What’s in a Name?

Yesterday I had a post go viral on Threads, a response to the announcement of an Executive Order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and Google’s rapid compliance with this decree. From now on, Google Maps will show this body of water that I know well from my childhood in Houston, Texas as the “Gulf of America” in the United States and the internationally recognized Gulf of Mexico everywhere else.

My response was “I know it’s a minor issue in the scheme of things but the whole name change makes the people of the U.S. look like brainwashed sheep in a dictator country.” This post now has around 2,000 likes and dozens of replies, most along the lines of “Ya think?” or “If the shoe fits…”

I called it a minor issue only because ICE offices now have quotas of immigrants to round up, and to meet the quotas, they’re not only going after the undocumented ones. And funds for WIC, EBT, Meals on Wheels, and Medicaid have been frozen, putting countless people in danger of malnutrition and death. No lives are at stake in a name change that no other country in the world will recognize.

One person responded by saying that the president has the right to change any name and gave the example of Stalingrad to Volgograd. But cities and other landmarks that are entirely within one country (including Denali, which the same EO changed back to Mt. McKinley) are different from a body of water that borders three countries — in this case Mexico and Cuba as well as the U.S. All three countries must agree for the name to be changed officially.

But this order does have ominous significance. First of all, it reflects a common practice of dictators to make changes singlehandedly without conforming to existing rule of law. Typically, when names of landmarks are changed, the process involves Congressional approval. The Congressional Record contains countless renamings of post offices and other Federal buildings. Similarly, state and local name changes go through an approval process that involves more than one person. In other countries, dictators have moved swiftly on renamings that border on the ludicrous. For instance, in 2002, Turkmenistan’s dictator for life, Saparmurat Niyazov, renamed the days of the week and months of the year after members of his family and his favorite words. (The names were changed back to their original ones in 2008, two years after Niyazov’s death.) Under despot Mobutu Seso Seko, who seized power in a coup that toppled the Congo’s leftist leader Patrice Lumumba — an event brilliantly portrayed in the Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat — the country’s name was changed to Zaire. (Again, the name was changed in 1997 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo after Mobutu’s overthrow.)

Second, the quick capitulation of Google, an example of obeying in advance since the company could have simply ignored this illegitimate decree, shows the willingness of tech companies to censor the internet at the behest of a dictator. We see this in China, where the Great Firewall limits Chinese citizens’ awareness of the outside world as well as their knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the mass incarceration of the Uyghur people today. We see it in Russia, where it is illegal to call the invasion of Ukraine a war; to the brainwashed and/or terrorized people of that country, it is known as the “Special Military Operation.” Will the tech companies impose similar restrictions on information in the U.S.? The fact that we now have to use VPNs, accessing maps from other countries’ servers, to see the Gulf of Mexico named as such, shows how easy it is to restrict the flow of information within the country and to cut the majority of people off from the rest of the world. And without access to other perspectives, it’s easy to brainwash a population, to make them believe absurdities because they don’t know anything else.

As Voltaire is credited with saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” So maybe it’s not such a minor issue after all.