The Gulf of You-Know

Toot-toot

I walked around yesterday wearing a t-shirt that said, simply, "The Gulf of Mexico," and people loved it. You'd think I was issuing a trumpet blast. Maybe Google has accepted that one man can rename a major, long-standing body of water, but there are lots of us who call that tacky and petty and beneath us.

To be sure, if we're in North America, the Gulf of Mexico is beneath us. In a good sense. At any rate --

I just looked back up there in the first paragraph and thought, Oh hell, trumpet. Who wants to put his or her lips to an instrument whose name includes that name?

But it's not the horn that needs renaming. It's the orange-o-tan. Except let's not drag a respectable ape into this.

Yes, the original family name was Drumpf, which is the sound of a fat man taking a seat. But we can do better than that. The word strumpet may derive from Late Latin strupum, "dishoner, violation." We could start calling the incumbent president Strupum, but that would be to remix Trump and us.

Perhaps one or another of you, dear Subscribers, will come up with something to rename Trump. Not anything associated with William Penn, I'll tell you that.

Why do I invoke William Penn? Because he was a class act, when it came to naming and American leadership. As will be seen in the following stack, from February of last year, that I am about to lay on you, for free:

"We have to win in November," exclaimed Trump at a rally the other day, "or we're not going to have Pennsylvania." You may think he meant to say, "We've got to have Pennsylvania, or we're not going to win in November," and got confused.

No. He went on: "They'll change the name. They're going to change the name of Pennsylvania."

The pretext for this startling charge was a plan by the National Park Service to remove a statue of William Penn -- who founded Pennsylvania -- from a park in Philadelphia.

What sort of fiendish diversity-pushing was this? Were the feds attempting to weaponize the venerable Keystone State's very name? Just because William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, happened not to have been, like, a trans woman of color or something? "Another sad example," declared a Republican legislator, "of the left in this country scraping the bottom of the barrel of wokeism."

Turns out that’s not exactly the case.

The park where the statue stands is Welcome Park, named for the ship called Welcome, which in 1682 first brought Penn and some sixty-five mostly Quaker colonists from England to what is now Pennsylvania.

So the park was not named for the man in the statue.

Neither, strictly speaking, was Pennsylvania!

Penn's original intent was to christen the new territory New Wales, because its hills resembled Wales's. A member of Britain's privy council, who was Welsh and hated Quakers, put the kibosh on that. Okay, said Penn, how about Sylvania, for the trees.

Aw, come on, said King Charles II. Put a Penn in it.

But Penn didn't want to be accused of vanity. Unlike someone else we could name, Penn wasn't into naming things for himself.

Okay, said the king, so let's name it for your dad.

This made sense, financially. William Penn the Elder had made a bundle, somehow, as an admiral of the royal navy. And had loaned a great deal of that bundle to the king. With interest, the debt had grown to 1500 pounds, which was evidently a lot back then. Here's a big chunk of the New World (bigger than the whole of England), said the Crown to Penn Jr., and call it even.

Sounds a little shady, to be sure. An admiral apparently could get a hand into the acquisition and apportioning of supplies. A fortune off of hardtack kickbacks? At any rate, the admiral was not a Quaker.

His son was. Here's how much of a Quaker he was. Meeting with his king in this matter of Pennsylvania, he refused to doff his hat. So the king doffed his hat. When a king is present, explained the king, there will be only one bare head in the room. Maybe the king did that with a wink — thought it might make little William (as he must have been called many times in his youth) duck his head a little bit. Nope. That's what compounding interest can do for the one who holds the paper.

But Penn was different (as a junior so often will be) from his dad. He was willing to play the situation, but to a righteous end. For him, and his followers, and settlers of other faiths, Pennsylvania was to be a haven from religious persecution. In England young Penn had been imprisoned more than once for stalwartly putting Quakerism ahead of Church and Crown. Once a jury had refused to convict him even after they, the jury, were locked up in the Tower.

And it turned out the Pennsylvania colony was tolerant of religious differences, and did allow for free speech and independent juries, and prided itself on fair trading. Penn labored to make this so, and was such a non-profiteer himself -- although he literally, according to his agreement with the King, owned Pennsylvania -- that on a return to England he was tossed into debtor's prison.

So we may feel like joining in the outrage over the plan to take his statue down. The plan has already been canceled, in response to that outrage, so Trump’s fears for the state as a whole would seem to be exaggerated.

But, well, it turns out that our man Penn was not marble, or even Quaker, clear through. At his estate in what is now suburban Philly, he kept a dozen or so enslaved black people. He even encouraged his colony's involvement in the slave trade.

And then there’s this question:

On what grounds did Britain figure it had Pennsylvania to grant?

Britain had claimed title, in fact, to a swath of North America (as we know it today) extending roughly from south Georgia to New Hampshire (as we know them today) and on out west (what the heck) to the Pacific. The reason Britain felt entitled to that claim was that British navigators had discovered (had beheld, at any rate, after arduous voyages) the eastern coast of that territory.

Never mind that people whose descendants we now call indigenous had been exploring within that territory for centuries, without feeling a need for the concept of real estate.

Even today, spokesmen for those descendants (from their relatively new home in Oklahoma) are quoted as saying they have no problem with a statue of William Penn, because their ancestors regarded him, especially in comparison to other European immigrants, as having been straight with them. He worked out treaties with them, gave them something in return, and adhered to the treaties.

"As to the natives," writes an early biographer of Penn, "in spite of their undeniable cruelty and savage cunning when provoked or wronged, it was quite possible to make friends and allies of them by kindness and fair treatment."

“Savage cunning,” is it? Here’s another form of cunning (though maybe not conscious enough to be called savage):

The name of the ship the Pennsylvanians sailed in on. Say you lived in the area already when here came a ship called Welcome.

What are you going to say to visitors who show up, where you live, out of nowhere, under a banner of "Welcome"?

"Of all the unmitigated gall"?

No, the natives were cooler than that. Maybe, "Uh, okay? Smh."

"Here we come, and WELCOME!" Isn't that just like white people? Even at our least rapacious? Little wonder we have managed to inherit so many places. Maybe even little wonder that so many of us, alas, have embraced You-know-who. Self-welcoming is the way for a con man to arrive.