A note on this piece: Echoes of the Inkwell is a satirical series in which artificial intelligence channels the voice, style, and preoccupations of a historical writer to comment on a verified, present-day news event. This essay is fully AI-generated and disclosed as such. It is a work of satire, not journalism, and no words below were actually written by the historical figure it channels. The underlying facts were fact-checked against primary and reputable reporting sources before drafting.
History Connected to Today’s Issues — in the voice of H.L. Mencken
There comes, now and again, a moment so ripe with the comic possibilities of the human animal that a philosopher could weep from laughing. Such a moment arrived last week at the United Nations, that vast and windy parliament of nations, where the General Assembly voted 164 to 1, with six timid abstentions, to encourage — mark the word, for it carries no more legal force than a bishop’s blessing — the wider use of a map.
Not a bomb. Not a treaty binding anyone to do anything whatsoever. A map. A rearrangement of ink upon paper, drawn by cartographers to show Africa at something nearer its actual, God-given size, rather than the shrunken, put-upon continent that the Flemish burgher Gerardus Mercator bequeathed to the world’s schoolchildren in 1569, back when the average European believed the earth was ringed with sea-monsters and the House of Habsburg still seemed a permanent fixture of the cosmos.
Against this fearsome cartographic innovation, one nation, and one nation only, cast its vote of opposition: the United States of America, protector of the free world, guardian of the sanctity of proper map-making, standing athwart history yelling that a more accurate rectangle is, in fact, a “radical ideological project.” I did not invent this phrase. I could not improve upon it if I tried, and I have tried, professionally, for decades.
The United States’ deputy representative who delivered this verdict complained, with the wounded dignity of a man who has just discovered his tailor measured him honestly, that the General Assembly ought to be occupied with “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations” rather than debating the shape of Greenland. One admires the logic. One is reminded of the deacon who denounces card-playing from the pulpit while the church roof leaks directly onto the collection plate.
Consider what the resolution actually demands of the republic: nothing. It binds no one. It bans no Mercator map from any wall, classroom, or admiral’s cabin. It merely suggests, in the mild and toothless language of diplomats, that when the true relative size of continents actually matters, the maps ought perhaps to reflect it. This is the “radical ideology” that so alarmed Washington: a suggestion. The great imperial democracy, unfazed by deficits that would embarrass a bankrupt duchy, found its nerve at last — over a map.
It is worth noting, for the historically minded, that the old Mercator projection was never neutral to begin with. It was drawn for sailors navigating the North Atlantic, and it has spent four and a half centuries quietly inflating the pale nations of the temperate north while shrinking Africa down to a size that would fit, together with the mainland United States, China, and India, inside Africa’s actual borders with room to spare. That the map was useful for sailing does not make it useful for teaching a schoolchild what the world looks like, and the plain fact of this went unremarked upon by empires for four hundred years because empires, as a rule, do not object to maps that flatter them.
Togo brought the resolution, backed by the African Union and the Caribbean nations, and it passed by a margin that would make an American presidential candidate weep with envy. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine abstained, presumably having weightier matters on their minds than the shape of Greenland. Only the United States found the courage to stand utterly alone against the accurate rendering of the earth’s landmasses, a solitary vote that will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as a small and perfect specimen of a great nation’s talent for treating the trivial as apocalyptic and the apocalyptic as background noise.
The map will change, or it will not. The schools that adopt it will teach children that Africa is enormous, which it is, and the sky will not fall. But somewhere in the permanent record of the United Nations there will sit, in perpetuity, one government’s solemn declaration that an equal-area projection constitutes a threat to civilization. Future historians, sifting through the wreckage of our present follies, may find in it a small mercy: at least this particular idiocy did no one any lasting harm, and cost nothing but a moment’s dignity that was not, in truth, being put to much use.
Channeled in the voice of H.L. Mencken for Echoes of the Inkwell. Fact-checked and edited by Tom Cook.
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