A baffling problem in the Trump era is separating its sinister aspects from its pathetic self-embarrassments. On Tuesday, the White House turned away an Associated Press reporter from an Oval Office event. The reporter had done nothing wrong. The refusal was intended to punish the AP collectively for disobeying President Donald Trump’s edict to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”
The decree and its enforcement were indeed sinister—an effort to bend reality to one man’s whim. But they were also pathetic, a revelation of inner weakness, not national strength.
Consider how the Gulf of Mexico got its name in the first place. It was not from the Mexicans themselves. The ancient Aztecs knew the oceans to their west and east as “Sky Water.” They did not invent geographically specific names for the seas around them, because they did not need them.
The Gulf of Mexico instead got its name from 16th-century Spanish mapmakers. In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.
Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. The Bight of Benin was not called that by the people of the Benin kingdom. It was named by the Europeans who sailed across the bight (an old word for bay) toward Benin.
The Indian Ocean. The Java Sea. These were not labels chosen by the Indians or Javanese, but by European seafarers en route to India and Java.
Even European home waters were named by sailors after their destination. The Irish Sea was the route from England to Ireland; the Gulf of Finland was the way taken by non-Finns on the south shore traveling to trade with the Finnish people on the north shore.
An apparent exception, the English Channel, is no exception at all.
The Romans bestowed the name “Britannic Ocean” upon the water between their continental empire and their British colony. The medieval English knew the sea by the ancient Latin name. They sometimes more loosely referred to the waters around them as “the German Ocean”—because they offered the way to the rich markets of the Rhine Valley and the German coast. But in the 1600s, the supreme naval power of northwestern Europe was the Dutch Netherlands. For the Dutch, the significance of the channel was that it guided them to England and then onward into the Atlantic. It was the Dutch who spread the term English Channel. Because the English relied on superior Dutch charts for a long time, the Dutch name stuck—despite the efforts of some English geographers to replace the name with the more romantic and less objectifying “Narrow Seas.”
Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.
Maybe, in that very specific sense, the attempted renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is a fitting memorial to the Trump era. Trump’s act of imperial boastfulness unwittingly reveals a disquieting self-awareness of imperial decline. As so often, Trump claims to be a winner while acting like a loser.
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