Doctors Weigh In on Presidential Name-Loss
The Supreme Court’s emergency decision that a President of the United States with no name can neither sign legislation nor be impeached has thrown the nation deeper into recension. In the five days since the newly-elected leader’s name was lost once and for all in the wee hours of Monday morning, the air-ways have been furious with the punditry of legal scholars, historians and linguists. Now, facing a full four years of nothing at the top, it’s time to find out what doctors think.
I asked Sally Hutchins, MD, chair of the board of the National Patrols of Health, Wellness and Being (NPHWB) if there are other documented cases of name-loss. “Memory loss is one thing,” said “but loss of an entire name is something that doesn’t show up in the literature at all, aside from Medieval apothecary’s manuals — ‘Jack Whatsisname and the Demon’ — that kind of thing.”
“My psychiatry and psychology colleagues are scouring their texts for documented examples of collective forgetting — akin to collective hallucination — but haven’t come up with anything yet.” Dr. Hutchins continued. “We’re kind of at a loss ourselves. But that’s nothing new for medicine.”
I mentioned Stanrod University’s Lost to History project to see of Dr. Hutchins’ team had found that research helpful. “Their work is enormously interesting,” she replied “but it doesn’t directly relate to what we’re looking for. What the Stanrod people did is set up a vast machine-learning AI system to identify terms, including names, that have not been employed at all — by anyone — in over 75 years. Their system has supposedly now generated three or four large, detailed reports. But of course nobody has been allowed to read them because that would skew the data.”
I inquired about public fears, rampant in sociable media, that name-loss could be contagious given that the President’s entire family can no longer be named. “I think folks might be confusing contagion-borne conditions with genetically-transmitted conditions. The fact that we can still name people like Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway, who have spent large amounts of time face to face with…” Dr. Hutchins trailed off. “In any event, it’s the opinion of our board that the public doesn’t have anything to worry about. The NPHWB has received no other credible reports of name loss from any of its metrics centers, and believe me we’ve been looking.”
According to one medical expert, then, we have nothing to fear. But in this health reporter’s humble opinion, a little prophylactic worry never hurt. While we wait for the other shoe to plummet we will have to just, in the words of the venerable Samuel à Becket, “Keep going, going on (call that going, call that on).”
