Elephant in the Room?

Political Asylum Plus: Jefferson’s uncertain issue and “multiple.” There are, no doubt, cynics among us who, looking askance at goings-on at the federal level, assume the term “National Zoo” is a cheeky reference to Washington. Such wiseacres should be directed to reports out of the Nation’s Capital on the development of Linh Mai, an eight-month-old Asian elephant calf. She’s getting special attention at the Smithsonian’s bosky Connecticut Avenue menagerie because—for reasons that remain slightly unclear—Linh Mai’s mommy “rejected” her. After her mother “behaved aggressively toward her,” WBUR reports, Linh Mai’s “human keepers had to step in for round-the-clock care.” Born in February, Linh Mai is “incredibly smart,” zoo officials say, “rambunctious, sassy, and playful.” She’s just as cute as anything weighing 1,000 lbs. could be. (Cuddly might be stretching it.) Her handlers are taking special care to make sure that “she connects with other elephants in her herd.” To that end, they’ve introduced Linh Mai to what they are calling her “aunties,” two 51-year-old female pachyderms, Swarna and Bozie by name, and she’s making great strides. Now hold on. Why is it important that Linh Mai connect with other elephants? What, exactly, are zoo officials worried about? Apparently, there are real concerns here, and they are not reluctant to say so. “What is her future going to look like?” one of her keepers wonders to the Washington Post. “Does she know she’s an elephant? Does she think she’s a person?” Zookeepers, one of them says, think it is important for her “to realize she [is] an elephant.” But wait. Is this not something Linh Mai should be allowed to decide for herself? Why are we choosing this for her? This is deeply troubling, or should be, and it is worrisome that zoo officials seem not to recognize this fact. That the media doesn’t realize it is even more surprising. The paternity of Sally Hemings’ children has been settled once and for all—again. The father, as long suspected, was Thomas Jefferson, and a new book confirms it. Richard Kurin’s History by a Hair provides what the New York Times calls “the most definitive evidence yet” that our third president fathered children by an enslaved woman at Monticello. But how something that is “definitive” can be “most” definitive is a question for grammarians, perhaps, not for the rest of us. Logicians, maybe? Jefferson’s culpability here is also, the Times reports, “a widely, if not universally, accepted truth.” What, again, does that even mean? Does whether something is true or not depend upon the level of its acceptance? Monticello called Jefferson’s siring of these children “a settled historical matter” way back in 2018. But support for the belief had been growing at least since 1997 with the publication of Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The charge was first leveled in Jefferson’s own lifetime by political opponents, while an 1873 interview with one of Sally Hemings’s children, Madison Hemings, said she was her master’s “concubine.” The new findings rely on DNA studies used to date to convict a pair of mass murderers, so they must be good, right? In this case, what are said to be samples of Jefferson’s hair, clipped on his deathbed in 1826, were examined and subjected to scientific scrutiny, leading to the latest headlines. Critics with no ideological axe to grind in this matter note, however, that such claims are usually reviewed by scientific journals before a book of this nature is published. This time, however, that step was skipped, leading one source of DNA material—a Hemings descendant—to withdraw her participation in the project and her support. The eagerness to accept such evidence has been growing for decades, as has the misinformation routinely spewed forth in its support. The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting the new claims, initially said, for example, that Hemings “traveled abroad with Jefferson to Paris, at 14.” Anybody who knows anything about the matter knows this is false. Hemings, with one of Jefferson’s daughters, arrived three years after Jefferson got to Paris—and the future president had in fact asked that a mature woman accompany his daughter as her chaperone and had no say in who actually showed up. (The Chronicle later retracted its erroneous claim.) Typical of treatment of the subject is Beverly Gage’s This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, published earlier this year. In it, Gage writes that Jefferson “is widely known not only as the author of the Declaration of Independence, but as the father of at least six children born to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was the half-sister of his deceased wife, Martha.” But hang on. The research to which Gage refers never concluded that our third President fathered “at least six children born to Sally Hemings.” The studies concluded only that one of her descendants carried the same Y chromosome as Jefferson, but nine other Jefferson men carried the same Y chromosome, including Jefferson’s brother Randolph Jefferson. Randolph Jefferson was a widower who—or so said Isaac Jefferson, another one of the enslaved men at Monticello—would “come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” Maybe Thomas Jefferson did have a long-lasting dalliance with one of his slaves, as members of today’s nomenklatura seem so eager to believe. But there can be no doubt that Sally Hemings, as Gage puts it, may now be “one of the most famous women in American history.” Meanwhile, we’ll wait for what the scientists have to say about the tests on Jefferson’s hair. What seems indisputable is this: Anyone troubled by the giddiness with which the claims are embraced must act out of creepy and despicable motives. Is there any truth to the rumor that guests on NPR programs sign contracts dictating their vocabulary they are to use during interviews? That would seem to be the case, considering the word choices that even academicians from prestigious universities employ during these broadcasts. People are always referred to as “folks,” a usage that seems to have entered the nation’s vocabulary during the Obama years. At the end of an interview, when the host or hostess expresses gratitude for the guest’s appearance, the guest invariably chirps, “Thanks for having me.” Younger guests—and those trying to seem younger than they are—must use “super” and “way” as adjectives expressing how impressed they are by some phenomenon otherwise pretty ordinary. They routinely refer to a “ton” of studies that support whatever point they’re trying to make. There must always be “conversations around” a given matter, never “conversations about” it. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox The most egregious, however, involve the choice of adjectives to precede a plural noun. Guests must never say “several,” “many,” “numerous,” or countless other near-synonyms. Instead, they are required, or seem to be, to say “multiple.” Multiple has been increasingly fashionable for several years, apparently, and why this is the case might be a good subject for Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Multiple, after all, is almost always meaningless, because it is redundant. The word it modifies is invariably plural, so its use adds nothing. But apparently, it seems to affix a veneer of multi-syllabic sophistication to whatever notion is being communicated, or so someone in authority at Public Broadcasting must believe. As wearisome as all this is, we can all take comfort in the fact that the content of these programs and the positions taken on them remain surprising, independent and refreshing as always, as are the viewpoints expressed by hosts and guests alike.