Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

IDLE INFANTILE DOODLING

I know you have become used to my making mature and thoughtful commentary in the “Something Thoughtful” section of each posting, with incisive remarks about politics, culture and other weighty matters.  But the hard fact is that I am not always in the mood to be serious. Sometimes I simply want to cut myself loose from seriousness and descend into inconsequential trivialities. So here I go with some things that are true but that are of no importance whatsoever.

Item One: When I was a teenager, aged 14, I read Erich Maria Remarque’s famous war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. I still have the paperback edition that I read then, and when I take it off my shelf I can find, in my immature handwriting, the comments I wrote on certain pages pointing out the most impressive bits. But after I’d first read it, somebody told me that the author’s name was really Kramer, not Remarque – and after all, you could almost see Remarque was the reverse spelling of Kramer. “Very interesting”, I thought. But only years later did I discover that the author really was called Remarque. The canard that he was named Kramer was invented by Josef Goebbels’ propaganda machine in the early 1930s when the Nazis – not yet in power – were protesting and rioting about the release in Germany of the American film version of All Quiet on the Western Front. “Kramer” was, in Germany, often a Jewish name and Goebbels invented the false name of the author to suggest that he was not only a “Bolshevik pacifist”, but also a Jew. The race enemy. To the best of my knowledge, the person who misinformed me was not a Nazi or racist, but had said what he said in good faith. Which goes to show how easily false information can be taken as fact even by well-meaning people. Disinformation is not new.

Item Two: A very similar story. You probably have never heard of Yma Sumac, who was a phenomenon in the 1950s. She was a Peruvian singer who was famed for singing in five octaves and so could sing from deep down to way up high. She mainly sang (or dolefully chanted) hymn-like indigenous songs to show off her versatility. Even when I was a tot, I could hear her on the radio and – years after it was first released – I saw at the local flea-house a (boring and slow-moving) adventure film, starring Charlton Heston, called The Secret of the Inca in which Yma Sumac, dressed in traditional Peruvian costume, chanted and moaned at length. And once again somebody informed me that actually Yma Sumac was really a made-up name, and that her real name was Amy Camus who had simply reversed  her names to seem exotic; and that she wasn’t Peruvian at all but came from a New York suburb. Again I thought “Very interesting”. Except that a few years later I discovered that the story was in fact a joke made up by an American comedian and never meant to be taken seriously. “Yma Sumac” was the Peruvian’s stage name [apparently it means something like “how beautiful”]. Her full name [I’ve looked this up, folks] was Zoila Emperatriz Chavarri Casrillo. She was Peruvian, born and raised in Peru. But once again, the false story was believed by many people. The power of disinformation.

Item Three: If you like, this is the piece de resistance, though maybe you might want to resist it as it’s mainly about schoolboy smut. Not too many years ago, one of my sons told me that the [technically rather primitive] English children’s cartoon series Captain Pugwash, about a rollicking pirate, was in fact filled with characters with disgusting names. Among Captain Pugwash’s pirate crew there was reportedly Master Bates (geddit? geddit?),  Seaman Staines (geddit? geddit? geddit?) and the cabin boy Roger who always introduced himself as “Roger, me, the cabin boy” (“Roger me”, geddit? geddit? geddit? geddit?... though maybe Americans won’t). Also, it was claimed that  “pugwash” was a form of intense gay sexual intercourse. For a while, all of this was widely believed to be true. In fact the English newspaper The Guardian printed a column on the filthy names hiding in a children’s show. Except that one week later The Guardian retracted their statement and apologised because the makers of Captain Pugwash had threatened to sue. None of the quoted names had ever appeared in Captain Pugwash and for the record the cabin boy was called Tom. So where had the false rumours about the names come from? Maybe it began as schoolboy smut, but it first appeared in print in a students’ satirical magazine, intended to be funny if you enjoy that variety of humour. Again, many people were eager to believe fiction. Incidentally, earlier there had been a kerfuffle about another children’s TV programme. This was The Magic Roundabout. It was a harmless French children’s programme which had been dubbed into English, but the dialogue in the English version bore no relation to the dialogue in the original French version. One of the main (animal) characters was, in the dubbed English version, a kind of laid-back hippie type of character, and in no time the series became a “cult” hit, because some English viewers believed it was filled with druggie argot. So, apparently, The Magic Roundabout was all about drugs. Nobody has definitively debunked this rumour, but it appears to be specious. As it happens, the man who voiced the characters in the English language version was the father of the actress Emma Thompson. For what it’s worth, she refutes the idea that her father was a druggie or mouthing druggie sentiments in a kiddies’ show. It all seems to have been wishful thinking on the part of the druggies who watched.

There now. I have fed you three or four cases of misinformation which were not exactly earth-shattering or important but were inconsequential trivialities. Misinformation still wows some people. For slightly more weighty examples, look up the column I called Faggots, Fakeryand Up Yours .