Go ahead, pick the "wrong" fight

Straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of MEXICO

Last week, I was standing in front of the stage at the 40 Watt club in Athens, Georgia for one of the Drive-By Truckers’ annual homecoming concerts when the band walked on stage and co-founder Patterson Hood kicked things off by reciting the opening lines of The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek” over the angry wail of an electric guitar:

When I get off of this mountain / I’ll tell you where I’m gonna go / straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of

Hood left the last word for the audience to fill in: Mexico. Then he repeated: Straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of and the audience responded again, this time more forcefully: MEXICO. And then one final time, louder still: MEXICO!

It was as cathartic as moment as I’ve experienced in the last three months: A few hundred people (many of them middle-aged white people, many from the Deep South) collectively — defiantly, joyously, derisively — expressing a refusal to go along with the latest racist bullshit from a would-be autocrat. It has been the Gulf of Mexico for 400 years and it will be the Gulf of Mexico for 400 more and neither Donald Trump nor anyone else can make us pretend otherwise.

Then a couple days later I saw this nonsense:

Atlantic senior editor Gilad Edelman blames Barack Obama’s decision to change the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali” — a name change the state of Alaska requested half a century ago — for Donald Trump’s extremely racist and extremely ridiculous order that the United States government refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” But that’s a side note: Edelman’s real reason for writing is to complain about the Associated Press (an international news company that says its “journalism is seen by over half the world’s population every day”) announcing it will continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico, as the entire world has done for 400 years. None of that is even the dumbest part. The dumbest part is that the Edelman concludes his argument by noting “Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. … The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ or the ‘Gulf of America.’” Which, of course, is all the Associated Press did: Decide for itself.

So what are we even doing here? Why did The Atlantic inflict upon its readers a piece whose conclusion repudiates its publication? Because The Atlantic and its ilk like nothing better than lecturing people for disapproving of Donald Trump’s dumb and racist actions, but maybe I’ll come back to that some other time.

For today, I want to focus on the article’s headline, “The ‘Gulf of America’ Is the Wrong Fight to Pick,” and on this passage:

This is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.

First of all, the AP didn’t pick this fight. Donald Trump picked it. As John Gruber notes, “until Trump’s executive action, there was no controversy, zero, none, nada, anywhere in the world, amongst any group of people, regarding the name of the Gulf of Mexico.” And Trump didn’t pick this fight because Barack Obama went along with Alaska’s desire for the federal government to join Alaskans in calling Denali “Denali.” Trump picked this fight because he’s a racist autocrat, and blaming Barack Obama for that is gross.

Given that Trump picked this fight, it is tautological to observe that “This is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have,” but tautology is as good as Edelman’s piece gets. Edelman seems to think that Trump wanting to have this fight is a compelling reason for others to stand down — failing to consider the rather obvious possibility that the precise reason Trump picked the fight is that Trump thinks he wins either way.

If people engage in the fight,¹ Edelman argues, “it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law.” I should acknowledge that this is only the second piece Edelman has published in The Atlantic since Donald Trump’s election last November and that the other one was headlined “Just Say No to Terrible White LEDs,” so although I’m not entirely sure this is the guy who should be lecturing the rest of us about getting “distracted” from more serious Trump administration transgressions I will stipulate that there exist more important things, and Edelman himself seems to be pretty good evidence that some people are easily distracted.

On the other hand, if people don’t engage in the fight — if they instead meekly go along with Donald Trump’s dumb attempt to unilaterally change the name of an international body of water that has been called the Gulf of Mexico for longer than either Mexico or America have been countries — they grant Trump the power to do what Edelman acknowledges Trump cannot do on his own: control the English language. As Gruber put it: “Insisting that the name be changed in a snap, with no parenthetical reference to the previous name … has some truly Orwellian memory hole vibes. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. It’s always been the Gulf of America.”² Voluntarily going along with things that closely resemble the 20th century’s most famous fictional illustrations of authoritarianism is generally a bad idea.

So it’s kind of a lose-lose, and I confess I can’t get particularly worked up about whether Gilad Edelman refers to the Gulf of Mexico by its 400-year-old name or by Donald Trump’s latest gimmick. I do think the notion that anyone, even the Associated Press, calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico constitutes a major distraction is a bit far-fetched, but whatever. If continuing to call a body of water by the only name for it he has ever known will tax Edelman’s brainpower so much that he won’t notice the smash-and-grab job Elon Musk is pulling, I won’t begrudge his efforts to conserve some energy. But Edelman’s presumptuous decision to tell other people to stand down — that’s a bridge too far.

As for me, I go back to where I started several paragraphs ago: to last week in Athens, Georgia. To the value of saying No, I won’t go along with this. Of remembering — individually and collectively — who we are and what we’ll do and what we won’t. Continuing to call the Gulf of Mexico by its name won’t force the Trump administration to abandon its insistence that the government call it the “Gulf of America.” It won’t topple autocracy. It isn’t a fight we can “win.” It’s a symbolic gesture, for our own small benefit and for that of others. Particularly the targets of Trump’s racism: There’s value in showing them that we aren’t all going along with this bullshit.

We aren’t in a situation in which we can pick only the “right” fights; only fights we can clearly win. Things are so much worse than that, and will be for a very long time. The cold hard truth is there aren’t very many fights we can have a high degree of confidence we can win; there’s too much stacked against us. We have to be willing to pick some fights we will probably lose, because those are pretty much the only kinds of fights we have.

That doesn’t mean we must pick every fight, but it does mean we should think twice, or maybe three times, before we lecture others about what fights not to pick. If you find yourself thinking everyone else is picking the wrong fights and the fight you want to fight is a sure winner, I’m pretty sure you haven’t thought hard enough about how hard your preferred fight is going to be. We don’t have sure wins, or even likely wins. It’s time to let a hundred flowers bloom.

And, yes, the stakes of this one might be relatively small. The flip side to that is that so are the downsides of resisting it. There are going to be some Trump administration actions that some people are going to have very serious reasons for not publicly contesting — the fear that doing so will get them deported or illegally imprisoned or harassed or targeted for violence. This isn’t one of them. Nobody’s going to get thrown in jail for calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no real consequence to defiance.

That raises a question: What happens if the Trump administration sees that people won’t take even a low-effort, consequence-free stand against their dumbest, most unnecessary actions?³

1. Here I should remind you that “the fight,” as Edelman defines it, consists simply of declining to join Trump in referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” — he isn’t criticizing anyone for filing a lawsuit to block the government action; he’s criticizing people for continuing to use the phrase “Gulf of Mexico.”

2. Gruber’s piece is not a response to Edelman’s; it is rather a lengthy consideration of a much more interesting and difficult question: how should mapmakers, specifically Apple and Google, respond to the United States government changing t he way it refers to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a thoughtful piece and is worth a read.

3. As usual, Jamelle Bouie put it better and shorter than I did: