Satire: The name game revisited

By Laurie Baron in San Diego

Donald Trump is at it again.  He just can’t resist slapping his or some faux patriotic name on bodies of water and buildings.  First, it was the Gulf of Mexico whose name he changed to the Gulf of America even though Mexico’s coastline with the Gulf is twice as big as that of the United States’.  He’s contemplating erecting a wall around Mexico’s Gulf beaches so that no Gulf of America water illegally washes onto Mexico’s shoreline.

Then he decided that he’s such a connoisseur of the fine arts that the Kennedy Center should be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center.  After Federal courts rejected this change, he appointed his lackies to the Center’s Board of Trustees to circumvent their rulings.  He’ll soon designate Kid Rock as the Center’s singer-in-residence.

Now he’s so angry at Canada for rejecting the last-minute conditions the United States demanded in the trade negotiations between the two countries that he’s renamed Lake Ontario Lake America.  This is just the beginning of Trump’s new names for the Great Lakes which he refers to as the Greatest Lakes. Lake Superior is slated to become Lake Superior White Race.  He’ll end the feminist implications of Lake Huron by dubbing it Lake His Sons.  He’ll politicize Lake Michigan’s name by rebranding it Lake Criminality since it’s corrupted by having Chicago and Milwaukee on its shores.  To intimidate Democrats, he’ll refer to Lake Erie as Lake Fear Me.

But why stop at lakes?  Given Mar-a-Lago’s proximity to the Atlantic, it will soon be the MAGAtlantic.   Trump finds it intolerable that the word pacific means peaceable.  It’s obvious that the Pacific Ocean must be stripped of that nomenclature and called the Warlike Ocean.

Finally, his plan to place the Strait of Hormuz under American jurisdiction will entail renaming it in honor of Pentagon Pete.  From now on, it will be known as the Strait of Male Hormones.

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Laurie Baron, retired from San Diego State University, is a professor emeritus of history.