The Ballad of Brinkman Rose
Like the excited parents of brand new stuff that we are, we've gone the extra step toward absurdity and given the truck a surname. We are the proud owners of a lumbering vehicle -- too large for his britches, but with a boyish disposition and effervescent rust -- the nerdy and mildly effeminate foundling: Brinkman Rose.
It was an agonizing process, involving massively unproductive hours in my cube, navigating through the online etymology dictionary, and long, rambling discussions about the finer and lesser qualities of words like "hack" and "vag" (rhymes with "bag," and short, in case you have an awful mind, for "vagabond"). "Brinkman" was an early contender and managed to play his realpolitik right, pitting our desire for something "American-sounding" (and therefore rural, slangy, and probably horsey) against the unavoidable fact that nothing is as American as brinkmanship. That was our nod to the America we inherited -- great, aggressive, modern place that it is.
The evolution of the surname is a more interesting case, and probably confirms the suspicions of my college roommate that I am "a big, fat nerd." We begin with the fact that (1) As we have considered our impending departure, and the things we'll find along the way,Democracy in America has been very much on our minds. There is the obvious reason that de Tocqueville was perhaps the most insightful observer of American government and, intrinsically (it follows), American culture ever to exist. The more compelling fact is that he was, to use the old turn of phrase, a stranger in a strange land. And I can't escape the eerie feeling that most Americans are as strange to me now as they were to this intellectual Frenchman two centuries ago. I'm no French diplomate, but I feel a kinship with his purpose. We proceed to the fact that (2) This year marks the 200th anniversary of de Tocqueville's birth. Pull the loose ends together, and we have (3) The beginnings of a namesake. It's quite obvious, however, that you can't name a truck Brinkman de Tocqueville. Or Alexis Brinkman. We had to dig further.
De Tocqueville was hired by the French government to study the U.S. penal system, which is massively funny, in a sad sort of way, given that one hallmark of the "success" of our legal institutions has been to create the largest population of prison inmates in the world -- over 2 million in 2004, or about 1 of every 150 Americans. Funny, sad, and a perfect example of a rather sinister form of American brinkmanship -- escalate to avoid concessions, at all cost. (The cost, if you're interested, is about $45 billion.)
John, as many of you know, has been involved in the anti-death penalty and prison reform movement for many years. So when I brought up the idea of naming the truck after some rickety old country prison or archetypal American supermax, he was reluctant to hang such a heavy albatross around Brinky's neck. Talking me down from my morbid fascination, he proposed that we stick with the same general idea, but give it a good kick in the pants. Thus was born our new fascination: great American prison breaks. After leafing through textbooks and Foucault, and rifling the Internet, we stumbled upon our hero, the architect of one of the greatest prison escapes of the Civil War.
Col. Thomas E. Rose, of the Union Army's 77th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, was captured at the Battle of Chicamunga in September 1863. Rather than endure the conditions in the makeshift Libby Prison (known to inmates as "Rat Hell"), he organized secrecy-sworn fellow prisoners to dig a tunnel that led outside the prison wall. The men rotated night shifts, digging with a chisel, knife, and fingers through a subterranean cavity squirming with rats and the stench of sewage. One unhappy tunneller wrote, "it was almost impossible for us to get pure air enough to sustain life while working in the tunnel. We were often pulled out by our comrades, suffocated and exhausted, nearer dead than alive." After 17 days of exhausting and fearful work, the men broke ground only to realize they were still on the wrong side of the wall. The (apparently) bumbling idiots running the prison failed to notice the hole. After two more days of scraping and clawing, the prisoners had finally tunneled their way to liberty and emerged in a shed just outside of the prison gates. The next evening, under cover of that most American of entertainments -- the prison yard musical variety show* -- 109 Union soldiers crawled to freedom under the improvisatory command of Col. Thomas E. Rose.
*This might not be true. But if you've seen Titicut Follies and appreciate my sense of humor, you'll agree that it must have happened.
