I have great news: birds are no longer racist. Bet you didn’t know they were racist to begin with. Well, they were. But now they’re not.
Except for milkshake duck: milkshake duck is still racist.
Perhaps you remember this imaginary feathered friend, born on Twitter in 2016. “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes!” announced the user “Pixelated Boat.” And then, “*5 seconds later* We regret to inform you that the duck is racist.”
The collective online psyche will inevitably dredge up or fabricate some sin to ruin even the sweetest object of group attention. Picnics are modern-day lynchings (they aren’t). Beer is patriarchy (or something). Your favorite comedian is a sex pest (okay, that one might be true). And that duck you like that drinks milkshakes? Definitely racist.
So were lots of birds, probably—sure, why not?—until this week, when the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced that no birds will be named after human individuals any longer. “Some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today.” explained the AOS president.
Katrina Miller of The New York Times, reporting on this development, dug up a few winged microagressions whose namesakes I assume she selected for maximal shock value. The accomplished naturalist James Audubon, for example, owned slaves. So there will no longer be a tropical seabird named “Audobon’s shearwater” (good luck pronouncing puffinus lherminieri).
To some extent this is of a piece with other efforts to wash the public square clean of bad memories. Last month a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which once stood in Charlottesville, VA, was melted down at an undisclosed location. Like many of its kind, the monument had been the occasion of passionate attacks and counter-attacks for years; in 2017 a rally to defend it notoriously turned violent. In this ignominious conclusion to the whole affair, Lee’s bronze face throbbed and glowed as it slid downward into globs of metal to be repurposed as scrap for some new sculpture.
It seems that men like Lee must simultaneously be stricken from the public record and constantly talked about. We want to burn and smear away every reminder of him; we also insist that his sins can never be forgotten, that they are always with us. The most contorted and painful aspects of our history must be undone, yet at the same time we are told they have insinuated themselves, serpentine, into the coils of our DNA. They must be the focus of our constant attention; they must also never be called to mind, not even obliquely, in the passing mention of a bird. The stress of this psychological posture is too much for any people to bear.
On one level, bird names are a hilariously petty domain in which to fight this fight. It seems absurdly frivolous to twitter over boobies when public statuary and civil war are at issue. But on another level the AOS decision is actually very revealing, because it does not stop only at those figures whose recorded deeds make them known offenders against contemporary ethics.
The AOS council disavowed any responsibility for picking through the avian rosters to evaluate the merits of each eponym on a case-by-case basis: “Any effort to make such judgments on past and present human figures would invariably be fraught with difficulty and negativity and become an unwelcome public and scientific distraction.” Instead they decided that every human name, no matter the biography attached to it, was too risky even to bestow upon a sparrow. The more than 70 people who gave their names to birds are all suspect: the purity of nature is apparently so delicate that it is threatened by the mere possibility of human evil. A possibility which, of course, clings to all of us.
I think this is why the destruction of that statue looked grotesque, even to native northerners like me who feel moderately squishy about Lee’s particular case. It was the spirit of the thing, the same spirit that in the end will wipe away the memory of all humanity rather than stain the wings of birds with the names of man. That spirit does not stop with confederate statues, but will even tear down the image of the man who freed the slaves.
Because even though it’s true that some men’s legacies are more admirable than others, it’s also true that in the end every man is implicated in the poison web of sin. No era, no nation, no human name is safe from the looming cloud of some grievous wrong that waits to be identified. Even our most soaring achievements emerge from the contorted mess of human history; sometimes it is because of those very achievements that we find ourselves aghast at what went before. Unless we realize this tragic fact, even our noblest ethics will morph diabolically into a cannibal quest to cleanse the world of ourselves.
In a bizarre way, that was part of why the milkshake duck joke worked: already in 2016, many of us could sense that a punishing standard was settling into place, a yoke that not even the birds of the air would manage to slip out of. Now that reality is outstripping satire, it’s worth asking ourselves once again whether there isn’t some better way of grappling with our sorrow at the fallen state of man. There was one, once: we called it mercy. Even still, at this late hour, it remains eternally on offer.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
It seems that we’ve inverted our view of the generations before us. Where we used to venerate great men for their highest achievements and extend them grace for their shortfalls, we are now under the perverse notion that everyone who came before us is to be judged specifically by their most egregious sins, which are then used to invalidate even the loftiest of achievements.
Do you think this is normal for a generation that doesn’t know how to accomplish great things of their own?
You can, after all, either live up to the standards of your father or you can tear him down as an ogre who isn’t worthy of emulation in the first place.