About six years ago I was reading Daily Kos—in blog terms, that's akin to me saying "back when I was reading the latest papyrus scrolls"—and something Markos wrote inspired me to post a comment. I don't remember what it was, but about the third or forth time I commented, he took my comment—about the politics of the Arab-American community in the Detroit area—and added it to his post about a poll of Arab-American voters.
That first time I posted a comment, I put no thought in to my moniker. I used my initials and my state. The site was barely known in the spring of 2003, and I certainly had no idea that within a few months I'd be a contributing editor to the site, and that it would be a major player in progressive media and politics.
Had I realized back in the spring of 2003 that my moniker would receive such visibility, I would have put some effort in to picking something cool. As Markos mentioned when he announced the decision of some of us contributing editors to begin posting under our own names, Meteor Blades, Plutonium Page and Hunter are great monikers. But DHinMI? Not so much.
Besides, for a few years I've had my name and bio on the About page. I could have ditched the pseudonym, but I chose not to, partly out of my conviction that pseudonyms have an honorable and virtuous place in discourse, and that so-called "real names," so revered by the gatekeepers in the media and elite opinion, are far less valuable than the the gatekeepers want us—and themselves—to believe. Pseudonyms have enriched political discourse and provided outlets for writers whose voices would otherwise be silent. And using a so-called "real name" never prevented charlatans and the deluded from fooling readers who want to believe in the authenticity of both a person and the stories they tell.
Pseudonyms have long served writers whose voice would be otherwise suppressed or who, because of professional or political constraints, would not have been able to bring their thoughts to the public. Until the 20th century women would often have to use a pseudonym to ensure their works would be read, or even published. Popular writers such as Stephen King and Anne Rice have used pseudonyms, especially for fiction outside their normal genres. Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote two books under a female pseudonym to highlight the difficulty unknown writers have in garnering an audience. Authors of erotica often use a pseudonym. Revolutionaries and political agitators often use pseudonyms. And people have long used pen names and pseudonyms to avoid using their foreign-sounding names.
Other writers have used pseudonyms to separate their professional life from their published works. David Cornwell, an agent in the British intelligence services MI-5 and later MI-6 wrote three novels under a pseudonym. After the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carre' left MI-6 to devote himself full time to writing. A few years ago the New Yorker ran a terrific series of articles by a NYC police officer writing under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey. When no longer a beat cop, the writer eventually "came out" as Edward Conlon, author of the memoir Blue Blood and now a detective with the NYPD.
As anyone with even a smidgen of knowledge American history can tell you, our most famous pseudonym is Publius, the name used by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay for The Federalist Papers, their articles published in newspapers urging adoption of the Constitution. The Anti-Federalists, too, used pseudonyms from Roman history such as Cato and Brutus. In the eighteenth century using pseudonyms was widely accepted in public political discourse. Among other virtues, it helps focus attention on the argument instead of the person advancing it.
Pseudonymous writing can, of course, lead to abuses. A few years ago I was managing a Congressional campaign in New Hampshire when the bloggers at three separate blogs (which have since been merged in to Blue Hampshire) figured out that a commenter urging readers to support Democrats in other states was really a staffer for the Republican incumbent we were trying to beat. (That case is used as an example in the Wikipedia entry for concern trolls.) Certainly at DKos we have to ferret out a decent number of sock puppet and other miscreants who hide behind pseudonyms.
Pseudonyms are also used for more dubious reasons. It's hard to argue that anything other than his privileged position in the Washington press corps and unquestioned access to inside sources with the Clinton administration were put at risk when Joe Klein published his loose roman a clef novel Primary Colors under the pseudonym "Anonymous." And it can sometimes be harder to assess public and historical figures because their writings include lesser-known works published under a pseudonym. The writer of alchemical works who published as Jeova sanctus unus would probably deserve to be little more than a historical oddity if his real name wasn't Isaac Newton (who himself pulled a John Lott/Mary Rosh and wrote letters under fictitious names vouching that he was the inventor of calculus).
The Klein case probably contributed to the frenzy of activity trying to figure out the identity of a blogger who back in 2003 seemed to know everything. "Is it Sidney Bluenthal? It just HAS to be Sidney Blumenthal," thought a lot of people. But no. The guy blogging as atrios was an academic economist with a temporary appointment who wasn't a mouthpiece for DC insiders, but rather a guy who had a computer, internet access, read a lot and had a terrific wit and an eye for hypocrisy and cant.
The atrios situation should probably have told some of the hide-bound and insecure journalistic protectors of decency and promoters of "transparency" that their fevered beliefs about the identities of these new pseudonymous bloggers were probably crazy. Like most people who write comments on political blogs, the pseudonymous bloggers—who are also sometimes anonymous; the two are not the same—were often people without any particular inside access, but simply informed readers who wrote well and could attract an audience.
But what about the other side of the equation, the supposed superiority of using "real names?" Did having to write under their real names prevent Jayson Blair or Ben Domenech from being plagiarizers? Steven Glass from making stuff up with no connection to reality and passing it off as reportage? In fact, wasn't it more likely that because they wrote under their given names that their work wasn't scrutinized?