And there you have it, a (far too?) detailed accounting of the origins and kinships informing the praenomen and cognomen of our two-ton baby boy, Brinkman Rose.
It was an agonizing process, involving massively unproductive hours in my cube, navigating through the online etymology dictionary, and long, rambling discussions about the finer and lesser qualities of words like "hack" and "vag" (rhymes with "bag," and short, in case you have an awful mind, for "vagabond"). "Brinkman" was an early contender and managed to play his realpolitik right, pitting our desire for something "American-sounding" (and therefore rural, slangy, and probably horsey) against the unavoidable fact that nothing is as American as brinkmanship. That was our nod to the America we inherited -- great, aggressive, modern place that it is.
The evolution of the surname is a more interesting case, and probably confirms the suspicions of my college roommate that I am "a big, fat nerd." We begin with the fact that (1) As we have considered our impending departure, and the things we'll find along the way,Democracy in America has been very much on our minds. There is the obvious reason that de Tocqueville was perhaps the most insightful observer of American government and, intrinsically (it follows), American culture ever to exist. The more compelling fact is that he was, to use the old turn of phrase, a stranger in a strange land. And I can't escape the eerie feeling that most Americans are as strange to me now as they were to this intellectual Frenchman two centuries ago. I'm no French diplomate, but I feel a kinship with his purpose. We proceed to the fact that (2) This year marks the 200th anniversary of de Tocqueville's birth. Pull the loose ends together, and we have (3) The beginnings of a namesake. It's quite obvious, however, that you can't name a truck Brinkman de Tocqueville. Or Alexis Brinkman. We had to dig further.
De Tocqueville was hired by the French government to study the U.S. penal system, which is massively funny, in a sad sort of way, given that one hallmark of the "success" of our legal institutions has been to create the largest population of prison inmates in the world -- over 2 million in 2004, or about 1 of every 150 Americans. Funny, sad, and a perfect example of a rather sinister form of American brinkmanship -- escalate to avoid concessions, at all cost. (The cost, if you're interested, is about $45 billion.)
John, as many of you know, has been involved in the anti-death penalty and prison reform movement for many years. So when I brought up the idea of naming the truck after some rickety old country prison or archetypal American supermax, he was reluctant to hang such a heavy albatross around Brinky's neck. Talking me down from my morbid fascination, he proposed that we stick with the same general idea, but give it a good kick in the pants. Thus was born our new fascination: great American prison breaks. After leafing through textbooks and Foucault, and rifling the Internet, we stumbled upon our hero, the architect of one of the greatest prison escapes of the Civil War.
Col. Thomas E. Rose, of the Union Army's 77th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, was captured at the Battle of Chicamunga in September 1863. Rather than endure the conditions in the makeshift Libby Prison (known to inmates as "Rat Hell"), he organized secrecy-sworn fellow prisoners to dig a tunnel that led outside the prison wall. The men rotated night shifts, digging with a chisel, knife, and fingers through a subterranean cavity squirming with rats and the stench of sewage. One unhappy tunneller wrote, "it was almost impossible for us to get pure air enough to sustain life while working in the tunnel. We were often pulled out by our comrades, suffocated and exhausted, nearer dead than alive." After 17 days of exhausting and fearful work, the men broke ground only to realize they were still on the wrong side of the wall. The (apparently) bumbling idiots running the prison failed to notice the hole. After two more days of scraping and clawing, the prisoners had finally tunneled their way to liberty and emerged in a shed just outside of the prison gates. The next evening, under cover of that most American of entertainments -- the prison yard musical variety show* -- 109 Union soldiers crawled to freedom under the improvisatory command of Col. Thomas E. Rose.
*This might not be true. But if you've seen Titicut Follies and appreciate my sense of humor, you'll agree that it must have happened.
And there you have it, a (far too?) detailed accounting of the origins and kinships informing the praenomen and cognomen of our two-ton baby boy, Brinkman Rose.
