Person, Place or Thing?

Vashon Island

Greetings fellow seekers of the truth and
fans of THE PRESIDENT OF ME?

THIS MONTH'S OPEN HOUSE at the Black House:
Saturday January 30th 10-4.

Come see what's new in the line, find some bargains in the 
"didn't make it into the line" sample box and on 
styles that are nearly sold out stragglers...

And it's been a busy month thinking about other things 
(the Vashon Island Haiti fundraiser, for example - 
please mark your calendar: Feb 21 at the O Space!) 
so we're still not any further along with the TPOM website... 
which means you're FORCED to come visit me at the Black House. 
Darn - not!

Georgette and I await your smiling faces...

and now for this month's Zeteticus essay...

PERSON PLACE OR THING…

One of the happiest discoveries I made as a first grader was that the language I’d formed up to that point actually had a structure. Each word I’d tucked into my brain could be ordered into tidy little columns: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. It was beautiful. So logical. A perfect little package to my Germanic six-year-old mind.

And the nouns! Nouns were the nobility of this beautifully appointed world. They were so important they had categories of their own – hierarchies, really. Person - first. Place - second. Thing - third. Person, place or thing. The teacher always said it in that order, as though she were chanting: PersonPlaceorThing. To this day when we play charades and the word is a noun, the universal query is: Person, Place or Thing? (…except when my smart aleck son prepares the clues, in which case we ask: Foul Smells, Punk Fashion or Punishable Offenses?) The net effect of the noun chant was that Persons always seemed the ruler of the land, the King, in fact, followed at a distance by the lords of Place. And Things - things were the commoners of Noundom. The value of a Thing registered at the bottom of the social order.

But the noun hierarchy seems to be suffering in modern times. Human beings’ obsession with the commercial universe has created a crossover between person and thing, often making the bejeweled magnificence of person practically indistinguishable from the grubby inconsequence of thing. People seem desperate to become commodities, manic to parlay any chance at fortune and fame into a lifetime of parading as manufactured goods. “How much money am I worth?”  becomes the person’s primary definition of self in this sorry devolution. The human being, with a heart and a mind and a soul – a person – turns into a dollar sign - a thing.

Reality TV programming brings in the biggest money for networks because viewers adore watching people being transformed into things called Winners and Losers. A Loser is such a low form of thing it borders on being nothing, equivalent to the number zero. Losers are transformed from tangible thing to nonexistent thing in the flash of a voted-out-of-favor nanosecond. They’re supposed to disappear. Viewers and producers are co-conspirators in this decimation of humanity. (A notable exception would be Susan Boyle, who triumphed over her ultimate loser status with a recording that settled all questions about her talent and her humanity. Here is the miracle of a person who seems to have remained a person in spite of her brush with fame.)

Sports heroes become things not in the execution of their athletic talent but the moment they become shills for corporations.  That relationship between corporate entity and “spokesperson” (which is a thing posing as a person) is measured not in human terms but at the bottom line, explaining why corporations can with such facility wipe their little shills right off the page when they behave too much like a person – or, heaven forbid, fail like a human being.

All this comes at what cost? Each time a person becomes a commodity, isn’t it possible that we bid incremental farewell to the whole point of our humanity? And at what point will our humanity have so devolved that personhood is reduced to the level of inanimate object? Will the day arrive when teachers teach that nouns consist solely of places and things?

Do we recognize the line across which someone steps when they go from being a person to a thing? How many times in our own lives have we tiptoed up to or across the line just to be able to claim we are some thing?

Shall we look in the mirror? What do we see? Person, Place or Thing?

Copyright 2010 Rebecca J. Wittman


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*The President of Me and Zeteticus are protected trademarks. Zeteticus comes from old Latin, and means "Seeker of the Truth"