Boy, the hue and cry raised by Donald Trump's promise to re-naming things isn't going away any time soon. The president-elect has proposed renaming a bunch of features and places, including reverting the name of the Great Land's prominent feature, Denali, back to "Mt. McKinley." Not to cast any aspersions on President McKinley, but with all due respect, he was from Ohio and never really had anything to do with Alaska.
Besides, pretty much everyone up here will keep on calling it Denali; that's what most folks have always called it.
Of course, the president-elect hasn't stopped with Alaska. He has espoused serious territorial ambitions, and sounds enthusiastic about renaming things; in one recent example, he called to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America." Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, wasted no time in firing back:
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum dove into President-elect Trump’s chatter of geopolitical rearrangement Wednesday, proposing a name change for North America in response to Trump’s musings about the Gulf of Mexico.
In a wide-ranging press conference Tuesday, Trump expounded on his aspirations of U.S. territorial expansion to Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
Sheinbaum, in her daily morning press conference Wednesday, said the body of water shared by Cuba, Mexico and the United States is internationally recognized as the Gulf of Mexico, adding that North America was historically marked on maps as Mexican America.
“I mean obviously ‘Gulf of Mexico,’ the name is recognized by the United Nations, an organism of the United Nations. But next, why don’t we call it ‘Mexican America’? It sounds nice, doesn’t it?” Sheinbaum said, waving to a historical map projected on a screen.
Well, since when have we cared what the United Nations thinks?
Seriously, the Estados Unidos de Mexico (United States of Mexico,) a country with significant internal problems, is not really in the position to be dictating new place names outside its own territory. Moving north, RedState's own Susie Moore has already suggested a new name for Greenland, and honestly, I can't improve on it; she's up for calling it "MAGADONIA."
Previously on RedState: Trump: Let's Rename the Gulf of Mexico
But while we're renaming terrain features, bodies of water, and so forth, why not go all out? Go big or go home, right? As it happens, I have some ideas.
Canada presents some interesting possibilities, including Poutineland and Syrupadonia. I'm inclined, though, to go with North Montana. It sets a better tone than North Vermont.
Hudson Bay: That name is kind of archaic. Oh, there's still a Hudson Bay Company, but it's not as big a deal as it was. How about renaming this big body of water "Trump Bay"?
The Mississippi River: I'm pretty sure this name is either racist or appropriating some culture or another. I'm good with calling it the "Reagan River." For the Missouri, because of the association with the Gipper, we can call the "Goldwater River."
And, of course, the District of Columbia, in a win for truth-in-advertising, can simply be renamed "The Swamp."
Iceland... OK, that name already pretty much nails it. Iceland is, precisely that, icy, except when it's actually exploding from volcanic activity. Death Valley, too - we aren't really going to top that.
Oh, and while we're renaming things, can we revert all of our military bases to names we recognize? Fort Benning, Fort Hood, and so on. The bases named for former Confederates were done so out of an effort at reconciliation, acceptance, and renewal after the Civil War. We shouldn't just discard that.
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I suppose we need to throw the left a few bones, just to ease all these renaming projects along. How about this? "Lake Superior," I'm pretty sure, is somehow judgemental and hurtful to the differently-distinguished. The name should be changed to "Lake Non-Judgemental." And San Francisco, in homage to the apparent idol of many San Francisco voters, can be renamed "Marxville." I'd be OK with "Pelosigrad," too. It sets the right, Soviet-style tone.
OK, it's not that easy to do this in the real world. There's a process for changing the names of features within our borders; the Department of the Interior is in charge of that function. But outside? The United States can't force an international acceptance for the renaming of a body of water that includes the territorial waters of a couple of different countries. We just can't. So, fun as it would be to have the name, "Gulf of America," that's probably not going to happen. President-elect Trump is, I suspect, trolling the left, which he seems to enjoy. But then, so am I.
