New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, called it “silly talk.” Manitoba’s premier, Wab Kinew, thought it seemed “a little sad.” In his social media remark, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was a trifle more explicative:
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.
I should note that rarely does a national leader include the word hydronym, whether singular or plural, in a statement addressing matters of such enormous importance as foreign affairs and international trade.
Indeed, I’d never run across the noun. Although its meaning is self-evident, I looked it up anyway: “the proper name of a body of water.” Emphasis on proper name.
Thus P.M. Carney prefaced his hydronymic comment with an etymological justification for the propriety of this particular body of water’s designation:
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
What’s in a name? Would Lake Ontario by any other name sound as sweet? With apologies to Shakespeare, wrong question. Because again, the emphasis here is on the body of water’s proper name. Not a sad, silly name assigned to the lake by a sad, silly old man—especially one who happens to be the president of the United States.
Who yesterday declared that, by order of regal fiat, his lackeys had “filed all the necessary papers, documents,” and so “this is official, effective immediately”—from this day forward, Lake Ontario is Lake America.
On the other hand, explained the Times, “Like Mr. Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Thursday’s order most likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change.”
That is to say, the change exists only in the sad, silly and yet fiercely unbalanced mind of Donald J. Trump.
When stacked against his grinding ruination of not only the American but world economy and his wholesale destruction of U.S. power and global admiration of the nation’s principles, the abject peurility of his “Lake America” shtick might seem just as insignificant.
And perhaps it is. Still, Trump’s sad, silly second act of an “official” redesignation strikes me as another exceptionally scary, tectonic shift in madness—another peak explosion within the inverted spiral of his whirling insanity.
For his abnormally focused obsession over the imaginary name of a Great Lake comes in the thick of his obliviousness to what Prime Minister Carney noted: “reality,” and in this case, merely “naming reality.”
Trump’s detachment from what’s unalterably real, however, further manifests in the playing of juvenile name games as his own country and the world he lit on fire burn all around him—the flames multiplying either altogether unnoticed by him or dismissed as what’s truly insignificant.
Historians of ancient Rome tend to see Nero as monstrously cruel but not really insane; historians of early 21st-century America will, I’m convinced, see Trump as both.
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