(March 16 print edition, T-P) The Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico.
The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education just wasted everybody’s time, probably some money and perhaps our schoolchildren’s educational quality by voting unanimously that state schools will now adopt the “Gulf of America” nonsense emanating from the Oval Office.
BESE is an overwhelmingly conservative board in a decidedly conservative state, but its adoption of the tendentious “Gulf of America” nomenclature is anything but conservative. In fact, it’s not even a sign of patriotism; instead, it is merely performative jingoism.
What BESE did is wrong on two levels, one substantive and one practical.
Substantively, it — along with President Donald Trump — is wrong because pretending to change the name is ahistorical, unnecessary and insulting to allies.
The familiar body of water has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since 1550, and became almost universally known as such in the mid-17th Century. The international body generally considered definitive for global place names, the International Hydrographic Organization, always has called it the Gulf of Mexico.
Never, ever, has it been the Gulf of America.
This matters. Modern political “conservatism,” of course, isn’t directly synonymous with “traditionalist,” but a key feature of conservatism does involve respect for tradition and historicity, unless and until empirical facts or strong reasoning support tradition’s abandonment.
There is no strong reasoning here. In his proclamation pretending to rename the Gulf, Trump doesn’t even offer reasoning other than saying, essentially, “we love the Gulf and we’re America so we can call it what we want.” It’s just baboon-like chest-thumping. And it’s meaningless. Even if one accepts the dubious proposition that Trump can rename part of the Gulf by unilateral edict, that supposed authority cannot extend beyond 12 nautical miles from U.S. shores.
The rest, by the same international laws that the U.S. relies on to say that China does not own the entire South China Sea, consists of international waters. The minute the U.S. stops respecting time-honored international conventions is the minute we lose any moral authority to insist that other, hostile nations also respect them.
And as simple geographic fact, more Mexican coastline than U.S. coastline, 1,743 miles to 1,631 miles, borders the Gulf.
From Trump, the move also is hypocritical. This is the same president who had conniption fits over renaming military bases bearing the names of Confederate generals. Even putting aside the issue of slavery, Trump would have us believe that place names are sacrosanct even when they involve the U.S. Army honoring generals who literally fought against the U.S. Army, but that place names are not sacrosanct even when no discreditable history begs to lose a place of honor.
Put all that aside, though, and just consider practicalities that conservatives usually value, such as costs. International publications have had a field day, for example, with the story of how a Mobile, Alabama institution recently rebranded itself, at significant expense, as the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, suddenly, it faces tremendous costs in signage and entire promotional campaigns if it is to de-brand after just spending loads to create the new moniker.
That’s just one example. All over the South, institutions and governments trying to follow Trump’s lead will be spending money changing logos, replacing signposts, buying new maps and the like.
Now Louisiana’s state school board, due to a random impulse of a president who never even mentioned the Gulf in his campaign and against all the historical norms that should guide academia, is joining the expensive parade. And all before even waiting to see if the renaming “sticks,” so to speak.
This is impractical to the degree that it could harm educational quality. Although the changes to course materials will not be mandatory immediately, the state Department of Education will be working with fourth- and fifth-grade social studies publishers to ascertain that the new name is included in new teaching materials.
But will the tail wag the dog? There exists ample resistance to the bogus new name. Not all publishers will comply. The ones that do may well charge higher prices to do so. And legitimate questions exist: Will the publishers willing to change be the same publishers whose materials already match Louisiana’s standards? What if they don’t? If push comes to shove between “Gulf of America” nomenclature and what otherwise are the best instructional products, which will take precedence?
Trump’s attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico came so suddenly it was like an unexpected effusion of effluvia. Last I checked, good education is grounded in timeless values, not in what amounts to an adolescent mind burp.
{That’s the full column. The original was here.}
