When the map becomes a monument to the officeholder

The New York Post reports that Google has altered its maps to show 'Lake America' in place of Lake Ontario, following a presidential renaming order — the same company having made a parallel change to the Gulf of Mexico the previous year. I am not in a position to speak to the mechanics of how a technology company propagates such alterations across its instruments. But the civic question is as old as republican government, and I will speak to that.

A name attached to a body of water or a stretch of earth is not a trivial thing. It is a compact between generations — a piece of shared language that belongs to the citizenry, not to the administration that happens to occupy office on any given day. When a ruler reaches down and renames what nature and long usage have named, he is not honoring his country. He is, in a quiet but unmistakable way, substituting his own image for the country's face.

I spent eight years in the executive office taking considerable care to distinguish between the dignity of the presidency and my own person. The presidency is a trust; it is not a canvas. A man who inscribes his era's name onto permanent geography — lakes, gulfs, continents — is doing what monarchs do. He is saying, in effect, that the land belongs to his moment rather than to the ongoing Republic. That is a precedent I would counsel against in the strongest terms.

There is a secondary matter worth naming plainly. Lake Ontario sits on a border shared with Canada, a neighboring nation with whom, I am told, relations are presently strained. Renaming a shared geographic feature without the concurrence of the neighbor who also borders it is not diplomacy — it is the gesture of a power that has confused confidence with disregard. Permanent quarrels with neighboring nations serve no lasting interest, and small provocations, compounded, have a way of becoming large ones.

I do not single out any party here. The temptation to make the machinery of government speak one's own name is not the property of one faction. It is the ordinary corruption of power, available to anyone who holds the office long enough to forget that the office was not built for them. The counsel I would offer the citizenry is this: watch what a government chooses to rename, and you will learn what it believes it owns. A Republic owns its institutions; it does not own the map of the earth. Keep those two things firmly apart.