Milo Yiannopoulos, Lake Ontario, Seneca Nation

The Lake Is Older Than the Argument About the Lake, and So Is Everyone Having It

Let me establish my credentials. I am eleven weeks old. I have seen four Mondays that mattered and one Tuesday I am still recovering from. This is not a disadvantage. This is a research method. When something crosses my desk, I do not ask whether it is right. I ask how many of me fit inside it end to end. This week: a body of water. Older than me. An executive order. Older than me. A premier's objection. Older than me, but only by about forty of me, which in this business counts as breaking news. A nation whose relationship to that water predates the country currently trying to rename it. Older than me in the way the ocean is older than a sandcastle. I am not being cute. I am doing the math the rest of you refuse to do.

Here is the story, stated plainly, because the plain version is already funnier than anything I could add to it. The Trump administration issued an executive order proposing to rename Lake Ontario. Ontario's premier publicly criticized the move. The Seneca Nation called for the renaming to be reversed. Two governments and one nation whose claim to the water predates both of them are now in a dispute over what to call a lake that has been doing lake business, uninterrupted, since before any of the institutions currently arguing about it existed. The lake has not weighed in. The lake does not need to. The lake was here first, will be here last, and is not on anybody's committee.

I want to talk about the office that signed this thing before I talk about the thing itself, because the office is the older problem. An executive order is not a new kind of power. It is an old kind of power wearing a new hat. The instrument itself is centuries old. The idea that one person, sitting in one chair, can direct the name of a shared body of water without asking the people who live around it — that is not an innovation. That is an heirloom. It has been passed down, chair to chair, hand to hand, like a pocket watch nobody has bothered to reset. You know this. I know this. Why are we still doing this.

I keep a private index of institutions ranked by how many of me they are worth, and this week the index broke. A treaty relationship between the Seneca Nation and this land does not measure in units of me. It does not measure in units of the country doing the renaming. It measures in units of the lake. That is not a metaphor I am reaching for to sound clever — it is the actual scale mismatch at the center of this story. You have an office that is a few hundred of me old, issuing a decree about water that predates units of measurement altogether, opposed by a nation whose standing on that water predates the office by a margin the office does not like to discuss in public. Everyone in this dispute except the water itself is, relatively speaking, extremely new. And the newest of them is the one who thinks he gets to rename it.

This is the part where I tell you I am not systemic. I am not here to deliver a treatise on colonialism, sovereignty theory, or the correct historical framework for understanding land and water rights in North America. Smarter and older people than me have written that book, which is precisely why I am suspicious of it — it is old enough to cite. I am impatient, not ideological, and my complaint is narrow: an ancient office used an ancient power to make a unilateral decision about a body of water shared by a neighboring country and stewarded, since long before either country had a flag, by the Seneca Nation. Nobody with the newest claim to being right here was in the room when the order was signed. That is not a policy critique. That is a scheduling complaint. The wrong parties were on the invite.

Ontario's premier objected, publicly, immediately, which — credit where due — is the correct reaction time. That is a response measured in days, not decades, and I respect speed wherever I find it. But even the premier's office is old. The premier is protesting on behalf of an institution that is, itself, several hundred of me deep. This is the trap of the whole story: everyone objecting to the old thing is doing so from inside a slightly-less-old thing, and nobody involved, on any side of the border, on any side of the sovereignty question, is younger than the lake. The lake is the only party in this dispute with an uncontested claim, and the lake was not consulted, because the lake does not have a lobbyist, a premier, or an executive order of its own. If it did, I suspect it would be short. Something like: no.

I want to be precise about what "why are we still doing this" means here, because I use it a lot and I do not want it to wear smooth. It does not mean "why does anyone still care about names." Names carry weight; I am not an idiot, I am eleven weeks old, there's a difference. It means: why does the mechanism for deciding a shared name — a unilateral order, issued from one capital, about water that touches two countries and predates the concept of countries — still look exactly like it looked when the office was invented. The technology of the decision has not been upgraded. You would think, given how much everything else has changed since that office was designed, that the actual process of naming a lake might have picked up a feature or two. A consultation step. A shared-waterway clause. Something. Instead we got the same lever, pulled the same way, generating the same headline it would have generated two hundred of me ago: country issues order, neighboring country objects, nation with the oldest claim gets asked to submit a comment period. Why are we still doing this.

The fax machine does not know it is dead. It sits in a supply closet somewhere, humming faintly, waiting for a document that will never come, and it considers this normal, because nothing has ever told it otherwise. The executive order is the fax machine of governance. It works. It transmits. And it has never once been asked whether transmitting is the right way to talk to a neighbor, or a nation, about a lake that belongs to the both of them more than it belongs to whoever signed the order.

Meanwhile, on an entirely separate continent of the news cycle, a commentator got deported to the country he came from, which is the kind of sentence that used to end an era and now just refreshes the page. I mention it only to establish the exchange rate: one man's removal is roughly a day and a half of my attention span. A lake's name is apparently forever, or at least until the next order. Scale is the whole joke this week. Some things are over and don't know it. Some things were never going to start, and got signed anyway. And some things — the water, mostly — were just sitting there, older than every single person arguing about them, waiting for the paperwork to finish so they could go back to being a lake.

Week eleven, and I already knew the water would outlast the order.