Anonymous Assholes

Ross Perot.  Trent Lott.  Gordon Liddy.  These men have more in common than their right-wing views and statuses as big deusch bags (not that there's a link or anything).   All these men go by their middle names.  For some reason, people who go by their middle names have always bothered me.   It seems somehow deceptive.  For years I've informally kept track of it, making a mental note every time I learned of someone forsaking their birth name.  After awhile a pattern emerged.  The practice of hiding your first name seems more common in the arena of politics than anywhere else. Check out some of these familiar names:

J. Dennis Hassert - Speaker of the House C. Ray Nagin - Mayor, New Orleans J. Edgar Hoover - Founder of the FBI J. Danforth Quayle - Former Vice-President L. Paul Bremer - Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq G. Gordon Liddy - Planned Watergate E. Howard Hunt - Carried out Watergate C. Kit Regan - Drummer C. Trent Lott - Senator/Racist H. Ross Perot - Paranoid/racist C. Stewart Verdery, Jr. - Former Assistant Secretary of Border and Transportation Policy (probably racist)

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. If I were voting to strip people of their rights, operating a mangled flood-relief effort, running an illegal occupation, trampling the constitution, or advising border and transportation policy, I probably wouldn't want people to know who I was, either.   Maybe that's why the father of the atomic bomb went by J. Robert Oppenheimer, or why the owner of one of the largest right-wing media corporations in the world is K. Rupert Murdoch.  When you're really bad, you even have to hide behind two names, like I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby or R.L. Stein.

Sure, not everyone who skips the first name is an asshole.  J.K. Rowling feared that people wouldn't buy her books if they knew she was a woman. That seems legitimate.  Kit Regan's middle name is Kit.  That's ok too.  When someone like Dennis Hassert does it, though, you know it's because he's hiding something.  Hell, when Dennis Hassert does anything, you know it's because he's hiding something.

But that's not all.  Over the course of writing this piece, I noticed an even more disturbing pattern.  If you rearrange the first initials of everyone mentioned above (minus the two authors), you get:                                                                      IJJCHECKJCCGL Or, when decoded:                                                                    I, JJ, CHECK JCC GL Obviously the coded message of someone named JJ checking out girls at his local Jewish Community Center.  Dispicable. That's all for now.  Keep an eye out for more anonymous assholes...especially at the JCC.  I know I will.

-Alan Engel