Welcome to the United Kingdom of 2029. Nigel Farage, having scraped a majority of parliamentary seats at the general election, summons reporters to a press conference at Downing Street. His desk groans beneath vellum scrolls, each decorated with ribbon and wax seal. You know? The sort of things King John unrolled in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The death penalty is to be reintroduced and retrospectively applied to all those who threw milkshakes at the incoming prime minister. All sweets, drawn from an approved list that includes humbugs, acid drops and aniseed balls, must now be again sold from big glass jars. And the Irish Sea is to be renamed the British Sea.
There are all kinds of reasons why this won’t happen (the impossibility of a victory by Farage’s Reform UK party not being among them). We will get to one of those later. The point is that, a few years ago, this scenario would have seemed no more absurd than a US president renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Part of Donald Trump’s malign genius is to make the impossible seem commonplace. His executive order on geographical nomenclature will have nothing like the practical effect of his policies on immigration, healthcare or foreign aid. But it can hardly be bettered as an example of how he scorns hitherto accepted norms.
Can he even do this? It’s not as if the Gulf of Mexico – almost entirely international waters – is some constituent part of the United States. Isn’t this like me standing on my doorstep in ceremonial doublet and announcing that Dublin Bay will be renamed for my cat? He is increasingly sounding like the victorious rebel leader in the Woody Allen film Bananas as he declared that from then on “underwear will be worn on the outside”. Seemed crazy last week. New normal now.
[ Trump’s adoption of imperial manner is a function of failureOpens in new window ]
The edict does appear to have some power internally. A body called the Geographic Names Information System, a database of placenames with the US, is instructed to “remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico”. The US Board on Geographic Names, a constituent body of the department of the interior, is further urged, according to an article from National Public Radio, “to ensure the change is reflected in agency maps, contracts, documents and communications”.
It hardly needs to be said that countries such as, oh, I don’t know, Mexico are having none of it. It seems unlikely that many European publications will – echoing their ongoing confusion with a popular social-media site – be lumbering readers with “Gulf of America (formerly Gulf of Mexico)” when recommending holidays in Cancún.
But the corporate United States has proved depressingly compliant with the new regime’s dicta. Google Maps has already changed Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on the US site. There will be no alterations for Mexican users, but elsewhere in the world Googlers now see “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.
Associated Press, an international news organisation, has refused to alter its stylebook and is paying the price. “This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing,” the agency noted, adding that it had been warned it would be barred “if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico”.
All very weird. All very sinister. Disputes rage over the names of maritime regions throughout the world. Is it the Arabian Gulf or the Persian Gulf? Google straddles the difference with “Persian Gulf (also known as the Arabian Gulf)”. The Irish Times deems it simply “the Gulf”. The Sea of Japan is that to the Japanese and the “East Sea” to the Koreans.
The difference here is that, until a few weeks ago, no such dispute raged over the Gulf of Mexico. The people of Bahrain and South Korea have, reasonably enough, strong feelings about how neighbouring bodies of water are identified. Nobody in Louisiana or Alabama gave a damn until Trump made an issue of it. The proclamation is a supreme example of his urge to move fast and break things. It also reflects his need to manufacture discord where none exists.
Trump is, however, missing a semantic nuance here. The Gulf of Mexico, in American minds, is (was?) so named because that’s how you get to Mexico from the United States. The case is similar with the Irish Sea. If we were idiots we might argue that the Irish Sea should be named the British Sea as it’s what lies between us and that island.
The current name is, arguably, an instance of Anglocentrism. (Let’s not confuse things by pondering the English Channel). That might be enough to dissuade Farage when he comes to power in four years’ time. Meanwhile nobody much considers what those on the Isle of Man think of it all.
