Kearny

1 Everywhere Close to Freeways
We tend to take place names for granted. This is what I tell my students. Typically we go about our business as if place names are something we want to know for the sake of familiarity but don’t need or even want to think too much about.
Say, for instance, that about fifteen minutes ago I picked you up at San Diego International Airport. You’re still shaking from enduring the pilot’s descent right in between two downtown skyscrapers in order to drop the plane onto the Lindbergh Field runway like a Navy pilot would a jet onto the deck of aircraft carrier. When the plane hopped and skipped but to a crash-free landing, you were relieved—and also curious because it’s your first time in America’s Finest City. From watching tv, you associate San Diego with the conviviality of people of all stripes and with the military. You won’t be disappointed. We’re heading up to my house in the Escondido end of the San Pasqual Valley, driving north on the 163 toward the 15, when you wave your hand in the general direction of the car’s windshield, first to the east and then to the west, gesturing toward a big broad flat-topped area spanning both sides of the freeway and covered in all manner of civilization and lack thereof: drive-thru and sit down restaurants, car dealerships with huge American flags hoisted way up high on aluminum poles, motels, auto repair shops, billboards, office parks, paint and hardware stores, gas station/convenience/liquor stores, churches, choice-looking palms and some washed-out eucalyptuses, building supply warehouses, gentlemen’s clubs, a fire-and-ambulance station, the outline and dinky planes of a little airport, incomplete on-and-off ramp construction and thus skip loaders, trencher backhoes, sandbags, dirt, weeds, Don’s Johns, and piles of gravel. You ask me, “What’s this place?” I say, “It’s Kearny Mesa,” and you’re satisfied—even though you shouldn’t be. The mesa part of it is clear enough. After all you are pointing to a big broad flat-topped area, and you know your topography. But what about your toponymy? Shouldn’t you ask me who or what a Kearny is? And in any case shouldn’t I try to tell you—give you at least the short account of why this mesa is named Kearny and why so much right here is named Kearny-this and Kearny-that?
I offer this example because of the history of my own tendencies. Even though I’m a teacher of writing—whose very occupation, after all, is to regard language with awe and respect—and have lived most of my life in, around, and near this place named Kearny Mesa, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I became really interested in the name Kearny and all that it betokens. At one point, created by the tapering ends of oh-so-many existential projections, I found myself wanting to know how Kearny came to mean so much to me and to others. I began pursuing Kearny, raising all kinds of questions about the eponym and the namesakes. I came to recognize how much the name Kearny had to teach me about the world I had made my place in and about language as we experience it, about the way we live our lives in names and names live their lives in us—and about the way we can grow along with names if we do our part.
This Kearny Mesa I’m speaking of, which is but one of the many beneficiaries all over the United States of the place name Kearny, is right in the heart of San Diego. To the east of Kearny Mesa is Serra Mesa and then Murphy Canyon, which is part of Mission Valley with the San Diego River, such as it is, running through it—once home to many Native American tribes of the Kumeyaay band (Bradley 16) and now home to shopping malls, apartment homes, Qualcomm Stadium, and homeless encampments. To the west of Kearny Mesa is Clairemont Mesa, San Diego’s largest post-World War II subdivision, tens of thousands of mostly single-family homes in tracts gliding down Bay Park and Bay Ho to Mission Bay. To the south is Linda Vista—originally known as Defense Housing Project Number 4002 when in 1941 it spawned 3000 houses in 200 days for the families of workers in the war effort (Engstrand 3-4). Linda Vista concludes in Old Town, home of the Presidio, a military outpost of Spanish California, founded by Gaspar de Portola’ in 1769. And on the northern boundary of Kearny Mesa is the huge Miramar Marine Air Station, which used to be named Camp Kearny, and the relatively new Miramar National Cemetery, located on the station’s northwest corner. Businesses in Kearny Mesa like to say on tv commercials that the community is “freeway close to everywhere,” but actually Kearny Mesa is everywhere close to freeways. Not only are the 163, the 15, and the 805 right there, but the 52 is too, with the 8 not too much further south and the 5 not too much further west. Like cramped communities everywhere, Kearny Mesa used to be wide open space, but now it's got some of everything: industrial, commercial, corporate, governmental, medical, educational, and retail establishments.
Kearny Mesa does have a few residential neighborhoods too, so when I hear or read Kearny, I think about the name not only as a denotation but also and more profoundly as a connotation. Kearny summons for me thoughts and feelings about my family’s history there. My older son was born in Kearny Mesa. My wife and I married there. My oldest brother launched from there. My older brother had a short life of trouble mostly there. And my mom and younger brother still live there—and my dad did too, until he died two years ago at the age of ninety-three. I think of so much else too, all kinds of personal and cultural history experienced in Kearny Mesa and in Kearny. Actually I should say that all these phenomena are incipient, not always present in the foreground of my mind but definitely in its depth and on its edges. If you’re not interested, a place name like Kearny is just a name. If you are interested, all these avenues will become available to you. The public histories reside and are open to anyone. But the personal histories are your very own to collect, connect, and configure. I know that for me Kearny points in all directions to the world—that Kearny opens onto the whole of all I’ve known and felt.
My dad’s memorial plaque is on one of the columbarium walls at the Miramar National Cemetery. If you’re standing at the cemetery and look south onto still undeveloped areas of Kearny Mesa you can see its landscape as it was when my family first moved there in 1964. The Navy had transferred my dad from Norfolk, Virginia, to San Diego and specifically to Submarine Flotilla One at Ballast Point on the tip of Point Loma—maybe a dozen miles south of Kearny Mesa—as the Vietnam War was getting underway. So I first saw Kearny Mesa when I was around eight years old and getting ready for the third grade. My impression was, "We've moved to Bedrock. We're the Flintstones!" The tract was pretty new—only about four years old. And there was still a lot of open space on the mesa. In fact, beginning right next to our house and extending some distance north was an expanse of clay-impaired ground, rocks, chaparral, sticker bushes, cacti and other succulents, home to lizards, horned toads, and skinks, and a few streams of water, temporary home to tadpoles. Following my dad’s lead, we used to call the barren field beside our house “the empty lot.” At first I resisted the landscape. The Norfolk we’d moved from was swampy and densely green. Norfolk seemed to me all filled in and sort of omnipresent and even oppressive—not just in its clunky brick buildings but in the dense flora and fauna too. Originally to me Kearny Mesa seemed to be about absence. And that emptiness stretched out in all directions except for parts of the south and the west, where there were houses and businesses and schools and so on extending all the way to Mission Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Later, when I wasn’t paying so much attention, Kearny Mesa got cluttered. But already at the time I knew all that scrub and stucco and cinderblock as Kearny.
The streets of this tract we’d moved into—this Vista Mesa Annex, as it turns out—had a crazy kind of naming act going on that gave a little kid a lot to wonder about. Crazy odonyms. We lived on Ashford, which is tame enough and sort of British-sounding, like it would’ve worked in Norfolk. But the elementary school I went to for a few years was on a street named Bagdad. Yes, like the city in Mesopotamia, but without the “h” of Baghdad. There were a few other street names like this—names almost referential in a way that made you wonder why but with seemingly a letter or two missing or changed, like Antiem instead of Antietam. I actually thought about all this back then because in that era when you were little you moved about on your feet or on your bicycle and had the opportunity to ponder street names. I specifically wondered about Antiem because back East I’d heard the name Antietam. Antietam was a big deal in the military history and American mythology the schools taught children—the Civil War site of the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. (In my second grade class in Norfolk, Mrs. Goldman taught us all she could about the Civil War—even cracked open the subject by having us act out the Lincoln/Douglas debates!) And then there were streets named in the spirit of that spacey age—named seemingly by the writing team of The Jetsons—like Cosmo and Blix. Blix is off Armstrong. When I was little, I was confused by the coincidence that one of the main streets in the neighborhood was named Armstrong, while there was also a girl in my class named Carol Armstrong whose family lived on Armstrong. Could it be more than coincidence? Was her family so established here that it was in charge of naming? Anyway, why would you name a street Blix? And it couldn’t have been just one person who named the streets in this neighborhood because the dots didn’t connect in the thematic way that an individual usually feels compelled to provide. For instance, at one point the two streets intersecting were Apollo and Beagle. No way those touching names appeared to be coming out of one mind. When you’re little you try to make something consistent of the street names in your neighborhood. Your folks may be long over that. It happens. They’ve experienced, they’ve used so many place names. Overfamiliarity breeds neglect. If they consider these names at all they consider them as arbitrary at best—some suburban planners at a municipal government meeting either playing free association games or giving nods to relatives—and denotations in the simplest sense of the term. But the children try to take the names and make a coherent world out of them—a world they can make a place for themselves in.
