With a stroke of his mighty felt-tip pen, the Leader of the Free World signed an executive order Thursday affirming that he knows diddly squat about geography.
He also said he was hereby rechristening "Lake Ontario" as "Lake America." Or maybe he said "Mall of America." Sometimes it's hard to keep up.
What's important is that having solved all the real problems, he found time to have his staff create a map of the Great Lakes with "Lake America" on it in big white-on-red letters. Atop the map was an unintentionally funny headline, "Making the Great Lakes Even Greater." which would work better if Jimmy Kimmel said it.
Speaking as a geography minor back in my undergrad days, I can attest that Lake Ontario has been a pretty fair lake, under that name,
since before the signers took their felt-tipped quill pens to the Declaration of Independence and first floated the notion of the United States.
Also, though I had to look this up, 53% of Lake Ontario's surface area belongs to Canada. So for his next executive order, the Leader might ask the Coast Guard to go out along the dividing line and paint a stripe.
“‘Lake of America’ was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the Leader said from the Oval Office, though he probably hasn't.
You could dismiss this as posturing, and just another salvo in the United States' peculiar trade war with Canada, except that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been instructed to update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to reflect the change.
That's the same important step taken last year before the rest of the world rushed to ignore the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, where you can still sit under a beach umbrella and enjoy a refreshing Canada Dry.
Responding to the Leader with what's probably the correct measure of seriousness, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston posted, “We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.”
The change does, however, interfere with the classic memory trick that grade schoolers use to list the Great Lakes − Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior, or HOMES.
With the guidance of the Leader, that becomes HAMES. Or, more fittingly:
SHAME.
On the subject of geography, Neal Rubin has always wondered why Northland Mall was in Southfield. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Renaming Lake Ontario 'Lake America' should give us all a sinking feeling