There's been no shortage of scams perpetrated by people writing under so-called "real names." Sometimes the frauds include fake names, like supposed LA gang girl Margaret B. Jones, who in fact was a privileged girl from the upscale 'burbs who had made it all up. But there are plenty of scams done under a person's actual name. James Frey's Million Little Pieces, referred to some as a Million Little Fabrications. There's Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir about life as a Jewish child in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, when in fact he spent the war in comfort in Switzerland. There's Jerzy Koskinski, author of Being There, whose Painted Bird was supposed to be about his life as a Jewish child separated from his parents and wandering alone among a sadistic Polish peasantry during the Holocaust, but Kosinski spent the war with his mother, hidden and in relative comfort; surely it was a perilous existence, but if you read The Painted Bird as I did, thinking it was mostly factual as Kosinski had claimed, you know the difference.
In a couple cases, the frauds were exposed by pseudonymous commenters and diarists at Daily Kos and other blogs. Domenech's plagiarism was exposed in a diary at Daily Kos. Our own SusanG was one of several Kossacks who dug up significant chunks of lies that led to the revelation that the White House was allowing a rightwing hack and male prostitute posing as "Jeff Gannon" in to the White House's daily press briefings, allowing him to ask puffball questions, and possibly playing a role in the outing of Valerie Plame.
Then there's the hilarious case known as the Sokal Affair. Physicist Alan Sokal decided to see if he could get complete nonsense published in a prominent academic journal dedicated to deconstructionism.
Sokal produced a paper that argued that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that Rupert Sheldrake's New Age concept of the "morphogenetic field" could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. It concludes that, since "physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct", a "liberatory science" and "emancipatory mathematics" must be developed that spurn "the elite caste canon of 'high science'" for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project".
Footnotes contain more obvious (to mathematicians) jokes, such as one that comments:
Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and 'pro-choice', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by theaxiom of choice.
Sokal submitted the paper to the leading journal Social Text. They were collecting papers for an upcoming issue dedicated to the science wars, and his was the only article submitted by a "real scientist". The editors had a number of concerns about the quality of the writing, and requested changes which Sokal refused. They decided to publish it anyway, considering Sokal to be an example of a "difficult, uncooperative author," noting these were "well known to journal editors". The Science Wars issue was published in May 1996.
After publication, Sokal revealed it was a prank.
Maybe the greatest example, however, of a case where a "real name" did nothing to prevent intellectual fraud and an author taking advantage of an uncritical readership was the bizarre case of Forrest Carter. The author of The Outlaw Josey Wales, which Clint Eastwood made in to the film of the same name, in 1976 Carter published The Education of Little Tree. Written for young readers, it's the story of a boy born during the Great Depression who at five years old is turned over by his parents to be raised by his Cherokee grandparents. Little Tree is taught to be in touch with nature. Readers loved it. For years it sold well, leading in 1991 to it being named the American Bookseller's Book of the Year. The author, who had died in 1979, was lauded for his sensitivity and his authentic voice as a true representative of a Cherokee spirit.
At that point, Emory University historian Dan Carter, the biographer of George Wallace, stepped in with an op-ed in the New York Times about Little Tree author Forrest Carter:
His real name was Asa (Ace) Earl Carter. We share a common Southern heritage and he may be a distant relation of mine. Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama: "Segregation now . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever."
He even organized a paramilitary unit of about 100 men that he called the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. Among its acts, these white-sheeted sociopaths assaulted Nat (King) Cole during a concert in Birmingham in 1956. In 1957, the group, without Mr. Carter present, castrated a black man they chose at random in a Birmingham suburb as a warning to "uppity" Alabama blacks.
His agent and publishers have described Mr. Carter as a self-taught writer. Indeed he was. For almost 30 years he honed his skills by spewing out racist and anti-Semitic pamphlets. In 1970 he wrote that all N.A.A.C.P. presidents "have been Jews . . . the same gang who financed the Russian Communist Revolution with millions out of New York City."
The same year, in a disquisition on the prospect of black policemen, he wrote: "SOON, you can expect your wife or daughter to be pulled over to the side of the road by one of these Ubangi or Watusi tribesman wearing the badge of Anglo-Saxon law enforcement and toting a gun . . . but [ he will be ] as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in the jungle."
Just as pseudonyms are not inherently an indication that the author is concealing something relevant to the argument or information she is conveying, so-called "real names" are not proof that the author is not engaging in concealment, plagiarism, dishonesty or outright fraud about their actual identity.
Last night someone in an open thread flagged this whinefest titled "death by moron" by a columnist bemoaning comments from anonymous people using a pseudonym. His solution to clean up the comment threads was to require that anyone
who wishes to post a public comment must also post his/her real name, an actual email address, maybe even a nice little headshot…. Hey, writers and journalists have been doing it for years, posting our names and email addresses and even photos for the entire world to see. If Web 2.0 means we're now all in this public sphere together, shouldn't I know exactly who you are, too? Shouldn't everyone?
No, everyone shouldn't. I don't want to deny myself and others the opportunity to hear voices that would otherwise be silenced if we required "real names." Besides, how do we know the "real name" tell us what we think they do?
