The potential beauty
Ok that is funny.
Trump, who in the meeting with Carney said he considered himself a “very artistic person”, insists that he is inspired by the potential beauty of a unified continent.
“When you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together … you know, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be’,” the president said.
Ahhh yes, that does indeed demonstrate that Trump is a very artistic person. It works the same way with packets of hundred dollar bills, and barrels of diamonds.
Mind you, there is some truth to the idea that the straight-line borders that appear so often in US maps are kind of irritating. We all know damn well they don’t reflect anything about the land in question, unlike all those squiggly lines that are obviously rivers as well as boundaries. They look wrong. Maps should be of the earth earthy; they should be irregular and bumpy and not drawn with a ruler.
A glance at the map of North America reveals the clean, crisp and unbroken line that spans the Lake of the Woods and then reaches to the Pacific Ocean, neatly tracing the 49th parallel.
That line was agreed on over the course of a string of negotiations between 1783 and 1846, when much of the relevant region had still not even been seen by European settlers.
“It’s not like the British and the Americans had a map and they drew a ruler on it. They didn’t have a map, and they just agreed upon this imaginary line: the 49th parallel. They just projected these imaginary lines further on to a geography that they didn’t know anything about,” said Bown.
Surveys of the lands would have revealed a far more complicated reality, which in many places makes the border nonsensical on the ground. In some place, it cuts the wrong way through mountain valleys; elsewhere, rivers wind back and forth across the frontier.
Squiggly. Bumpy. Organic.
While I tend to agree, there are problems with using rivers as boundaries. Texas and Oklahoma have constant border fights, and there is one Oklahoma town that could be stuck on the Texas side of the river if it moves again…and I wouldn’t wish that on any town, even in Oklahoma.
Carter Lake, IA, meanwhile, is stuck in Nebraska, becoming a suburb of Omaha, because of the movement of the Missouri River. So these Iowans have to live their lives surrounded on all side by Nebraska, cut off from the state they call home.
To use rivers as boundaries, we have to accept mobile boundaries, and I doubt we’re willing to do that.
Trump say he’s artistic. That sounds like a the basis for a Hitler rant if there ever was one.
70% of Canadians (including me) live south of the 49th. The Great Lakes make more robust boundaries than most rivers, though there always seem to be pesky islands to complicate things (not to mention the isthmuses and peninsulas). But if Trump and co are going to raise questions about the validity of the Northern border, wondering if that will open the door to questioning the validity of the US’S southern end?
Not now that it’s been renamed The Gulf of America!
Maybe he will be satisfied with renaming Lake Ontario to Lake New York?
Seanna, I think he’ll insist on naming it Lake Trump.