Gulf of America: not an oil company ad.

 Lucius Cary, the second (or third, I'm not sure which) Viscount Falkland, has always been one of my favorite philosophers.  I doubt he would have thought of himself as a philosopher; he was a soldier and a man of action, a loyal servant of His Majesty King Charles II during the English Civil War (His Lordship’s side lost, in case you were wondering), and I believe that he would have thought prolonged philosophical thinking a bit of a bore when compared to the less intellectual delights of hacking and slashing His Majesty's enemies into a thousand tiny bloody pieces.  Lord Falkland never wrote a philosophical treatise of interminable length, unlike so many other philosophers then and now, who insist that entire forests come crashing down and get pulped into paper so that they can inflict their deep ideas about the meaning of it all upon a long-suffering and not terribly interested humanity.  No, indeed, Lord Falkland was an Englishman of the empirical school, whose entire philosophical output comes down to us in a single sentence, an observation that he made in passing to a friend. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said, “it is necessary not to change.”  That’s it, that’s the whole of it, and his lordship packed more philosophical depth into that one sentence than many philosophers can pack into tomes so physically and philosophically dense that I could drop said tome on a mouse in the absolute certainty that the annoying little rodent would not survive the encounter.  

So why am I subjecting you to all this philosophical beating around the bush about the subject of this screed? This is an exceptionally good question, and I am sure it might have something to do with my being a royal pain in the general posterior, but there is, in fact, an exceptionally good reason.  If you follow the news at all these days, and who isn’t, given that the current president is much more entertaining than the previous president, you will know that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, said change of name being the product of a presidential executive order brought on by a case of excessive pique at the current president of Mexico. I do not know why The Donald chose this name when there are so many more evocative names that come to mind: the Sea of Margaritas, the Bay of Spring Break, the Bay of Babes, or even the Gulf of Dixie for the politically incorrect . The Gulf of America suffers tremendously by comparison. The Gulf of Mexico is tropic heat and long white beaches, palm trees and the sound of Latin music, sweat trickling slowly down your sides into the small of your back as you sit in your beach chair with your margarita in your hand, watching the towering pastel clouds gathering on the horizon and the tanned bikini-clad senoritas, all smiles and laughter, strolling slowly by at the water’s edge, the sultry breeze coming off the sea, and the taste of tequila on your love’s lips as you kiss her in the moonlight. That is the Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf of America, by contrast, is a gas station.