Our tract was part of a massive suburban expansion in Kearny Mesa and Clairemont Mesa—in part to provide housing for the workers at General Dynamics, which at the time was the nation’s prime contractor for everything from the design to launch of Atlas and Centaur missiles. (I know this now.) In its heyday, the General Dynamics compound spanned 232 acres and boasted almost 47,000 employees—easily the largest private employer in the county. San Diego’s population at the time was only in the 300,000s. Today, for example, the largest private employer in the county of over three million people is Qualcomm, with a little over 13,000 workers. General Dynamics, says journalist Tony Perry in a Los Angeles Times piece about the rise and fall of the aerospace industry in Southern California in the years after World War II, “produce[d] the rocketry to put America in space and the missiles to keep American enemies at bay.” Perry adds that “tens of thousands of middle-class families enjoyed its many benefits and rallied proudly under its banner of patriotism and technological know-how”—and the influence and opulence that came with it. One of these many benefits was the twenty-seven acre Missile Park, with its baseball fields, picnic tables, tennis courts, meeting rooms, miniature train, carousel, and so on—including the 80-foot Atlas 2E intercontinental ballistic missile standing upright at its entry. This park was sort of the hub of these families’ social lives. When General Dynamics eventually closed, its divisions pieced out to various corporations all over the country, and despite the efforts of local politicians and save-the-park groups, Missile Park, like the rest of the parcel, was replaced by a “mixed-use” complex. So now, thirty years later, what appears on the former site is San Diego Spectrum Center with corporate offices for Northrup Grumman, Sharp Healthcare, two private universities, hotels and motels, fine restaurants, and two great odonyms: Tech Way and Lightwave Avenue. And right outside Spectrum Center is the enormous Solar Turbines complex. Solar names its machines after rockets of the past: Saturn, Centaur, Mercury, Taurus, Mars, and Titan!
Trust me. In Kearny Mesa you can live inside the fort of American military protection and the font of American military aggression for decades without any idea that you are—even though the place and street names are always trying to apprise you of that fact. I mean, there are even streets named Armory, Armour, and Artillery. You can even present yourself to yourself and to the world as a pacifist. But none of us, even pacifists, would want the U.S. to be anything less than the number one military power in the world! This want is the bind—the source of our predicament. Well, when I was little Kearny Mesa did look like The Flintstones to me—but with a rocket on its skyline. So it looked like The Jetsons too. I’m not sure whether the image was pre-historical or post-apocalyptic, but these were the days right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so everyone was a little edgy and into Cold War ideology. (There was a street named Batista, like the dictator of Cuba who was overthrown by Castro.) It’s clear to me now that the conquest of others was implicit in these street names. But at the time you just constructed an image of the world cued by names of thoroughfares like Atlas, Raytheon, Mercury, Engineer, and Convoy. What’s this world trying to tell you? That you’re living in some kind of place that aspires to space—that aspires to just rocket out of this one? But the ground is covered with rocks and clay-dirt! At the time you didn’t know the words or concepts “transcendence” and”immanence,” but that was the struggle being pantomimed in Kearny Mesa. In the United States we’re all more or less complicit with the worldwide exercise of American power because we all more or less benefit from it. Growing up in Kearny Mesa in the shade of the General Dynamics plant and in the housing tract built for its employees, you felt your complicity in the power, but when you were little, you thought of your role, like Perry says, as a rooter for “patriotism and technological know-how.” And it was lost on you that these rockets were going to be used as weapons. You understood their roles in national glory, in space advancement, in asserting the primacy of humanity (or a certain version of humanity)—but you didn’t think of their role in killing people whose only fault was to be born in a land that the United States had named “enemy.”
Recently I read the novel The Sympathizer and was reminded by author Viet Thanh Nguyen that many of the Vietnamese people who settled in Kearny Mesa in the late 1970s after the end of the Vietnam (or was it American?) War and opened shops and restaurants along Convoy Street entered this country as refugees through Camp Pendleton, the huge Marine base just north of San Diego. These Vietnamese people, as Nguyen says, came “here only because the United States fought a war that killed three million of [their] countrymen (not counting over two million others who died in neighboring Laos and Cambodia)” (392). A year before Saigon fell in 1975 I graduated from Kearny High School alongside Filipino students who were there, as Nguyen explains, “largely because of the Philippine-American War, which killed more than 200,000,” and alongside Korean students there “because of a chain of events set off by a war that killed over two million” (392). Ten years before Vietnamese refugees began arriving in San Diego by way of Camp Pendleton, back in the mid-1960s when I was a student at Ross Elementary on Bagdad Street, we had Japanese-American students at the school who we treated with condescension and bemusement because, after all, America’s defeat of Japan had occurred only twenty years earlier and now the Japanese were lampooned in popular culture (like in the tv show McHale’s Navy) and in consumerism (as in “Jap” products, meaning at the time really cheap in quality). We knew nothing about the Japanese internment camps of World War II, only about five hours drive from San Diego. Nguyen concludes,
We can argue about the causes for these wars and the apportioning of blame, but the fact is that war begins, and ends, over here, with the support of citizens for the war machine, with the arrival of frightened refugees fleeing wars we have instigated. Telling these kinds of stories, or learning to read, see, and hear family stories as war stories, is an important way to treat the disorder of our military-industrial complex. For rather than being disturbed by the idea that war is hell, this complex thrives on it.” (392)
The story of Kearny is a war story. My family’s is a Kearny story. We reside in names just as surely as we reside in homes and neighborhoods, in communities and on their streets. So the very name Kearny—what kind of namescape does it give us to traverse? And how does it shape who we are and become?

2 From Cabrillo to Kearny
Linguists and semioticians—that is, scholars of language and of meaning-making—call a name a “sign.” And a name is just one of countless kinds of sign. A successful sign conjoins three necessary elements: (1) a “signifier” (the sound-image of the name: Kearny [Kur-nee], with that hard-hitting “k” and a shape something like the map of the United States), (2) a “signified” (the subject matter of the name: in fact, all that Kearny potentially betokens), and (3) an “interpreter” (someone or something who understands that the image-sound Kearny refers to the subject matter of Kearny—someone or something like me and now you too). To produce a sign, the interpreter merges the signifier and the signified so that the signifier becomes, in a sense, transformed by the signified, and the signified by the signifier. It’s the magical exchange whereby this becomes that. Just like everyone else I don’t remember the a-ha moment when I realized how signs in general work—when I recognized that the expanse of asphalt cars drive on is the street. But I do remember when I began assuming that proper names worked more magically than common names—when I began assuming that proper names, especially names of places and streets, surely conferred the essence of the place or street. It was when we moved to San Diego from Norfolk, Virginia, and everything was so unfamiliar to me that I fixated on San Diego’s difference.
In Virginia, I took in all of these British colonial names, and they defined for me a closed world—another kind of fort. I could nowhere near have articulated it at the time, but those names—Cornwallis, Yorktown, Washington, Hampton, and Princess Anne—the very names brought comfort to a child like me, made me feel as if it all made sense, all the way from Jamestown on down. These names were ensconced in American Revolutionary mythology—in a particular conception of history and national identity: a colonial rebellion against a repressive “mother” country, which welled into a democratic way-of-being that was surely divinely inspired and thus had to be spread to others whether they wanted it or not. They suggested to me then that heroic people had made heroic decisions. (While at this point in my life “heroic decisions” means something entirely different.) So when we then moved to San Diego and the names all changed, and my attitudes toward the names changed, well, things got different. The Spanish place names of San Diego, like Balboa, Coronado, and de Portola’ seemed as dissimilar as could be from the English place names of Norfolk. And the mythology they traced wasn’t clear to me. Neither were the heroic decisions.
The Spanish names began in the middle of 1542 when, at the behest of the Viceroy of Mexico, one Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo led a naval expedition of galleons around the tip of what is now Baja California and up the west coast. Despite their big sounding name, these galleons were actually tiny ships—each displacing only “200 toneladas” (qtd. in Rowe). In late September or early October of 1542, Cabrillo’s group of three ships—its flagship was Cabrillo’s galleon the San Salvador—sailed into San Diego Bay and came ashore at what is now Ballast Point, where 422 years later my dad was stationed on submarine tenders. Of course, all of these names—Baja California, San Diego, Ballast Point, and so on—were coined much later. Initially Cabrillo named the place San Miguel in honor of the saint whose feast day was imminent. San Diego didn’t acquire its name until years later when it was named “after San Diego Bay, which had been rechristened by Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602, in honor of the Franciscan, San Diego de Alcala de Henares, whose name was borne by his flagship” (“How”). Anyway, Cabrillo and crew continued north and got as far as the Russian River before turning back. Somehow they missed San Francisco Bay. On the way back when they returned to Catalina Island they got into skirmishes with the natives—who Cabrillo’s group had found friendly for the most part throughout their trip. Cabrillo was trying to go ashore to support his men when he stepped on a rocky ledge and splintered his shin. Despite being attended to by his physician, Cabrillo developed gangrene and died on January 3, 1543. His men continued back to Mexico. At the time Cabrillo’s voyage was regarded as a failure: Cabrillo hadn’t made any money, hadn’t made any trading partners, and hadn’t established any settlements. In fact, information about the voyage in the form of logs and maps wouldn’t even be in circulation in Spain for another sixteen years. Albert Greenstein, writing for The Historical Society of Southern California, expresses our communal astonishment that “not until 1769 did Spain send soldiers, missionaries and settlers to Alta California to underscore the claims made by Cabrillo some 227 years earlier.” Nevertheless, as Greenstein emphasizes, “the voyage [did mark] the beginning of recorded history in the Western United States”—in other words, the history of the imprinting of European names on what would become the Western United States.
