like Dave). But that was my choice, and it was also something I wasn’t nearly as comfortable hearing out loud. Only a handful of people call me Dave now, who met me online as Dav, and I tolerate it because I did after all introduce myself that way.

My uncle often greets me with a Spanish “David”, but that’s cool because we get along really well and he’s Puerto Rican, so it comes naturally. My dad does it occasionally too, because he’s a dork like that. But I’ve never questioned in my whole life that my family took my name seriously when they gave it to me, and have respected my right to have it the way I wanted.

Names mean a lot to people, and it is disrespectful to trifle with them. I have a student whom I met four years ago with one name, and then within a few months reintroduced himself with a new one, because he was transitioning to a new gender. Within a year he was on to a new name/nickname combination, and so far it’s stuck. Making sure his name and pronouns were respected was one of our main priorities in helping his whole class through the transition.

Most people don’t have to go through a process like that, but those who do can surely appreciate that a person’s name belongs to that person alone. And even if a person makes the decision to put their birth name aside and take on a new one of their own choosing, it would be considerate of their parents not to start them off in life with a name that reflects nothing but their own vanity.

I would never go so far as to say all spelling variants, or unusual names, or even faux-unusual fad names are illegitimate, because that’s nonsense. What’s important is the parents’ motivation in giving a name, and I for one think it’s transparent that “X Æ A-12“ is a name that exists to turn the birth of a child into a spectacle and promote the Musk/Grimes brand.

People speculate on what the Musk/Grimes child is going to actually be called by his parents when they put their twitter accounts down and use spoken language, but what about the matter of what this kid is going to call himself, in his own mind? Naming a child after the mere concept of a mathematical variable, a multilingual orthographic pun, and a goddamn military spyplane, all at the same time, does not communicate that the name was given with any thoughtfulness. It’s trifling masquerading as significance.

And it would still be a thousand times better if they had just spelled it as X Ash Archangel, instead of insisting on turning the act of reading the name into a rebus, or a cryptic crossword puzzle. But no - they preferred to give their kid the precious gift of one day being able to google himself and learn that the occasion of his birth was met with a chorus of utter confusion over what a weird fucking name he was given.

Name your kids whatever you want; but is it too much to ask parents to consider what is it about names that actually gives them meaning, and even “uniqueness”? Or at the very least, to not treat the naming of a child like an album drop or an IPO?

For a Troubled Political Conscience

At this point, I think that Tara Reade’s accusation against Joe Biden is at least as likely to be true as not. I don’t have the means at my disposal to say definitively what happened, and I don’t think it’s on me to give an account of what “really” took place. Reade has given an account. We know Biden has a history of inappropriate touching, and we know that powerful men do these sorts of things with regularity. Without a thorough investigation, there’s already a high degree of plausibility.

And the thing that I’ve been really struggling with is, what to do about this information, since it is still overwhelmingly likely he will be Donald Trump’s only credible opponent in November. And Trump must go.

Does it matter that Trump has been credibly accused of worse and more? Does it matter that so has Bill Clinton? And does it matter that Trump is still the one who bragged about grabbing women, laughed it off as “locker room talk”, and has intimated more than once that it’s a real shame he can’t have his way with his own daughter? None of these things have any real bearing on holding Biden accountable for his actions. But this is a lot bigger than Biden.

Four more years of Donald Trump means more hard-right conservatives on the Supreme Court. It means the continuing dismantlement of whatever social welfare apparatuses this country has managed to cobble together. It means the pandemic will continue to be mishandled and so will every unknown crisis that may occur in that time. And it means more arbitrary attacks not only on the environment here, but the global climate.

It’s also entirely possible that Trump will consolidate power in such a way that he can put an end to any meaningful role for any organization in national politics, apart from the Republican party and the Trump Organization.

Those are all terrible outcomes that must be avoided. and there are two ways that can be accomplished: either we elect the Democratic nominee in November, or we dismantle the present constitutional order and put an end to the American presidency.

Yes, yes, the second one, I hear you chanting. Well you aren’t going to make it happen in the next four years without a civil war. This is not a thought experiment, it is a fact. There will be a president next year and it could be Trump. He will come down as hard on an insurrection as any dictator ever has. The power of the state will not be diminished because we have become disillusioned with the character of the men who wield it. And Trump will put the power of the state to work doing terrible, terrible things. We know this because he’s been doing it.

The United States, of course, has been doing terrible things with its power for centuries. But that does not mean that we, who are given some small power to direct the course of future events by electing our leadership, have no obligation to push against an outcome for the country and the world that is measurably and demonstrably worse.

Joe Biden may have committed a crime, and that would be a reason to oppose him. But there are much bigger issues than Biden’s sexual misconduct to consider when determining the ethics of this situation. If we only look at environmental issues, it is not a stretch to say that X number of people will die for every day that Trump continues to make climate policy. AND he’s a rapist.

Imagine these scenarios:

• Biden wins, and you have to live with having voted for some one who is guilty of sexual assault, but who has mitigated the climate disaster to some degree.
• Trump wins and continues to make the climate crisis worse solely to “own the libs”, while being definitely guilty of sexual assault on a wide scale, but you didn’t vote.

I can live with one of these scenarios. I’m not satisfied with it. But ethically speaking, there is a clear choice to be made.