Are They Kidding?

by Morgan Dash

I came across two "news" items---that is, items apparently purporting to be factually true, reported by reputable outlets--- that are causing some family dissension. Brother Chris, the family dramatist, claims that if he allowed himself to believe these items, they would be evidence that the world had now gone so far beyond the credible that the already dubious occupation of trying to make dramatic sense of this existence would be rendered futile beyond redemption. (I hope I'm not overdramatizing his position.)

Brother Theron of course believes them with all the roaring absurdity of his simultaneous love-hate relationship with humanity, not to mention the apparent laws of the universe.

I can't settle the argument---maybe you can. Here are the two items. Truth? Fiction? You decide.

1. There is a best-selling book in America called Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. It's a slim volume containing a fable which some have found revelatory, about adapting to change. The premise, apparently presented without irony, is that the reader is expected to identify with rats who run the rat race maze, but who are confounded when their expected reward (i.e.”the cheese”) is not in the same place it always had been. (As nuts as that sounds, that's at least a verifiable part of the story.)

It seems that this book has also caught on in China, where it has inspired a number of follow-ups (or "imitators" as stated in the Times Literary Supplement column that is the source for this tale) . These tomes published in the erstwhile land of Confucius include: Can I Move Your Cheese? by Chen Tong; Who Dares to Move My Cheese by Kang Yanning; Make the Cheese Yourself by Dong Huangfu; Whose Cheese Should I Move? by Wu Yizhou, and No More Cheese! by Lin Zhanxian.

The column (signed by "J.C.") concludes the item by observing that "most Chinese people have never eaten cheese."

2. This story involves the Klingon language and the United States National Security Agency. As you may or may not know, Klingons are a race of aliens invented for an episode of Star Trek some 37 years ago. Klingons were somewhat reinvented for the Star Trek motion picture series and became important in subsequent Star Trek TV series. (Worf being the most famous Klingon.) In the first Star Trek movie, a few words of a language meant to be Klingon were heard. These were invented by the ace linguist and master of voices of the Enterprise crew, James Doohan, who played Scotty. (He invented the first Vulcan language dialogue for that film as well.) When Klingons talking in their own language became more elaborate later in the film series, linguist Marc Okrand invented a Klingon vocabulary and rules for a basic language. There's a Klingon dictionary of some 2,000 words; some Shakespeare and parts of the Bible have been translated into this language, and some young fans, who probably would not be caught dead taking Russian or Spanish, learn and converse in conversational Klingon.

You may have guessed a little of where this story is going if you've recently seen the film Code Talkers or if you know that Navajos used a code based on their language--a language, like all Native languages, that the U.S. government tried long and hard to suppress and destroy---for the U.S. armed forces in World War II. The Japanese were never able to break it (although if it had only been used as it was in the Code Talkers movie-to radio back the firing coordinates for fixed enemy positions--- it would have been irrelevant. Presumably the Japanese already knew the position of their own artillery, and whether they knew that the U.S. had a fix or them or not hardly mattered, since they couldn't move them.)

So finally, here is the story: Lawrence Schoen, founder of the Klingon Language Institute, recently gave a presentation to the National Security Agency on the Klingon language, as the "government was curious about the potential for al-Qaeda operatives" to communicate using Klingon.