Just as conquest is implicit in some of the street names of Kearny Mesa, conquest was implicit in the Spanish names the conquerors branded on the land. In fact, Martin Lienhard, in “Writing and Power in the Conquest of America,” argues that the conquistadors had a relatively easy time subduing the indigenous people precisely because the Spanish had a written language, maps, and theological and political texts—the Bible and Spanish law—in which to proclaim and solidify their dominance. This written language and the texts it allowed for empowered the “toponyms”—the place names—that the Spanish established. By renaming the landscape to assert their own desires, plans, values, and beliefs, the Spanish were able to inscribe on the land entire systems of ideas, relationships, and roles described in their religious/political writings. Lienhard explains, in a scholarly yet incredulous voice,
The exploratory, prospective, and dominating nature of European scriptural practice provided a model for the occupation of a new territory. It is clear from a whole series of colonial practices that the Europeans proceeded as if they wanted to record their power on all the possible surfaces of the New World. European power was engraved (not just metaphorically!) on the landscape through the Christianization of the indigenous toponymy. In his first journal entries, Columbus, with a stroke of a pen, transformed the toponymy of the Antilles: "this [island] of San Salvador" (October 14), "which [island] I named Santa Maria de la Concepcion" (October 15), "which I named Fernandina" (October 15), "which I named Isabela" (October 19). It is easy to see that this new toponymy represented the conquerors' dual religious-political power. The former toponymies continued to exist, of course, in the collective memory and, in Mesoamerica, in the codices, but they lacked legal value because the exclusive reference for the new legal order established by the conquest and introduced by European power was writing [and the written name]. (80)
The Spanish exploited one of the many functions of place naming: to produce places invested with cultural meaning and social power by inventing new spaces of colonial possession. Often this naming occurred when the conquerors decided that some age-old area was new—that they had “discovered” it or “developed” it. So what was once in the Kumeyaay era Cosoy and Jamio (Bradley 12) became in the Spanish era the northern part of the area named Linda Vista (Martin 250) and now in the American era is Kearny Mesa. Here is a particularly interesting and telling piece of lore: I can’t think of any streets in Kearny Mesa that have Indian names. Local newspaper columnist Bill Swank points out that one mesa to the west, “Many of the oldest streets in Clairemont have Indian names [like Algonquin, Huron, Iroquois, and Ute]. Surprisingly, none of these streets are named for San Diego County tribes—for example, Cahuilla, Cupeno, Diegueno, Iipay, Inaja, Kumeyaay, Luiseno, Pala, Pauma, Rincon, Sycuan, or Viejas.” Apparently the namers preferred the monikers of mythic Indians from far away to those of the actual Indians who once called their own what is now San Diego. Or maybe the namers didn’t know their local history. Or maybe the namers were showing the local tribes a special gesture of disrespect. (Here’s a subject for another discussion: What is the new dominant culture saying to the previous dominant culture when the new rejects big parts of the previous but nevertheless retains many of its names? Kearny Mesa, Clairemont Mesa, Scripps Ranch—these are all relatively new names marking specific kinds of American conquest: military, ideological, and economic. But the newcomers kept, for instance, La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, and even San Diego, of course. Beyond conquering, beyond the oily sentimentality and nostalgia, what’s the message here?)
Just as in the 1500s through the early 1800s Spanish names supplanted existing indigenous names, following the Mexican-American War in the 1840s and the United States’ land grab, American names—names given by the new conquistadors—came to supplant the Spanish names. And it is so appropriate that Kearny Mesa is named for the conqueror who wrested the region away from the Mexicans, who had wrested it away from the Spanish, who had wrested it away from the Indians! Kearny Mesa is named for the former Camp Kearny, a U.S. military base that operated in the area from 1917 to 1946 and eventually became today’s Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. In turn, Camp Kearny had been named for Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny, an American leader in the Mexican-American War who also served as a military governor of California. Kearny, it turns out, was a major participant in American history. Historians who are cheerleaders for the United States’ conquests laud Kearny’s achievements: the “father” of our cavalry system, a Western “explorer” of note, the “builder” of more frontier posts than any contemporary, the “protector” from Indian attack of a long frontier, the man whose “statesmanship” brought law and order to New Mexico, and who “wisely” served as the military governor of New Mexico, California, Veracruz, and Mexico City (Robinson). Of course, for the historians who consider the perspective of the people already on the ground when Kearny came along, the general’s legacy takes on a different character. Where the historians of transcendence see progress, these historians of immanence see barbarism. Where the transcendental historian sees the rocket, the immanental historian sees the cemeteries (Benjamin 257-258). And we measure life from both of these perspectives—from both the arc of the rocket and the number of gravestones in the cemetery.
It’s not remarkable to me that San Diegans named a district after a military figure. It’s remarkable to me that most locals know nothing about the guy. It’s remarkable to me that we can be deeply influenced by a place name that we are in fact helping to grow as a sign and more specifically as a symbol without knowing anything about the source. So if the goal of the namers was to commemorate the one and only Stephen Watts Kearny, it isn’t working. (However and nevertheless, what is working is all-involved’s investing Kearny with ideological meaning and political significance.) Most San Diegans I talk to today—and certainly the Kearny Mesans I met growing up—have no idea who Kearny was. Even in the early 1970s when I attended Kearny High School among many precocious and perspicacious students, no one ever remarked on Kearny himself. Even when I took Mr. Albertson’s splendid American history class in eleventh grade, Kearny’s name never came up. Instead we associated Kearny with Komets and the color maroon and athletic and, yes, believe it or not, even academic prowess. We associated Kearny with winners. Could it be that Kearny himself never came up because history remembers him as sort of a loser?
Again, a big part of this remarkability to me is the fact that it was only a few years ago that I became particularly interested in who Kearny was. And the source of my interest was not only a sense of remiss for all those years of living in and near Kearny Mesa and never asking the question but also because I learned that the “most tragic episode of Kearny’s life,” as the historians invariably say (Clarke 159), transpired only a few miles away from where I now live in the San Pasqual Valley, thirty miles or so north of Kearny Mesa. Here’s the generally agreed upon historical account:
Shortly after the United States declared war on Mexico in May 1846, Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny was tasked with conquering Mexico's northern provinces, New Mexico and California. While Kearny demonstrated his considerable gift for administrative command with his acquisition of the New Mexican territory, he faced a more difficult task in California. Expecting a show of force from the Mexican Californios, Kearny set out west from New Mexico. Upon reaching California, Kearny was intercepted by Kit Carson and his men, informing Kearny that the territory had been taken by American settlers in the Bear Flag Revolt. Kearny sent two hundred of his men back to New Mexico with the news and continued forward with one-third of his force. Unfortunately, the success of the revolt had been exaggerated and, before reaching their destination, Kearny and his men encountered a group of Californios intent on keeping more U.S. troops out of their homeland. (Fort Rosecrans)
There General Kearny and his Army dragoons, who had begun their trek at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, fought the Battle of San Pasqual against General Andres Pico’s Californios, the descendents of Spanish ancestry who lived in the region now known as California. After the battle, Pico’s troops besieged Kearny’s troops for several days before support arrived from San Diego. So General Kearny himself left his most dramatic footprints on San Diego mostly in the southeastern corner of Escondido, where, depending on your perspective, he and his dragoons either lost or won an important battle in the Mexican-American War. For the record, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, Kearny would claim he won because eventually the Californios retreated, but the Californios claimed they won because Kearny’s losses were much greater. Absolutely you can say that the influences and interests represented by both Kearny’s and Pico’s commands are still much in evidence here—and of course so much more than anyone at the time could have even intended. In fact, to an extraterrestrial walking the streets of Escondido it wouldn’t be readily apparent which side had won the Mexican-American War—one of the features of the area I find most delightful. I understand that the same is true, but in reverse victory, of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Today walking the streets of the former Saigon, fully tricked out in the signs of American consumerism, the extraterrestrial would be unsure who had won the Vietnamese-American War. Surely this outcome should inform any philosophy of military history! In any event, the record shows pretty unambiguously that Kearny’s troops suffered grievous fatalities and casualties next to what is now The San Diego Zoo Safari Park and stopped the bleeding only once they got to Mule Hill, which is next to what is now a Westfield mall named North County Fair. According to historian Donna Bradley, who must be among those who declare Kearny the winner, “Kearney [as the general’s name was spelled at the time] would have lost the battle except for Kumeyaay help. An Indian led Kit Carson and Lt. Edward Beale through enemy lines to Commodore Stockton in San Diego so 250 reinforcements could return to complete the confrontation with Andres Pico, thereby maintaining the lands from the Mexican Californios or rancho owners” (8). In other words, Kit Carson, with the help of a local to whose people many promises had been made, snuck away down to San Diego, where he stirred the support of Commodore Stockton, who sent a combined force of sailors and marines to return to the scene and disperse the Californios. Carson had a pretty checkered career, but a whole lot of stuff in California is named after him, including the gorgeous recreational park next to North County Fair there in Escondido and a city in Los Angeles County where the erstwhile San Diego Chargers just moved. The remnants of Kearny’s bedraggled troops limped down to San Diego, established a camp at what is now Miramar—the camp that would later be named for Kearny—which abutted a mesa that also would later be named for Kearny. All of Kearny’s activity led to the Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the fighting of the Mexican-American War in Alta California and led to the establishment of California as one of these United States just ten years before the beginning of the American Civil War.

3 Three Theories of Language
As bewildering as it now is to me that American History classes at Kearny High School didn’t teach who Kearny was, it’s even more bewildering to me that we don’t require high school students to take a class in what language is—a course of study that would necessarily have to involve the naming act and, one hopes, toponymy and odonymy. There is no requisite class on linguistics, the scientific study of spoken and written language, or on semiotics, the scientific study of meaning-making in signs. In the broad sense that many linguists and semioticians—and especially the intellectual descendents of Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”)—use the term, a sign, in Peirce’s formulation, “’is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, it creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’ (qtd. in Eco 1461). So not only are words signs, but so too are missile replicas, flags, billboards, libraries—and even entire theories. But words are handy examples of signs. And names are special kinds of signs, special kinds of words, especially proper names, and most especially place names. Any given sign is always in relation to whole systems of signs. That’s one reason I say that Kearny opens onto whole worlds. I see Kearny on a road sign, and I may host the sights, sounds, smells, and significance of the sour-milk-funk coming out of a lunchbox thermos, the handball courts at Montgomery Junior High, the epaulettes on my dad’s uniform jackets and the sword he used to wear to special Navy occasions, the basketball courts at the Rec Center, the civil defense siren on the light pole at the Mayfair market that sounded every Monday at noon, Orton meeting Malou and vice versa, Wehlander, don Juan, Julie’s Rubbish, the Cadillac, Kyle and his friends throwing rocks to smash the screens of tvs dumped at the landfill, teaching students parsing the grammar of sentences to put prepositional phrases in parentheses, stickers (on the door) (of the glove compartment) (of the ’64 Chevy truck)—and bean burritos, truly the signature dish of San Diego, being passed out the window at Adelberto’s, Alberto’s, Gilberto’s, Humberto’s, Lupe’s, Palomino’s, Roberto’s, and of course Super Sergio’s. How many salsas? (And thank you to the Mexican fast food restaurants for keeping alive the apostrophe in our grapholect!) Students may get some language theory in their composition classes—their classes in non-fiction writing and (the famous but never well-defined) critical thinking. I think they should. The true subject of composition classes should be language or more specifically written language, but too often composition classes get shackled as “service” courses—that is, courses in which students learn how to write for their other classes. Over the years I’ve made a number of incomplete gestures toward teaching my composition students theories of language but have never felt successful, which I suspect is because I was working from the outside in—beginning with huge generalizations about language and trying to move toward explications of particular deployments of language. For instance, I’ve begun with a primer on Ferdinand de Saussure’s invaluable analysis of the linguistic sign as the union of the signifier and the signified in order to make the case that when I draw attention to the mug I brought into class and set on the table at the front of the room, the students aren’t apprehending that unique mug as much as they are agreeing that this object meets the criteria of mug-ness. But now I want to try to work from the inside-out—that is, begin with a particular, such as place naming, and work up to generalizations about language as such.
Theories of language abound, of course. All contribute to our still aspirational understanding of language. None is comprehensive. Only when we add them all together do we start to get close to something that approximates our experience of the power and flexibility of language. Like language itself, the theorizing about language is so vast that when you’re trying to organize your thinking, it’s useful to have a guiding question to pose to the theories and to the theorists whose very names have become a kind of shorthand for the theories they espouse. My own guiding question is, How do names grow? How can we explain this phenomenon? How can Kearny have come to mean so much to me and to others? And often so much different to me than it does to others?
Take, for instance, the biological model of language that foregrounds the neurological capacities that let us engage in language. This theory was popularized by linguist, cognitive scientist, and philosopher Noam Chomsky. In the 1950s Chomsky began developing the argument that language is an innate human capacity, made possible by a “Language Acquisition Device” present in all of our brains and supporting a Universal Grammar, hard-wired (as the metaphor goes) into our brains, always and everywhere underlying our production and reception of language. It’s the functioning of this LAD that enables us to transform “deep structures” of proto-language into the “surface structures” that we speak and hear, write and read. This pervasive mental grammar is different from prescriptive and descriptive grammars taught in English classes. It’s the human capacity to employ the common structures shared by all human languages—for instance, the universal capacity to join a noun with a verb to make a claim. The most characteristic feature of this Universal Grammar, says Chomsky, is “recursion”—the power of language to infinitely modify and imbed further information in any statement or add appositives to any name and thus to grow it. For instance, recursion allows me to add on endlessly to the statement “Kearny Mesa is a community”: “Kearny Mesa, named for the former Camp Kearny, a U.S. military base that operated from 1917 to 1946 and after several reincarnations became today’s Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, is a community in San Diego, which is now America’s eighth-largest city. . . .” Chomsky’s ideas still dominate linguistics and have spawned innumerable followers, some of whom have attempted to advance Chomsky’s theory by answering the ongoing challenge to it: “If there is a language acquisition device in the brain, where exactly does it reside?” Steven Pinker is a famous case. Pinker is determined not only to identify specific regions of the brain that produce and receive language; he also wants to explain our prowess with language down to the genetic level. Pinker wants to be able to point to the naming gene.
Chomsky, by the way, is an anti-war activist. In the 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” Chomsky famously states, “We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the ‘Vasco da Gama era’ of world history” (qtd. in Wolfe 28). Vasco da Gama, of course, was a Portuguese imperialist who in his expeditions of the late 1400s, early 1500s missed America just like Cabrillo soon later would miss San Francisco.
Chomsky’s inability to locate and account for the language acquisition device sent some semioticians and linguists not off to find it but instead to begin their own theorizing in the assumption that Chomsky was missing something—that Chomsky was bypassing the most awesome elements of language. One such theorist was Walker Percy, a sometimes semiotician who focused on subjectivity and the self. Percy believed that in order to arrive at a comprehensive theory of the human, which after all is missing in our age, we need a comprehensive theory of language, also missing not only in our age but in all ages. In fact, suggested Percy, a theory of the human and a theory of language may turn out to be one-and-the-same thing, as Percy explained in the essays he collected in The Message in the Bottle. In any event, said Percy, Chomsky’s approach stops short on both counts—language and people. It doesn’t fulfill our curiosity about the central phenomenon: “What happens when people talk, when one person names something or says a sentence about something and another person understands [or misunderstands] him” (Percy, “Delta” 14). Percy says,
The famous theoretician Noam Chomsky is frank to admit our nearly total ignorance on the subject [of this central phenomenon]. He does draw a picture. He indicates the central phenomenon of language by a black box, contents unknown, labeled LAD, the “language acquisition device,” which receives the random input of language a child hears and somehow converts it into the child’s capacity to utter any number of sentences in the language. So certain indeed is Chomsky that what happens inside that box cannot be explained by the S[timuluses] and R[esponses] of [behaviorist] psychologists that at one time he saw fit to resurrect the old idea of Descartes that only a mind, a mental substance, can account for the extraordinary phenomenon of language. The black box was full of mind stuff, according to Chomsky. Later he said it probably contained computerlike elements. (Percy, “Delta” 15-16)
Percy is primarily known as a novelist and in fact in 1962 won a National Book Award for The Moviegoer. Twenty years later Percy published the book-length essay Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which is in large his explanation for the warfare of the twentieth century—the 20,000,000 dead of World War I and the 50,000,000 dead of World War II—and his prediction of apocalyptic wars in the twenty-first century.
At the center of this book Percy offers his “Semiotic Primer of the Self”—“an intermezzo” in which Percy says he is “attempt[ing] an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of the self” focusing not only on language but also on “the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances” (Lost 83). Percy points out that when an “I” speaks, writes, and so on, the “I” always posits a “you” it’s addressing (even when that “you” is in fact oneself). That “I” and that “you” insist that language activity is always intersubjective “triadic” behavior—triadic because each sign-making event involves those three “irreducible” elements: a signifier, a subject (signified or referent), and an “I” addressing a “you” (an interpreter). Percy explains that
all such triadic behavior is social in origin. A signal received by an organism is like other signals or stimuli from its environment. [It is not social in origin in the very same way that chemical and physical transactions occurring between molecules or electrons are not social in origin.] But a sign requires a sign-giver. Thus, every triad of sign-reception requires another triad of sign-utterance. Whether the sign is a word, a painting, or a symphony—or Robinson Crusoe writing a journal to himself—a sign transaction requires a sign-utterer and a sign-receiver[. . . .] These are two conjoined triadic events which always happen in any exchange of signs, whether in talk, looking at a painting, reading a novel, or listening to music. It allows for such peculiar properties of triadic events as understanding, misunderstanding, truth-telling, lying. (Lost 96-97)
In footnotes to this section of “The Semiotic Primer” Percy acknowledges his “debt” to the aforementioned Charles Sanders Peirce, “founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the ‘dyadic’ behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the ‘triadic’ character of symbol-use” (Lost 85). (Percy, Peirce—I know the similarity is confusing.) Dyadic activity, as the name implies, is binary action operating on the basis of signals. Dyadic activity is the kind of A-leads-directly-to-B behavior involved when I say Kearny Mesa and you drive there or when I point to Kearny Mesa on a map and you look down at its coordinates. However, triadic activity cannot be described or charted in this binary way. Triadic activity involves three necessary elements—a signifier, a subject (signified), and an interpreter. This threeness is necessary to produce a sign. Triadic activity is panoramic, as when I say Kearny and your mind has a limitless range of thoughts, feelings, memories, responses, dismissals, hopes, wishes, lies, dreams, fears, and so on that it could fix on but chooses to foreground one, two, or several. For instance, maybe your mind foregrounds “samenesses” to Kearny, such as thoughts of experiences you associate directly with Kearny. Okay, because reading always makes you hungry, maybe right now you’re thinking of the restaurant choices afforded by Kearny Mesa’s newly named Asia Town—a stretch of Convoy Street that offers Asian cuisines ranging from Afghani to Uzbekistani but with heavy emphasis on Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean (“Convoy”). (Oh, and lots of Boba.) Or maybe your mind foregrounds “differences” from Kearny, such as thoughts of names and places that help you understand Kearny by what it isn’t, like Serra Mesa or Linda Vista. When I was little, Linda Vista seemed to me startlingly different from Kearny because Linda Vista meant Black people, and Linda Vista was exotic, and the children of Linda Vista seemed to know things and have metaphysical things (like “soul”) that children of Kearny Mesa didn’t. Two of my close friends had a Black-American father and Japanese mother. Imagine. Did the Blacks who settled in Linda Vista after World War II have any influence over the place naming acts? Did Black-Americans get to name Judson, Ulric, and Tait? The closest Kearny Mesa came to Blackness is the street name Othello! This kind of triadic activity—the mind, mouth, and keyboard coursing comparisons and contrasts—is characteristic of human language use. Such capaciousness! The versatility of triadic activity is what makes it so difficult to describe much less explain language comprehensively.
Percy points out that as far as we yet know, only humans are capable of triadic behavior: “This [triadic] phenomenon occurred in the evolution of man. It may have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos, or it may have occurred in other creatures on earth. We do not know. But it is not known to have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos and it has not been proved—despite heroic attempts with chimps, gorillas, and dolphins—to have occurred in other earth species” (Lost 94-95). In Percy’s theory then, naming not only reveals the nature of language but also reveals the nature of the human. Naming is the source of the encompassing totality of human phenomena. Naming is the means by which we know anything, by which we know each other, and by which we struggle to know ourselves. Through this extraordinary act we are able to “concelebrate” (Lost 106) the world in “utterance[s] in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign” (Lost 106).
Through this extraordinary act by which we can speak among ourselves of everything, we also can identify a fatal flaw:
Semiotically, [however,] the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g. apple, Canada, 7-Up. The self of the sign user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of the world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. (Percy, Lost 107)
Percy says, “as soon as the self becomes self-conscious—that is, aware of its own unique unformulability in its world of signs—from that moment forward, it cannot escape the predicament of its placement in the world (Lost 109). This nameless self is innately bellicose: “[W]ith the appearance of man there also appeared for the first time in the Cosmos, as far as we know, language, mind, self, and consciousness, and almost immediately thereafter a train of disasters and triumphs which seem to have very little to do with adapting to an environment—such as organized warfare against himself” (Lost 197). But in earlier epochs of human history, the nameless self could place itself in the world by identifying itself by means of totemism, Eastern pantheism, and the theistic-historical belief systems of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Lost 111-112). In our epoch, in this post-religious, scientific age, the self that cannot know itself and no longer has available to it the earlier modes of identification, this self makes war of ever greater magnitudes, destruction, and loss of life. When I speak, hear, write, or read the name Kearny, either I or someone else can hold up and play up what we mean by this sign. Celebrating the sign together, we grow Kearny—just as we do by using it to name our predicament. The predicament, that is, that we’ll also use this name to make war: Where once Kearny meant to me sage and rockets and cinder blocks—always cinder blocks—now it also means war stories.
Percy labeled his own theory of language “anthropological,” but at the same time it is clearly cultural. In fact, Percy shared many preoccupations with the linguists who study language as a capability that we develop and refine in the midst of others who are using a given specific language to more or less make meaning. Language in this view is a cultural artifact—an invention that produces, reflects, and bounds a culture’s description of reality. Cultural theorists find their evidence in the words we speak and hear and write and read every day, so often they focus on the metaphorical basis of thought and language. The premise here is that thought is metaphoric and proceeds by comparison and contiguity—by bordering or being in direct contact with something—and that the metaphors of language derive therefrom. Metaphors make implicit comparisons. Metaphors are symbols. Proponents of this theory, and Percy was one of them, maintain that metaphor is the “true maker of language” and that metaphorical activity is our “fundamental symbolic orientation in the world” (qtd. in Lavid 141).
A watershed in the history of this perspective was the 1980 publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson insist that metaphors are not simply poetical or rhetorical figures of speech “but are part of everyday speech that affects the ways in which we perceive, think, and act. Reality itself is defined by metaphor, and as metaphors vary from culture to culture, so do the realities they define” (3). The very first example Lakoff and Johnson provide in Metaphors We Live By, and one they return to throughout the book, is the metaphor “Argument Is War” and its manifestations, such as “Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target” (4). The authors emphasize, “It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. [. . .] It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing” (4). And by extension it structures the actions we perform in living. For instance, in Kearny Mesa we lived by the metaphor Ordinary living is war-footing.
Lakoff and Johnson were certainly not the first scholars and writers to point out that we can’t say or write anything without involving metaphor. But these authors made a distinct contribution to our understanding of language by cataloguing kinds of metaphors to reveal the conceptual systems they create, offer, and impose. The authors identify three overlapping categories of conceptual metaphors. With “ontological” metaphors we view events, activities, emotions, ideas, and so on as entities and substances as in We need to combat inflation (25). With “structural” metaphors we regard abstract and complex concepts in terms of more concrete concepts: Economic activity equals war (9). And with “orientational” metaphors we order experience by means of spatial relationships, such as up-down, in-out, on-off, and front-back: She is one of the higher-ranking officials in the agency (14).
Lakoff and Johnson are particularly interested in the ways in which the metaphors we live by influence, direct, and even encompass our social and political lives: “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies” (156). In the talk “Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf,” which Lakoff delivered on the campus of The University of California at Berkeley in 1991, Lakoff argues that the American involvement in the Gulf War “was obscured or ‘spun’ by the metaphors which were used by the first Bush administration to justify it” (“George Lakoff”). Lakoff opens this essay with a bottom line:
Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether to go to war in the gulf was a panorama of metaphor. Secretary of State Baker saw Saddam Hussein as "sitting on our economic lifeline." President Bush portrayed him as having a "stranglehold" on our economy. General Schwarzkopf characterized the occupation of Kuwait as a "rape" that was ongoing. The President said that the US was in the gulf to "protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent," and that we had to "push Saddam Hussein back." Saddam Hussein was painted as a Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought played in bringing us in this war.
