Nemo - Clown Fish, Captain, or Concept?

By Don White

I was researching, of all things, Barak Obama's birthplace. There is a lot of controversy just now about whether Barak Obama was a "natural born" citizen of the United States.

I pulled out my Black's Law Dictionary and looked up the words "natural born" and I still didn't get an answer. Then, as humans are prone to do, I lost my original intent and began thumbing through the dictionary and came up with the word Nemo.

Nemo means "no man" or "no one." That's interesting, thought I. Then I thought of the great movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. An Indian, Nemo is captain of the Nautilus who is a wild, yet very interesting, character.

All that is known for sure about Captain Nemo and the Nautilus is that, after the Sepoy Mutiny, Nemo used his scientific genius to construct the submarine Nautilus, the Sword of the Ocean, then gathered together a crew of like-minded mariners, and launched a secret war against War itself.

After destroying a number of vessels, he picked up Professor Pierre Arronax, his assistant counsel,.and harpooner Ned Land, taken from the Abraham Lincoln, a science ship which had been hunting the Nautilus. Eventually they escaped from him, and Nemo and the Nautilus seemed to be destroyed.

Jules Verne wrote the novel(s) about Captain Nemo, aka Prince Dakkar. a fictional character whom Verne featured in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874).

Nemo is one of the most famous antiheroes ever, a very mysterious figure. He was son of an Indian Raja, and he is a scientific genius who roams the depths of the sea in his submarine.

How Nemo was recruited for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by the British Empire is unknown. He hated most governments and especially the Empire which ruled his homeland. One doubts the English overtook him in his submarine because the Nautilus was far more powerful than anything the Brits had in the sea. So the reasons for his joining in this grand quest must have been enormous.

Nemo really does save the world. He steered the Nautilus, first to Paris to capture Mr.Hyde, then to Vienna to stop the Fantom from sinking the city. In their fight with the Fantom's forces in Venice, it was Nemo who fired the missile that interrupted the chain of collapsing buildings and saved Venice.

The Nautilus then pursued the fleeing villain and his ally, Dorian Gray, to the Fantom's hidden lair in the far East, Nemo freed the Fantom's captive scientists and their families. He also helped Hyde fight one of the Fantom's soldiers who, having imbibed a version of Jekyll's drug, had become an even stronger version of Hyde.

After Quatermain's funeral, it was Nemo, motivated by the sacrifice of Allan Quatermain, who suggested the League stay together, with the Nautilus as their base, and use their combined abilities to protect the world. If that sounds like the United Nations, the One World Order, or the role the U.S. has played the past one hundred years, then you now know where Barak Obama and the others got their ideas.

They grew up reading comic books and the funny papers and dreaming of the day they, too, could be valiant Captain Nemos - all the while destroying the Constitution and the freedoms we already have in America. Sometimes good motives turn eccentric people bad.

Finding Nemo is a 100-minute kids and family movie with animation and actors behind the scenes including Albert Brooks, Willem Dafoe, Ellen DeGeneres, and others. This highly successful movie carries a G rating and was released May 30, 2003.

Advertising Week says you could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo. Though half of the name is not original, the concept of a clownfish losing his way in the ocean and having to be found and returned to his family is not only new but original and fun for families and kids.

Manufacturers have developed Nemo toys, bugs, and monsters. But nothing prepared movie-goers for the elation evoked by a neurotically cautious, bright-orange-and-white-striped clownfish named Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and his considerably bolder son, Nemo (9-year-old Alexander Gould, already a pro from his work on ''Ally McBeal''), as each swims his own hero's journey.

This wonderful animated movie brought tears to the eyes of kids and parents alike and reminded oldsters of the old ''Howdy Doody''-era kids' TV puppet show ''Diver Dan.''

Separated from his overprotective father in a moment of youthful curiosity familiar to anyone who has taken a kid to the mall, Nemo is scooped up along Australia's Great Barrier Reef by a dentist and hobbyist diver with an office fish tank to fill, while the horrified Marlin watches. It's a frightening scene, a Disney classic moment of darkness right up there with Simba's witness of Mufasa's death in ''The Lion King.''

Just down the street from our home in Windermere, Florida, and where my boys sometimes work for free tickets into the parks, is Disney World. Our entire family recently enjoyed the live Nemo presentation of dancing, singing, and "swimming" which included actors from our church Andria and Adam Daveline. Before them we had another friend in that great production, Daniel Law, a booming tenor who, like the Davelines, were our Ward's choristers. So the presentation took on extra special meaning to us because of those great and awsome actors and singers that we knew so well.

Getting back to the thesis of this Hub, here are some of the legal terms and quotations from the original Latin word Nemo, meaning "no man.":

• No man is to be admitted to incapacitate himself. (Nemo admittendus est inhabilitare seipsum).
• A man cannot be a judge and a party in his own cause. (Nemo agit in seipsum)
• No one can sue in the name of another (Nemo alieno nomine lege agere potest)
• No one can properly understand any part of a thing until he has read through the whole again and again. *We need to tell this to the crooked U.S. Congressmen who read nothing before passing bills. (Nemo aliquam partem recte intelligere potest, antequam totum iterum atque iterum perlegerit).
• No man is punished twice for the same offense. Nemo bis punitur pro erodem delicto.
• No one suffers punishment on account of his thoughts. Thank goodness. Nemo cogitationis pcenam patitur
  
• No man is compelled to sell his own property, even for a just price. (Nemo cogitur rem suam vendure, etiam justo pretio. (Eminent domain statues are not only unjust but originally were unconstitutional and they should be repealed).

• No man can give that which he has not. Tell Obama and Congress to stop giving away our money to foreign countries and to banks and Wall Street. They don't own our money, though they think they do. Taxes will become onerous under the current administration. Nemo Dare Potest quod non habet.

I could go on and on but won't.

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