WHO DO YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE?

If I were to pick a theme in this morning’s newspaper it would be identity. Grand Chief Thunderbird is in trouble for selling tribal memberships. The government gave each tribe the ability to determine its own members, but reserved the right to decide on the identity of the tribe itself. It says the Kaweah tribe of ten thousand people is not Indian.

A black athlete recruited for a Montana university to masquerade as a student is in a lotta trouble for criminal acts but the nature of those acts and the evidence against him has been made secret by a judge, though he was convicted, so we don’t know who this guy “really” is. But Senator Craig, who had successfully hidden his non-conforming and public nuisance sexual proclivities, has been outed and condemned, though everyone agrees he has been a superior senator throughout his lifelong career.

Though it wasn’t in the paper today, a few days ago a guy named Phil Scriver claimed -- as he does about once a year -- that he was Bob Scriver’s cousin. When I called the newspaper to complain, as I do every time, that Phil is NO RELATION, I was told that if I could definitively prove he was NOT, then they’d print the story. Well, heck, we’re all cousins, right? Fight fantasy with fantasy. I’m going to start claiming that I’m the adopted daughter of Bob Scriver. Last time I threatened to claim that I was the third wife of Phil Scriver, but that ploy went nowhere. I gave the reporter the emails of Bob’s actual cousins in Quebec, plus a family tree going back to the great-great-grandparents. No reaction.

A fugitive from justice, Norman Hsu, fell ill and unconscious on an Amtrak train and was caught because he was carrying his passport. When he had failed to show up in court there was a hue and cry because he had that passport with him. They ransacked his home looking for it, because it was the proof of identity that would get him past many barriers.

Here on the rez, where identity is often complex, the proof of identity is the consensus raised by old ladies who remember your mother very well and have strong convictions about what she was up to in her reproductive years. But that component is only one part of their opinion: what they consider more important is how you’ve lived your life. Not just whether you were a success, but what contributions you made to others. This is the way it always used to be in the old days when people lived in villages of maybe a hundred and traveled very little.

Now identity is often reduced to a DNA sample, so one of the stories in the paper was about a serial rapist who was smart enough to use a condom and scrub off evidence with dirt, but missed a few spots so was convicted. Or we are scrutinizing an identity on a video, like the one Osama Bin Laden has just released. (His beard is shorter and blacker. Is it false? Is he really him? And what is the identity of that bird singing in the background???)

This is a new element in the issue of identity: the insistence of governmental bodies on determining the identity of an individual and accumulating information about that person. (They promised that Social Security numbers would never be used for other purposes. They lied.) Made feasible to this extent by computers, the roots of this record-keeping extend back into medieval church records of who is married to whom, which child belongs to which parents and who is really dead. The main need is to manage who is responsible for property, especially inheritance which can become highly contentious and momentious. (Think "heirs to the throne.")

But the question is framed in terms of the identity of the Soul and people are told that God knows everything that they are or do. Now it is the installation of police monitoring cameras that records everything, but once the image was an angel writing everything in a big book. This idea has provided fodder for jokes, esp. cartoons, for many centuries. It is also supposed to be a force for good behavior -- to be slipping around without proper identification is assumed to be evading the law.

With the invention of the computer, the government is busy trying to register all the animals in the country -- for food safety, for the corraling of dangerous animals, for ownerhship, they say. But the Homeland Security database that was supposed to keep track of terrorists has turned out to be 29% wrong. The whole trouble is that humans design the programs and humans monitor the results. The government by now has far exceeded its capacity to analyze or even correct the information it has gathered. You know how important it is to scrutinize your monthly statements from the bank or some department store.

When I was married to Bob, we used to be entertained by the nonsense invented by reporters who confused reality with the movie they last saw on television. That was in the Sixties. By now the inaccuracy and pure inventiveness of reporters has, well, exceeded credibility. Of course, that hasn’t prevented them from promoting accusations of deception against others.

It would all be pretty amusing except for the actual consequences to so many people. A radio story last night told about a man who claimed to be a rather famous athlete, a baseball pitcher. When he died, that’s what his eulogy said. The only trouble was that the REAL athlete, when told he had died, protested! He had the same legal name, he was the same physical height and weight, but he was the guy with the skill and trophies. And he was alive! Luckily he had a good sense of humor.

On the other hand, a woman writer named Laura Albert, using a collaborator and a pen name, created a lot of sensational stories which sold well. When she was unmasked, she was stigmatized as a “hoax” and a “hustler” and fined a LOT of money by a judge in a lawsuit for misrepresenting herself. So am I in big trouble for claiming to be “Prairie Mary”? What about my prior identity when I wrote a column called “The Merry Scribbler?” Or is the problem that Laura Albert simply revealed how many people have a hunger for misery, to know all about it so they can feel smug and sanctimonious? If so, who’s at fault here? An opportunistic publisher, a public hooked on grocery store tabloids, or people like Oprah -- first promoting recovery from criminal wickedness and then condemning a new and much more benign wickedness, like, fooling her -- or at least her staff? How much IS Oprah really herself and how much is she the construct of the people around her?