Naming, of course, is essentially an act whereby you know one kind of thing in terms of another or by its correspondences, associations, similarities, dissimilarities, and affinities with something else. Every name is a metaphor—a way of talking about things (so to speak) that becomes a way of behaving and thus a way of living. Every metaphor is an attempt to name. What does it mean to us as a culture that we’ve named a national effort to advance the research on, diagnosis of, and treatment of cancer the War on Cancer? How has this declaration of war on cancer shaped our national concern and especially the allocation of resources? I’m reminded of Robert Stone’s lament of William James’s good intentions as Stone surveyed the damage caused by all that was done in the name of War on Drugs:
In 1910, the philosopher William James wrote an essay discussing the absence of values, the "moral weightlessness," that seemed to characterize modern times. James was a pacifist. Yet he conceded that the demands of battle were capable of bringing forth virtues like courage, loyalty, community, and mutual concern that seemed in increasingly short supply as the new century unfolded. As a pacifist and a moralist, James found himself in a dilemma. How, he wondered, can we nourish those virtues without having to pay the dreadful price that war demands? We must foster courage, loyalty, and the rest, but we must not have war. Very well, he reasoned, we must find the moral equivalent of war.” (Stone 54)
One wonders whether James recognized that even the moral equivalent of war cuts both ways.
The military place names of Kearny Mesa are metaphors. As such, this structure of military metaphors reflects the values of the culture. Lakoff and Johnson stress that just as metaphorical systems can be like constellations in the sky with words like stars reordering, changing, reconfiguring, and illuminating new significations, they also can be prison houses, impressments, closed grids of coding, bars behind bars, a declaration of war.
These particular theories of language—these biological, anthropological, and cultural theories—are especially intriguing to me as I wonder about place names, but only three among a plethora. True enough, too often theorists do act upon the metaphor “Argument is war.” You should see what Chomsky has to say about Lakoff’s work and Lakoff about Chomsky’s work! (And, for the record, had Percy weighed in he would have sided with Lakoff—while grimacing as he tried to look past Lakoff’s “secular liberalism.”) But obviously all three have valuable contributions to make to our growing understanding.

4 Peirce
The theory of language most pertinent to this discussion of the vastness of names—the way in which names are bigger than we are—is typically traced back to C. S. Peirce, the one I’ve mentioned a couple of times already, the one Percy lauded, the one who some scholars consider the greatest American philosopher of all time—an Atlas rocket on the skyline of semiotics but also not exactly a household name. (And like Percy, Peirce was a thinker whose work you can greatly respect while declining to buy his values wholesale.) Ultimately Peirce was working toward a unified theory of everything. He was a scholarly jack-of-all-trades—not only a semiotician but also a philosopher, a physical scientist, a social scientist, a mathematician, and more. Owing not to his intellect but to his personality, Peirce couldn’t hold on to an academic job, but between 1859 and 1891 he was employed on-and-off in various scientific roles by the United States Coast Survey and its successor, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, where, as a biographer explains, “he enjoyed his highly influential father's protection until the latter's death in 1880. That employment exempted Peirce from having to take part in the Civil War; it would have been very awkward for him to do so, as the Boston Brahmin Peirces sympathized with the Confederacy” (“Charles Sanders Peirce”). Moreover, Peirce dreaded the draft: “‘I should feel that I was ended & thrown away for nothing,’ as he put it in a letter [to a friend]” (qtd. in Menand 160).
Throughout his adult life Peirce worked on his theory of signs, of meaning making, and of language—his semiotic, that is—revising, crafting, and even changing the terms of it across innumerable articles, papers, journal entries, and letters to like-minded friends. Peirce, says the novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, “was compelled continuously to rediscuss and revise his ideas; he felt a sort of psychological pleasure in challenging and re-defining his own formulas; it is rather difficult to find two separate passages on a same topic in which he does not contradict and re-propose what he has previously said” (1457). Peirce never assembled a final, finished theoretical statement of this semiotic, so, as you can imagine, his writings remain to this day an abundant source of interpretation, elaboration, and further theorizing for his intellectual descendents. Despite the voluminous, often ambiguous, and slippery nature of Peirce’s writings on semiosis, Peirce held consistently to certain core principles, such as the radical difference between dyadic and triadic activity, and to specific ongoing projects, such as the classification of types of signs in an attempt to explain all possible relationships between signifiers and signifieds—for instance, between words and subjects.
And Peirce’s classification of signs is a work of wonder. Peirce grounded this classification in his postulation of the existence of three classes of elementary signs: “icons,” “indices” (or “indexes”), and “symbols.”
An icon reflects qualities of its subject. It is an image or otherwise that physically resembles the subject that it stands for. An icon operates by likenesses—for example, “camo” shirts and pants worn as fashion or that eighty-foot replica of a missile that General Dynamic perched at the entrance to Missile Park.
An index is a signal correlating with and pointing to its subject, utilizing some physical or existential connection between it and its subject—a dyadic relationship as Peirce and Percy would say, a cause/effect relationship. You were using your hand as an index when you pointed out the car windshield to the big broad flat-topped area that you learned is Kearny Mesa.
A symbol employs some convention, habit, or social rule to represent its subject, which can be something in or out of the world, something real or imagined. Unlike icons and indices, with symbols there is no identity between signifier and subject. The references a symbol makes are “non-motivated” or “arbitrary,” as semioticians like to say (Yanushkevich 46). And a symbol brings reason—“inferences”—into play, as when you read Kearny and begin thinking of those Mexican drive-thrus and the Boba drinks.
According to Peirce these three categories of signs correspond with three categories of phenomena. Peirce associates the icon with “firstness”—a feeling, a quality, or a possibility. He associates the index with “secondness”—the realm of brute facts—things and their co-existence with other things, which draws denotation. And Peirce associates the symbol with “thirdness”—general laws, reasoning, which draws connotation. Also according to Peirce these three categories of signs correspond with three modes of being in time: “An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of present experience. [. . .] The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to predict the future’” (qtd. in Yanushkevich 45).
But Peirce did not stop with these elementary signs. In fact, initially, and in addition to icons, indices, and symbols, Peirce posited six other signs to begin to account for combination signs—for instance, the iconic aspect of indices or the indexical aspect of symbols (Boersema 351, 355, and 360). Peirce labeled this next group qualisigns, sinsigns, legisigns, rhemes, dicents, and arguments. Peirce then “revised [this list] in order to theorize 66 signs, before eventually coming up with the troublesome figure of 59,049” (Cobley 30).
In Peirce’s system, place names can act as any kind of sign. In terms of the elementary signs, Kearny is at once an icon, an index, and a symbol. For instance, a place name can be an icon as it brings to mind and body certain feelings about the place. A place name can be an index as it can denote and point to a specific place. And a place name can be a symbol inasmuch as it connotes and stirs a whole world of correspondences, associations, and arguments. Of course, the symbolic possibilities of a place name are most fascinating. In the sign acting as a symbol, the signifier and the signified (say, of Kearny and the subjects it refers to) become so merged that we lose sight of the very “arbitrariness” of the symbol. (In other words, there is no “natural” reason that this community has to be named Kearny.) To me, for instance, the name for a place of family stories, of war stories, a gateway to a world of thoughts and feelings—why “naturally” that’s a Kearny! Well, it is and it isn’t, of course.
Peirce’s premise was that all thought occurs in signs (words, sentences, camo bed sheets, statues/replicas of missiles, emblematic art on the walls of Vietnamese restaurants, and so on), and that signs always lead to more signs, which is to say that all thought in language is trying always to expand its orbit and to reach for the future. For this reason, and put negatively, names are “unstable.” Names don’t have fixed-forever-more meanings. For this reason, put positively, names are infinitely productive. Names keep growing. Ultimately Peirce was trying to describe in detail and type how one word calls another word and how one idea calls another idea. Signs necessarily generate further signs. This is how signs grow. This growth is the essence of language’s power. It’s what’s really special about language—and the reason that language is never simply or merely a tool. Names grow if you’re interested in all the knowledge that’s available to be had or made under the auspices of the name. And the kind of knowing that a place name allows is different from knowing about an object. The kind of knowing that a place name allows is ever-expansive. It isn’t the kind of thing that you know with precision. It’s the kind of thing that you know with connection, relation, association, correspondence. The kind of knowing I want to talk about is knowing-on-the-basis-of, or under-the auspices-of, or in-the-context-of. This growth is more than the accumulation of public and personal associations, correspondences, and memories—more than a collection of public and personal denotations and connotations. Growth is also a product of the transformation—some kind of alchemy—that occurs when all of these denotations and connotations strike up against each other and require an interpretant. Say we’re sitting at the kitchen table, looking at a map of Kearny Mesa on my phone. Initially the street names are indexes, but they don’t stay that way. I see the Kearny Mesa street name Vickers, and I start to think of how to get there off of Convoy, but then I go on to think of the Ray Frey Auto Center and how much of my family’s life has occurred in, around, and under automobiles! And, of course, the entire time I’m thinking of my dad’s name: Victor.
