Trump Renaming Things & the Fight for Werewolf Path

There are two things we should have learned before we elected President Donald Trump. He is very good at these.

He’s good at firing people (from his experience at The Apprentice.)

He’s good at renaming things (mostly by naming something, such as a building, after himself.)

I think it might have been a good idea to have considered all this when we elected him. We’re certainly getting enough of both today.

Trump enjoys renaming things. He renamed the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building into the Trump Building, the Bonwit Teller Building into the Trump Tower and the Gulf and Western Building into the Trump International Hotel and Tower. And that’s just in Manhattan.

Now, with his new job, he’s suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, the State of North Dakota to “Dakota” to give it a bit of a dash, and a mountain in Alaska known as Mount Denali into its former name, which was Mount McKinley.   When something is renamed after a president, it should be kept that way. Wink, wink.

He’s also proposed renaming certain treaties with our allies. I’ll use the acronyms here rather than the blizzard of words. NAFTA would become USMCA, APEC to IPEF and NATO to NATO-ME.

One obvious place he’s overlooked in re-naming, it seems to me, is New Mexico. Call it New America. We won the war with Mexico in 1848. It should reflect that.

Anyway, personally I have taken Trump’s obsession with renaming things a step further. I’ve had the pleasure of naming things that have never been named before. I’ve gone wild in doing this.

When I first began publishing Dan’s Papers, I decided it would be a good idea to include a map of the area somewhere in the back. People could carry the paper around in their cars and, to not get lost, pull over and refer to it. (This was long before Google Map or Waze.)

So I commenced to draw such a map. I got to see the existing roads in a Hagstrom’s Almanac, which laid them down pretty accurately. I couldn’t just reprint Hagstroms, though. I’d get sued. But I could draw my own map with pen and paper. You can’t copyright the actual roads of course.

In making this drawing, I came to notice that a lot of roads, shown as dotted lines because they were unpaved, had no names. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I just named them? Like an explorer coming upon a new and unknown land, standing tall, what is it they say? With the sweep of a hand, they say “I name thee…” and that’s that.

I also noticed that some of the existing roads had very interesting names. For example, there was Abraham’s Path and Highway Behind the Pond in East Hampton, and there was Gin Lane and David White’s Lane in Southampton.

Trump was a toddler at that time, when you think about it. I’m six years older than he is. So I was old enough to enjoy naming what had never been named before. He wasn’t.

One dotted line in East Hampton I named “Lost Cow’s Journey.” Another became “Lois Lane” (after the Superman character I’d read about). I named a dirt road “Rumrunner’s Charge” and “Fat Mosquito Road” in Napeague and came up with “Wrong Way” and “Murder Hill” in Montauk. In Southampton I named a dirt road connecting Deerfield Road and Big Noyac Path “Werewolf Path.” And in Bridgehampton I proceeded with my one single effort in changing a name. There was a road called “Blank Lane.” Pretty awful. At the very moment I was drawing that lane on my map I got a phone call from a friend, so I decided to rename Blank Lane into “Michael O’Donoghue’s Road” in his honor and told him so.

As the years went by, of course, roads got paved and none of my names actually stuck — except for one.

A street sign had been put up in Southampton showing what I had named it. It said “Werewolf Path.”

I was so happy about this. And I wrote about it. Which brought it to the attention of the powers that be in the Town of Southampton. Yes, that year — it was 2012 — they had accepted that name. Often they’d accept new names if people put up signs and the name stuck. But actually, officially, it turned out, “Werewolf’s Path” had not yet been voted upon.  And since you (meaning me) made such a fuss about it, we’re going to erase that name and just call it as an extension of another road that reached to it.

I thought that was just so mean. But, of course, there was nothing I could do about it, except, well, hold a demonstration in front of Town Hall demanding Werewolf Path be accepted and that the other name whatever it was be thrown in the dumpster.

The demonstrators, of course, came from my staff.  I had made it an order. Make signs. Demonstrate and shout in front of town hall for a half hour, have it photographed, and I would write still another story about it, including the photo. I did that. But it got nowhere. The town was sticking to its guns. And so it was the end of the road for Werewolf Path.

On the other hand, having gathered up the four big signs on sticks I had ordered made up, I discovered something very embarrassing. On every sign, the word WEREWOLF was misspelled. They’d spelled it WAREWOLF. The newspaper had made this horrendous typographical error. Which nobody had noticed until afterwards. Not a great moment for Dan’s Papers.

I still have one of these signs in my garage though. A reminder. Of something.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, this is what I think Trump is up to with all he’s doing today.

I think that in four years’ time he and Elon will have changed the name of South Africa to United States East so Elon can qualify for citizenship and run for president. With his vast wealth, he will easily win. And then he and Donald will take all the gold out of Fort Knox, load it into a rocket and fly off to Mars — a whole new planet requiring a whole lot of new names.

They will go “I name thee…” over and over and Mars will become the Dubai of the universe, home to the wealthiest beings in the cosmos. And Elon and the Donald will own it all.

It’ll be amazing.