Lake Trump
Donald Trump, in his typically infantile manner, has responded to not getting his way in trade bullying with Canada by signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
Of course no one in Canada will ever recognize or use this name. And of course the only Americans who will ever use it are the diehards still clinging to their Trump fantasy as though the last humiliated shreds of their egos depended on it; and even they will use it with some circumspection, aware of the mocking laughter they will receive from their fellow Americans — not least the millions of Americans who live, and whose ancestors lived, on the American side of that Great Lake, and for whom Lake Ontario is a name connoting personal history and a friendly, world-connecting affiliation with neighbours across the border — for having thus self-identified as last-generation MAGA saps.
All of that, however, is merely the obvious. But what should truly be most striking about this latest Trump foot-stomping, like many previous cases, is the sheer lack of basic human self-awareness or humility it indicates. For who else among us imagines himself so personally significant as to have the authority to unilaterally declare into existence a new world map on his own whim, as though established realities, political history, and centuries-old conventions of language, place, and societal self-understanding were of no consequence next to any random, invective-addled nonsense that comes over his transom at any given moment? In other words, as though the world, its geopolitical configuration, and the billions of people living on this Earth with him were mere malleable playthings of his imagination, to be reformed and adapted according to his changeable feelings of the day. If he is frustrated with Mexico today, then the Gulf of Mexico shall be the “Gulf of America.” If Canada annoys him, then Lake Ontario shall become “Lake America.”
Who else views the world in which he lives with so little deference to historical developments and facts, to the past work and achievements of generations of decent and worthy men, and to the institutions, traditions, and mutual goodwill that constitute civilization in concrete terms? Stated more directly, what kind of man views human precedent, which is to say past humanity, our accumulated heritage, with this level of disdain, this degree of personal entitlement and trampling obliviousness?
I will tell you what kind: a progressive. Worse yet, a progressive with the intellect and moral sense of a spoiled six-year-old, who does not even know he is a progressive (just as his admirers do not know they have embraced progressivism and would deny it to the last breath in their progressive bodies). In other words, a caricature of progressivism. Trump is all the worst political instincts and reflexes of late-modern humanity reduced to their unvarnished and uneducated essence: the smug self-certainty; the dismissal of past greatness and wisdom; the assumption that everything which has not been done, every problem that remains unsolved, is merely evidence that past men were too weak or cowardly to do what was needed; the psychosis of easily blurring the lines between reality and wish, between will and possibility; and the unflinching belief that he and he alone could fix everything forever, if only everyone else would bow to his will and accept what he offers them without question or doubt.
The problem, however, is not so much Trump himself, but rather what his ascendancy, and the loudest alternative voices opposing him, who are almost as detached from and disdainful of reality and history as he is, reveal. The fact that we live in an age when the majority of men are actually looking for such a leader, hoping for such a leader, and disappointed when they fail to find such a leader, is as harsh an indictment of our time as could be issued.