Peirce scholar Winfried Nöth dwells on the growth of signs, of words, of names in much of his work. In discussing “successful communication,” Nöth reminds that “the speaker can only suppose or perhaps hope that the hearer evokes the same images [as the speaker has in mind in using a sign], but actually there are always differences which remain and which give rise to a dialogic ‘sequence of successive interpretations’ ad infinitum in the dialogic process of unlimited semiosis” (“Peircean Semiotics” 618). Kearny gives rise to a sequence of successive interpretations in the process of unlimited semiosis.

5 The Interpretant
Specifically, signs grow because of the primacy of the “interpretant” in the production of signs. For example, a signifier such as a word—let’s say Kearny—will refer to the subject, which in this case is some kind of cross between concrete and a concept, only once an interpretant has served as the go-between, as the “mediator” that understands (or misunderstands) that this word means that concrete or concept. This mediator, of course, could be oneself or it could be others. Note that earlier when I introduced the concept of “sign,” I labeled one of its three essential elements an “interpreter,” but Peirce chose instead to use this term “interpretant”—an ambiguity his successors have marveled at and struggled with. Peirce never solidified exactly what he meant by “interpretant.” Among Peirce scholars (semioticians, linguists, cognitive scientists, novelists, and so on) there are at least three somewhat differently focused explanations of what Peirce meant by “interpretant.”
(1) Many Peirce scholars consider the interpretant to be the rules and habits a given utterance is subject to—that is, the rules and habits that govern what a word, phrase, and so on may mean in a certain context. For example, Kearny can mean a huge range of things, but it can’t mean, say, “a long stretch of empty beach” unless the interlocutors have their own private references. To a large extent we say or you write what’s available to be said or written. (Maybe the clearest example of this point is our ability to use a stock phrase whose words we don’t exactly know the meaning of individually. For instance, after listening to the news today, I feel able to use the phrase “at an inflection point” in a sentence such as “The war in Afghanistan is at an inflection point” without being able to define “inflection” or “inflection point” specifically.) But so many textual and contextual streams flow into that availability! “A ‘habit,’ according to Peirce, is ‘that which determines us, from given premises, to draw one inference [meaning] rather than another,’ and is ‘constitutional or acquired’” (Cobley 159). What are my habits of mind such that I thought this instead of that? And what are the elements that generate and sustain such habits of mind? Brain, body, mind, environment, world, language, thought, consciousness, of course and at least. Clearly this is the area where researchers, theorists, and scholars still have great work to do in order to continue to make progress with the development of a theory of context (how we make meanings in context) and a theory of consciousness.
(2) Other scholars consider the interpretant to be a further sign—the new sign prompted by the previous sign. It’s the sign that comes to mind—for instance, when someone says something or when you read something. The interpretant is the “translation” that the sign engenders in the person. For instance, Eco calls the “interpretant” the idea to which [a sign] gives rise” (1461). Or in Nöth’s characterization: “The essence of interpretation is to develop this preceding sign further in the light of the new context in which the sign appears. The result is the interpretant, which is a new and more developed sign of the same object” (“Peircean Semiotics” 616). So because I always conceive of Kearny in a new context, I continually make of this name a new and more developed sign. I suppose one could say that each utterance of a name is like each act of remembrance—a wholly new event in the history of the cosmos. As the authors of the Peirce article in The Stanford Encyclopedia point out, “[T]he meaning of a sign is manifest in the interpretation that it generates in sign users.” In other words, the interpretant’s incessant question is “What does this sign mean?” and the interpretant’s answer is the next sign—the successive sign.
(3) Yet other scholars consider the interpretant to be the act that produces this further sign—the activity that occurs in a mind (or machine) while someone or something is forming a sign. The interpretant is the thing that happens in your mind—the act—once you hear or read the word. As another Peirce scholar puts the matter, “[I]nterpretants are the dynamic, informational, epistemic, and communicational states of those who participate in semiosis” (Pietarinen 393). Here, and importantly, because the emphasis is on the act of interpretation it is off of the agent. You see, one can read Peirce to be emphasizing that the interpretant isn’t necessarily an interpreter—a human agent, for instance. In many writings Peirce resisted this notion for two reasons. First, Peirce didn’t want to seat all agency in the person. Peirce’s idea is that neither speaker nor hearer is in full control of the interpretant. Second, Peirce envisioned a universe pervaded by signs and didn’t want to limit his semiotic to the human involvement with signs. (In any event, Peirce wasn’t adhering to the good ol’ humanistic tradition!)
Maybe we can coalesce matters—simplifying without becoming overly simplistic—by saying that Peirce means by “interpretant” (1) an act of interpretation, implicit in which are (2) the rules and habits governing this act of interpretation, which occurs to (3) a “you” (oneself or others) and produces (4) a subsequent sign requiring interpretation. We need this compound-complex understanding of “interpretant” in order to approach an understanding of how language grows—of how names grow. We’re constantly interpreting (or translating) signs into other signs in a process that goes on infinitely. Signs grow because they always demand and receive new interpretations—new “interpretants” in his jargon. As a person in whom these interpretations occur, my meaning of Kearny continues to grow. Do place names grow in a special way—different from other signs? I’m not yet sure. But I intuit that their growth influences us more thoroughly than the growth of other signs.
What’s super impressive and mysterious about language is that it is a do-er of the action—it in league with the person who’s speaking or writing it. As I mention above, this is the door that Peirce left open—that language is an agent in all this activity, not just an agency employed by humans. We do casually talk as if language is in fact the agent, as in “This essay argues that. . . .” Names can sponsor in us deep and influential connotations without our knowing anything about the name's origin, history, and denotations. Names can appear to turn the table and act upon us. Nöth focuses much of his work on arguing that in Peirce’s conception signs are living things, pursuing answers to questions such as “What does Peirce mean by the ‘self-development of signs’ in nature and culture and by symbols as living things? How do signs grow? Do all signs grow, or do only symbols grow? Does the growth of signs presuppose semiotic agency, and if so, who are the agents in semiosis when signs and sign systems grow?” (“Growth” 172). It’s not important to me—I don’t think, at least—to argue that a name is more an agent than is a namer. But we live in namescapes. Names grow. As your knowledge grows, you recognize how pervasive names are in your life—how worlds grow from them and how these worlds interconnect until they form the world. Language acts upon us, just like landscapes act upon us. Just as we live in landscapes, we live in namescapes. I made decisions in my life guided by Kearny Mesa’s namescape (middle-class, multi-cultural, service-oriented, militaristically-tough). Kearny and the street names evoked this huge scape of associations, impressions, meanings, hopes, wishes, lies, dreams, and fears that I moved within and made decisions within. The names solidified, substantiated, and grounded. Many of these names reflected cultural, social, economic, and political interests. Others still seem just puzzling, quizzical—but just as full of wonder for an adult now as they were for a small boy. I mean, it’s not as if we’re always choosing to use a particular place name to impart a specific denotation or a specific range of connotations. Names come unbidden. It can even feel like a name is imposing itself on you. As a do-er, language surely sends us to war. But it also directs us to contemplate existence without war. You might say that over time humans transfer agency into names so that names come to be able to act. (And we then deny culpability for our behavior!) It’s like so much is done “in the name of” that at one point the name declares eminent domain! But it’s never people themselves or language itself that grows names—that grows the knowledge made possible by names. The two use and need each other. Someone’s simply saying Kearny evokes in me such a depth and range of response! It’s not the speaker alone and her or his intentions that’s doing this to me. It’s the name. By our efforts Kearny continues to grow. The knowledge afforded by the name continues to grow.

