There’s nothing more patriotic than trucking it down to Houston or New Orleans or Tampa Bay and taking a swim in American freedom. Out with the old “Gulf of Mexico” name and in with the new “Gulf of America”!!
With the stroke of a pen, it was done. Easy peasy.
Have presidents always had this power? Well, I guess they have, but other than an occasional mountain or a bridge, sure doesn’t seem like they’ve done anything cool with it.
Enter the Holy Savior Donald J. Trump (the J stands for Jesus.) And his pen has been workin’ overdrive.
Not since they renamed jellybeans “Starburst Jellybeans” has something been renamed so controversially. But why stop there? Let’s see just how far this barely used super power can take us? Can you rename a continent? What does Antarctica mean anyway? How does “Freedom Continent” sound? Catchy, right? Or maybe we can rename an entire city. Washington DC is so passé. Besides, our first president already has a whole state named after him. What if we renamed DC after the BEST president ever? Trump D.C. And the street signs would look like on the Apprentice!
If we’re going to rename stuff on the map, let’s just rename everything while we’re at it!
The Grand Canyon of Ultimate Triumph, The Mississippi River of Unstoppable Progress, The Great Lakes of American Superiority, The National Parks of Unparalleled Glory. We’ll keep map makers in business for at least a few more years!
If we can rename cities and continents… what about the moon and planets? The Moon can just be called MoonX in honor of his Holiness Elon Musk. Uranus has always been a silly name left to childish puns like “I hear we can see Uranus out tonight. Better bend over, Billy!!” and then all of the kids would chuckle. Ah, great fun. But ultimately, Uranus needs to pay the price for those jokes. We need to get rid of Uranus. How about the order of planets now goes Earth (we skip the first two because Earth always comes first), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Bitcoin, Neptune. Who could possibly say no to this stroke of marketing genius!!
We can fix a bunch of stuff that was never named right in the first place. Like a “toaster” certainly carries with it an expectation that it will make toast. But what if we make it better! Come on out to Sears to buy yourself a new Browning Box! It’s only 30% more expensive and 80% more likely to catch the house on fire! Like what about the term “condom”? Doesn’t even say what it is! How about we call them Pinocchio’s because they only poke out when you spread a bunch of lies!
We can rename the Dollar the “Chipotle” and get a little branding money back into the treasury. Just like when they put ads on the walls at baseball games. You won’t even notice it after a few Timex Cycles (that’s what we call years now.)
Those Nest cameras you put on your doorbell? They have nothing to do with bird nests. Enter the executive pen! They are now called “Catch your drunk neighbor falling on the ice so we can post it to Facebook” cameras! Genius!! Thanks, President Trump!!
Now, it seems that we’ve had a bit of fun with all of this. And, admittedly, renaming a thing or two now and again is pretty harmless. But what it seems that we really need to be watching out for is when Donald looks to rename the title of the executive of the country from “President” to “Grand Ruler.”
(Chris Kamler can be found ruling on X, formerly known as Twitter, as @chriskamler)