The Importance of Names
Look ma! I'm actually using my history degree!
Studying history in college has led to many consequences I never imagined when I picked the major at 17. I grew up with the great privilege of parents who encouraged me to pursue whatever I was most interested in, and much to the dismay of my future bank account, that didn’t happen to be business or coding. More than anything, I wanted to learn about the past so I could have a more complete understanding of the present and the future.
The drawback of this life choice is that I’m filled with blinding fury roughly 8,523 times every single day.
Now, you may know me as a guy who writes about shitting his pants at work and dive bars, but I assure you there’s a bit more under the surface here. There are hundreds of people more capable than I am to discuss the slew of illegal and unconstitutional actions of the current administration, so I don’t want to wade too far into those waters and advocate for the importance of USAID or explain what the NIH actually funds. The daily avalanche of bad news makes me feel completely hopeless and despondent, but one of the upsides of being a writer is that I have a platform to vent.
As such, I wanted to take a second to address one of the most personally maddening developments of this first month (fuck, how has it only been a month?!) of the second Trump presidency — the renaming of Army bases, gulfs, and mountains. I know this is possibly the least consequential of the current horrors, but I think that by looking at things through a historical lens each of these moments offers some keen insight into what to expect for the next 47 months (good god).
Fort Bragg Returns
A few years back, the U.S. military went through a laborious process to rename bases that had been named after Confederates. While it should have been common sense not to name bases after traitors, the military is known for pulling the occasional SNAFU, so at the time it felt good to be finally righting this wrong. Conservatives saw it a little differently and threw a hissy fit because this attacked their precious “heritage.” Personally, I don’t understand being proud of a bunch of slave owners who seceded from the country just to have their cute little rebellion crushed within a handful of years, but maybe I’m built different.
The biggest kerfuffle was over the renaming of Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the country. The fort had been named after the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, one of the most inept generals in military history. During the Seminole Wars, he dodged service as much as he could, and when he returned to the lines his own troops allegedly tried to assassinate him. Twice. Throughout the Civil War, he lost damn near every battle he had a chance to, and in his rare moments of victory, he found a way to squander the advantage. Naturally, those troops also tried to have him removed from command, albeit a little less violently. I could go on and on to document all of his many foibles, but I don’t want to lose all of you, so let’s just say Bragg’s ineptitude should have been enough to exclude him from having anything short of an outhouse named after him, even before you factor in the whole traitor thing.