The Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies

Mary W. Matthews

When I was a child, my family took a lot of car trips. We skied in the winter and visited grandparents in the summer, both of which meant round trips of hundreds of miles. Dad edited and wrote for the National Geographic, which occasionally meant round trips of thousands of miles. And of course there were cousins on Sanibel to visit, roughly 1,200 miles one-way (as the car drives).

It was during a very early car trip that the concept of the Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies began to evolve. The Little Men lurk by the side of the road and keep track of your movements, signaling each other so that lights turn red as you approach; roadblocks, speed traps, and potholes magically appear at just the wrong moment; and sometimes tacks spring up out of the road to cause flat tires. (The Little Men appeared long before the advent of steel-belted radials.)

And the Little Men have continued to diversify since my family first deduced their existence all those decades ago. About six months ago, Nabisco introduced a new taste treat, fudge-dipped Oreos. The Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies have obviously discovered that my husband and I like these cookies, because they’ve disappeared off the shelves. This kind of thing has happened often enough over the years that Jerry now declares that if we like some product a lot, we must loudly state that we hate it, so as to fool the Little Men.

All those moments in your life when it has seemed as though the Universe is out to get you, when nothing seems to go right? It’s not random chance or self-fulfilling prophecy — it’s the Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies.

(Aside to those who know how committed I am to inclusive language: Of course they’re magical little men. Magical little women have better things to do than plot deeds of cosmic malevolence.)

I know what you’re going to say. You’ll shake your head, knowing I’m consummately silly or ever so slightly daft, or both. “The Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies,” you’ll say. “You couldn’t even make it cell phones?”

But perhaps, instead of scoffing, you feel a thrill of recognition. At last, an explanation for the perversity of apparently random chance! And perhaps your family had something similar, like the families of literature who knew about the Under Toad, the Green Ripper, the Velveteen Rabbit, the Brave Little Toaster, or even the Great Pumpkin.

Anthropomorphism (AM): the ascribing of human intelligence, emotions, and cultural values to non-human beings and things. We’ve been doing it at least since the story about the talking serpent — the story where God, instead of being Spirit, liked to walk in a garden in the cool, cool, cool of the evening.

One of the ways we use AM is to try to feel more in control over things that are essentially uncontrollable. In the beginning, each phenomenon had its own anthropomorphic deity — gods of lightning and thunder, sun and storm and warfare, goddesses of fertility and growing things, moonlight, wisdom, and civilization. Over the millennia we realized that if there were dozens of gods and goddesses, there must be only one Über-Deity, or whence the dozens? So most of us stated confidently that we believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen — and merrily invented angels and muses, daemons and demons and devils, witches and warlocks, houris and incubi and succubi, nymphs, dryads, nereids, satyrs, fauns, saints and appearances of the Virgin, Bigfoots and yetis, ghosts, poltergeists, fairies, leprechauns, mermaids, selkies, djinni/genies, trolls, ogres, brownies, Kilroy Was Here, space aliens with rectal probes, honest politicians. . . .

And this gets us into a related reason for AM: coping with fear. If you can turn a thunderstorm into the anger of Zeus, Thor, or Tsuki-Yomi, you have a hope of appeasing the god’s anger and ending the storm. If you propitiate Danu-Ana, winter will end and her daughter, Spring, will smile, crops will be abundant and you’ll have that baby you’ve been longing for.

This control-of-fear hypothesis also applies to hurricanes, which were given exclusively female names until women began pointing out that we don’t exactly have an exclusive lock on the explosive violence and senseless destruction department. Perhaps ships were thought of as feminine (Lloyd’s stopped using “she” only recently) for a similar reason — for men to feel more in control over a powerful entity they’re secretly or not-so-secretly afraid of, while at the same time tacitly acknowledging that women’s power is ultimately beyond male control.

Another reason we use AM is to try to explain the unexplainable. This, I think, is the realm of ghosts, poltergeists, demons, fairies, and space aliens. I believe the whole alien-abduction phenomenon, from Betty and Barney Hill to “The X Files,” is essentially the same sort of expression of cultural anxiety as the witchcraft mania of the Middle Ages. (But what if I’m wrong?)

When we humans enter a strange landscape, we look for familiar referents so we can orient ourselves — other people, trees, buildings. If you enter a really vast cavern, your stereoscopic vision becomes useless for objects more than roughly 50 feet away; it’s impossible to get much beyond “Wow, that’s big!” without something familiar somewhere to give you a sense of scale. You might see a stalagmite that you judge to be about 100 feet away — until you notice that the human standing next to it would then be only eight inches tall, and things suddenly snap into a different focus.