6 Rosecrans, Grant, and Kearny
I began pursuing Kearny and thus growing Kearny not only because I found out that General Kearny’s career and life almost ended on the other side of the hill behind my house but also because I read a biography of Ulysses Simpson Grant by one William McFeely. From McFeely’s work I learned about William Starke Rosecrans, who among other things was a Union general in the Civil War. (And I have to say right here that it feels odd for me to focus on this Grant—the one on the fifty dollar bill—in the context of a discussion of Kearny because Grant is also the name of my younger brother, who would be the mayor of Kearny Mesa if Kearny Mesa had a mayor.) Before reading McFeely’s book I knew nothing about Rosecrans, but I knew Rosecrans. In fact, in my life Rosecrans is intimately connected with Kearny. Surely the historical Kearny and the historical Rosecrans crossed paths in their careers too. Rosecrans came up in McFeely’s book because Grant and Rosecrans were at odds for much of the Civil War—apparently because Grant was always ready to charge and Rosecrans wasn’t. I like to think that Rosecrans didn’t want his men to be just cannon fodder. “Cannon fodder” is a term I learned as a kid from my dad when he used it to describe the waves of soldiers the United States was sending to the well-fortified Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. My dad said, “The plan is to have the enemy use up all their ammunition, and then they’ll be all done for.” Grant eventually didn’t seem to mind the cannon fodder tactic. In this unflinching account of Grant, McFeely emphasizes that by 1864 the General “was waging war with a brutality of which he had been incapable in 1861 and 1862” (190). In the so-called Siege of Petersburg alone, in the last year of the war, when it was clear the Confederacy had lost, the General’s orders led to the deaths of 28,000 Confederates and 42,000 of his own troops (National). Do you remember that scene in Spielberg’s Lincoln? Where Lincoln walks among the dead at Petersburg in a penance that we viewers were supposed to understand as his noble acknowledgement of the flesh-and-blood cost of his idealism? Until a few years ago Rosecrans meant to me the street in San Diego that begins once you get past Old Town and ends right where you enter the road to the Coast Guard and Navy bases. As many times as I’d been on it, I had never stopped to wonder who or even what the street was named after—didn’t wonder even though the huge military cemetery on the ridge up above the boulevard is named Fort Rosecrans. In the mid- to late ‘60s, when my dad was stationed at Ballast Point, that submarine base at the tip of Point Loma, we got to it by taking 8 West, getting off at Rosecrans and driving south for about five miles, and then entering the base. We—well, with my mom at the wheel—drove down it all the time to drop off or pick up my dad because we had only the one car. With my dad, you didn’t just ask him point blank questions about his politics or political positions on historical events. You just gathered them from comments he made, which sometimes seemed more like knee-jerk reactions or something he’d heard when he was little. So even if I could today it wouldn’t occur to me to say, for instance, “So Dad, what do you think of U.S. Grant? Was his greatest failure sending all those young men and boys to slaughter? Was it taking ‘Total War’ to the civilians? Or was it wasting the meaning of any of that by looking after his job in the White House while Reconstruction failed? And whose side would you have been on? Grant’s or Rosecrans’s?” The way that the roads of Kearny Mesa lead to the roads of Linda Vista, which lead to Old Town and then to Rosecrans in Point Loma, this is how I envision names working, with Kearny leading to a place name associated with or right next to it—Miramar, Clairemont, Linda Vista, Serra Mesa—and then on to the places next to those places—Poway, Mission Bay, Mission Hills, Tierrasanta—and then on to the rest of the world. All place names speak potentially of all other place names. All place names refer continually to all other place names. And more: All place names refer perpetually to all subjects we know under the auspices of those names, and all those subjects speak to each other too. We are ceaselessly arranging signs in particular configurations as we talk to ourselves and others so as to connect with ourselves and others—others who are also ceaselessly arranging signs in particular configurations, some of which overlap our own. [Infinite semiosis—did Peirce coin that term?]
After reading McFeely’s book I started to research Rosecrans and to see the public lattice of coincidences that linked Rosecrans to Kearny—that linked the world of Rosecrans to the world of Kearny. I learned from an encyclopedia article that “Many Fort Rosecrans interments date to the early years of the California Republic, including the remains of the casualties of the Battle of San Pasqual. [. . .] Initially, the dead were buried where they fell, but by 1874 the remains had been removed to the San Diego Military Reservation. Eight years later, the bodies were again reinterred at what is now Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. In 1922, the San Diego chapter of the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West had a large boulder brought from the battlefield and placed at the gravesite with a plaque affixed that lists the names of the dead” (“Fort Rosecrans”). It seems important to point out the army established Fort Rosecrans on the Fleetridge above Ballast Point in 1903, after the end of the Spanish-American War and the United States’ capture of Manila on the island of Luzon in the Philippines (Engstrand 3).
Miramar National Cemetery, where my dad’s memorial plaque is on one of the columbarium walls, became necessary because by 1966 Fort Rosecrans Cemetery was filled to capacity, leaving only the Riverside National Cemetery for burials and internments of San Diego region veterans. So in 2010 the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated a new National Cemetery in the northwest part of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, the former site of Camp Kearny, and planned for it to eventually hold the remains of approximately 235,000 veterans and spouses (“Miramar”).
You look at all those tombstones in the cemetery, and it’s easy to abstract away without going into the lives. It’s easy to take it all for granted. But each of these tombstones is a unique sign. The markers of young people who died in combat, these are the signs we interpret especially poignantly—signs of valor and/or signs of spent lives.
I’m hoping that by describing to my students what happened to me, my own experience of considering the place names in Kearny Mesa, I can make them more mindful of the presence of war in our lives and in our language—and of the complicity of all of us in the war machine. I’m hoping to make our predicament clearer to them. Once you recognize the omnipresence of war in our language and thus in our lives, you confront the hard questions that we have to address—and the especially American question: Would we decline war if it meant the U.S. losing its pre-eminent position in world power? As the new Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, argues, “The United States would not long exist were it not for the selfless commitment of [its] warriors” (qtd. in Filkens 34). Or as a dozen or so years ago Mattis told midshipmen at the Naval Academy: “If we are going to keep this great big experiment called America alive—and that’s all it is, an experiment—we need cocky, macho, unselfish, and morally very straight young men and women to lead our forces against the enemy. Your job, my fine young men and women, is to find the enemy that wants to end this experiment and kill every one of them until they are so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact” (qtd. in Filkens 37). Moreover, Mattis as he is described by colleagues and reporters would not only say “leave us and our freedoms intact” but also “leave the hopes of humanity intact.” A nation cannot live in this world unilaterally disarmed, as the maxim goes.
But in the context of war, how do we distinguish between the desire for security and the desire for conflict and conquest? How do we distinguish between the fort and the font? The example of Mattis and his career also makes a thundering argument against war. War can become this contest where “winning” (whatever that means and however it is measured) becomes everything, no matter the cost. War can become a source of enjoyment for some warriors at the expense of everyone else—and ultimately even of themselves. Mattis would be the first to say that war works as a strategy only when it’s part of a broader political strategy: “Military force alone promises only more military force” (qtd. in Filkens 45). And despite the planners’ talk of achieving an “end-state,” there is never an absolute end-state of war. War breeds war.
We can provide arguments both for the necessity and even moral imperative of war and for the futility, brutality, and banality of war. These arguments aren’t necessarily contradictory. It is possible for a person like Mattis and for a people like Americans to maintain with integrity both positions as defined by these arguments. If my dad were alive today, what would he think of Jim Mattis? I consider my dad a pacifist. Yes, my dad—a veteran of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—a pacifist. So why did my dad take us to see General Douglas MacArthur, who historians portray as a war-monger, lying in state in Norfolk?
War will not be the theme most of my students fix on once they begin exploring the important place names in their lives. That’s understandable. Mostly what I want to do is urge the students not to take language for granted in two related ways: (1) not to consider language just a given, just something ordinary, just something servile, and (2) not to ignore the fact that language is an actor too, capable of making up their minds. Drawing their attention to the complexity of the naming act is a way of doing this urging. Toponymy has got to be one of the most taken-for-granted manifestations of the power to language—which makes it ideal for my purpose. I mean, the list could go on and on of the ways in which place names operate—and in this essay I’ve show them operating in these ways explicitly and implicitly—and each of these ways is a topic for students to write about, to apply to the important place names in their own lives:
(1) to denote a “place”;
(2) to communicate (information);
(3) to support a map of calculable territory;
(4) to become a locus of personal memories and significances;
(5) to familiarize—or at least to render the unfamiliar more managable;
(6) to make us feel secure;
(7) to socially produce a place—that is, to open a space of recognition;
(8) to produce “places” invested with cultural meaning and social power (for example, to “invent” new spaces of colonial possession);
(9) to attempt to affix stable identities to particular spaces, to physical territory;
(10) to produce a symbolic area;
(11) to promote particular conceptions of history and national identity;
(12) to advance cultural values, social norms, and political ideologies;
(13) to contest a space (political), such as by entering into political struggle over the processes of place naming;
(14) to rid us of a legacy (by renaming)
(15) to commemorate;
(16) to spatialize memory;
(17) to generate images (including the creation of racialized, gendered, and commodified landscapes)
(18) to serve as a form of symbolic capital (for example, place naming rights).
(I derived this list under the guidance of Reuben Rose-Redwood’s excellent article describing a critical turn in the study of place names. Traditionally scholars of toponymy have been primarily interested in the names themselves. Now scholars are focusing on the naming act—its nature and implications.)
Place names reveal clearly what is to me the most powerful principle of language: Language grows. If you want to get people interested in language, show them how names grow and how they can grow along with them. They can see the worlds motivated by important place names in their lives and how the world of one name intersects with the world of another name. Names keep requiring new interpretants, but we have to do our part too by bringing new knowledge to our interpretations. Human growth depends on language growth. Language is stunted by the same things that stunt a person: Lack of inquiry. Misinformation. Lack of observation. Lack of memory. Names grow if you’re interested in all the knowledge that’s available under the auspices of the name. It’s all right there in front of you if you’re interested.

Spring 2017

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