Shakespeare would have us believe that a sea by any other name would taste as salty. Trump doesn’t read Shakespeare.
There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political idiocy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.
It’s absurd that users here in the US no longer see “Gulf of Mexico” at all. You can search for that term, and the “Gulf of America” will be the first result, but the 400-year-old name “Gulf of Mexico” no longer appears as a label on maps to US-region users for either Google Maps or Apple Maps. In any even vaguely reasonable political climate, even those in favor of the name change would endorse, perhaps even insist upon, a transitional period where the previous, familiar name appears in parentheses. Insisting that the name be changed in a snap, with no parenthetical reference to the previous name (a name that, again, has been recognized globally for over 400 years, and remains on every single printed map in existence, and every single work of literature and history referencing the Gulf) has some truly Orwellian memory hole vibes. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. It’s always been the Gulf of America.
Much serious thought and consideration, from very smart people in Mountain View and Cupertino, went into determining how to respond to a pro
Apple and Google’s decision to show this made-up name in parentheses to everyone around the world is akin to showing China’s fictionally inflated size of the Diaoyu Islands to everyone in the world, as, say, a dotted outline surrounding the geographically accurate representations of the actual islands’ sizes. There’s a word for this stuff, and that word is propaganda.
Imagine if the government of France decreed that the English Channel was now the “French Channel”. Now imagine that Google and Apple Maps complied, even just to the degree of changing the label, outside France (which, per their company policies, should see “French Channel”) and the United Kingdom (which would still see only “English Channel”) to show the rest of the world, including us in the United States, “English Channel (French Channel)”. It would rightfully be considered insulting nonsense.
The only difference from my hypothetical and our reality with the Gulf of Mexico is that France, in addition to not having a narcissistic would-be autocrat as its president (yet?), is not the world’s lone remaining superpower. That’s what makes Google’s and Apple’s acquiescence worrisome, not merely irritating. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pithily observed over the weekend, on Bluesky, “My take is that your willingness to accept this Gulf of America nonsense is an indicator of your willingness to accept much worse things coming from this administration.”
