Trump is playing the rename game again, Lake Ontario to Lake America. I wrote about a similar move last year when he tried to rename Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. The counterexample I used is even more relevant to this week’s Canada rename!
The big point is ALWAYS the same. Psychopaths are predictably unpredictable. They change everything all the time. Change names, change rules. If you try to move “against” a psychopath you are actually moving WITH him. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
The sane approach is to keep your distance from the flying punch machine, hold steady, do your duty, serve your purpose. The punches will go elsewhere soon, and you’ll still be serving your own purpose instead of working for the psychopath.
= = = = = START COUNTEREXAMPLE:
This is one of the EXTREMELY RARE cases where journalists actually work both ways. Via Nieman, journalists have universally derided Trump’s Napoleonic effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. This, of course, is more predictable than gravity. Journalists NEVER go along with anything ordered by Official Wrong Party. This is the opposite of news, zero information in Shannon terms..
Local journalists UNPREDICTABLY refused to go along when the grotesque devil “city” “government” renamed Canada Island to a weird garble of IPA symbols that I won’t bother to write, though I knew IPA before it was cool and made fonts for IPA before Unicode had fonts for IPA. The garble was apparently intended to honor Firstses Nationses Indigenouses Peopleses because they are impoverished and vulnerable and underrepresented and because they own the casinos and finance the government.
Google map shows the normal name:
The city’s official map, used for plats and planning and such, cautiously avoids the dispute:
When the city renamed it from Canada to the weird garble, the most orthodox local media tried to pronounce the weird garble then quickly returned to Canada Island. Now that Trump has officially sanctioned and blockaded Canada, I’m surprised he hasn’t ordered a new rename.
[And this year he got around to it on a much bigger landmark.]
The island didn’t have a name before 1974. It was just part of the riverfront industrial area filled with railroad tracks and warehouses.
When Spokane hosted the 1974 World’s Fair, all the productive industry was cleared out to make room for pavilions celebrating Nixon’s environmental lunacy. The island held Canada’s pavilion, so it became Canada Island.
Polistra's Mill 