I think one reason we anthropomorphize is for much the same purpose — to explain weird phenomena by fitting them into a familiar template so we can feel as though we have a sense of scale. To draw analogies between us and the bizarre and try to find images from our own experience to make sense of them.

For example, the house my husband and I bought in 1999 was built in 1920. Periodically, Jerry or I or both of us will hear human footsteps overhead when we know that not even the cats are upstairs. We’ve named this “ghost” George, and we apologize to “him” when the Terminix man comes or a child hollers in the street — and we blame him when small items mysteriously disappear, a calendar from the desk or a set of drill bits from their container.

Humans also use AM to project our thoughts and feelings, either for comfort — think of those long, heart-to-heart talks we have with our pets — or for convenience. My husband and I have between us owned cars named Arnold, Horace, Fritz, Bessie, and Felix. It’s easier to say “Fritz” than it is to say, “Jerry’s dear old yellow Volkswagen beetle that he loved so much and still talks about wistfully all these years later.”

In the use of AM to entertain, instruct, or persuade, to make some product or animal seem familiar and endearing, the examples are virtually endless. Think of Balaam’s ass, Francis the Talking Mule, and Mr. Ed, Br’er Rabbit and Puss in Boots, Charlie the Tuna and Lancelot Link, “My Mother the Car,” R2D2, and that great iMac commercial. How could you possibly feel intimidated by a computer that mimics your every movement and, when you stick your tongue out at it, opens its drawer and sticks out its CD tray?

AM isn’t just pervasive in our lives, it permeates our culture and patterns of thought. We can’t go a day without some encounter with an AM, from Rosy-Fingered Dawn to Mayor McCheese to a high-fiving pair of squirrels to Old Man River, until we say goodnight to the Man in the Moon.

It seems to me that AM must be a survival trait, since we all do it, from Uncle Sam to John Bull to Marianne to Ivan to Charlie to Osama, from Santa Claus to the Great Satan.

The burning question in my mind is, is AM a survival trait because it helps us cope more successfully — only that and nothing more? Or is it possible that there exists a spiritual dimension, for the most part inaccessible to modern science, and our angels and ghosts and spirit guides are just the best way we can find of explaining the unexplainable?

Perhaps it is even possible, as some have suggested, that mass belief in an AM creates that AM. Perhaps religious statues weep tears of blood because worshippers believe they can. Perhaps a house becomes literally haunted when enough people sincerely believe that it is.

It’s tempting for me to flatter Mensans by suggesting that high intelligence is correlated with the imagination that goes into a creation like the Little Men With the Walkie-Talkies. I’m also tempted to imagine that one difference between high and low intelligence is the amount of belief one invests in AMs. But against that we must balance (for example) Conan Doyle’s absolute belief in fairies and Houdini’s desperate belief in ectoplasm as he searched, like Diogenes, for an honest medium. These were not stupid men.

I worry that there are people who buy the Weekly World News not because it’s hilarious, but because they believe its stories of apocalypses and Antichrists, Bigfoot sightings and Frog Babies, where The Space Alien campaigned for Clinton and the Bat Boy advises the Magisterium to solve its credibility problems by using robot priests. . . .

I think in the end that high intelligence is useful for making us skeptical of our AMs. Maybe God isn’t an angry old white man with a long white beard. Maybe Jesus isn’t merely “God in a man-suit.” Maybe Allah didn’t create humanity out of a drop of his celestial sperm (Sura 16:4 and others). Maybe Hecate won’t confer supernatural powers on those who dance naked in the light of the full moon. Maybe Mr. Clean couldn’t beat up the Ajax White Knight (“stronger than dirt”). Maybe Colossus couldn’t beat up HAL. Maybe the Keebler elves could “pull a Snow White” on Chiquita Banana.

Maybe AM is a survival trait because it gives us that little extra competitive edge, the ability to tell when a car needs a tune-up because she’s feeling grumpy, the ability to enter into dialogue with a sorrowful tree or a mischievous ocean current.

But maybe we anthropomorphize because we are made in our Creator’s image, and one of our Creator’s pastimes is investing human response into unlikely situations. Maybe one of God’s pranks on us is that beings from some parallel dimension actually do intersect with us from time to time, and, for lack of a better description, we call them angels or fairies or genii loci. Or Little Men With Walkie-Talkies.