lenny unencumbered

He named me. He liked the sound of it. And I said, well, all right. I felt a little odd about it. I don’t understand all that name changing business anyway… No, he felt that Lauren Bacall was better sounding than Betty Bacall. He had a vision of his own. He was a svengali. He wanted to mold me. He wanted to control me. And he did until Mr. Bogart got involved.

–Betty Joan Perske, aka Lauren Bacall

Soon after the ANC took power in South Africa in 1994, it began renaming roads, towns, and cities, among other things. At the time, major debates focused on whether it was necessary to spend taxpayer money on renaming while more urgent problems needed attention. Those debates continue.

I understand and agree with the need to change names associated with our racist colonial and apartheid legacy, but I also felt that the timing was off. It needed to be managed more judiciously, while priority was given to more pressing matters.

America, on the other hand, as a prosperous nation, has the latitude to change names at will. Not that the country doesn’t have more urgent problems, but it does have money to burn, given how much it squanders on its military. When an egotistical man-child wields that will, however, it’s another matter entirely. We are reminded of the quintessential tin-pot dictator.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been on a renaming spree since returning to office, and it doesn’t appear he’s done yet. His latest act of renaming Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Super Intelligence (SI) by Executive Order is probably one of the dumbest yet, but more on that later.

Here is a sampling of the name changes he’s ordered personally or influenced in no particular order:

1. U.S. Institute of Peace HQ was renamed the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace in December 2025.
2. The Kennedy Center was temporarily renamed the The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in December 2025, before the name was removed in June 2026 following a court ruling.
3. The Gulf of Mexico was renamed Lake America for U.S. federal use in August 2026.
4. Denali was renamed Mount McKinley by executive order in January 2025.
5. Palm Beach International Airport was renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport by the state of Florida in July 2026.
6. Fort Liberty was renamed Fort Bragg in February 2025.
7. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory was renamed the National Laboratory of the Rockies in December 2025.
8. Lake Ontario was renamed Lake America by an executive order in August 2026.

Trump, ever the egomaniac, loves to see his moniker associated with practically everything, and thus we have these:

1. Trump-Class Battleships – a new class of battleship
2. Boeing F-47 – a type of jet to honour his 47th presidency
3. Trump Accounts – government-backed savings accounts for children
4. TrumpRx – a government discount drug platform
5. Trump Gold Card – a (definitely bogus) elite visa or residency program for potential immigrants
6. President Donald J. Trump Boulevard & Avenue – local connecting roads in Florida near Mar-a-Lago and in Hialeah
7. Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) – A designated transit corridor framework through Armenia (?)

Defenders of Trump’s ego trip disingenuously cite the Biden Administration’s September 2022 name change of 650 places in America. These were necessary, however, because they removed the word squaw from them. For example, California’s Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, was renamed Olympic Valley. Why so many places had the name “Squaw” in them, only Americans can tell.

Coming back to the absurd renaming of AI to SI, Trump launched the America.gov portal at the end of September, apparently to function as “a centralised chatbot and search tool aiming to simplify public access to federal services, benefits, and information,” according to Politico.

The portal has turned out to be a mixed bag. What some users initially thought was the AI (SI?) having an existential crisis when you ask it to play the Minecraft video game has turned out to be just an easter egg hidden by the programmers.

Meanwhile, the service, apart from being plagued by spelling errors, unproven claims and confusing responses to user requests as reported by USA Today, has already started proving that it is, in fact, rather devious. MS Now reported that it avoids answering certain questions and changes its answers to others when asked repeatedly. If that’s a sign of super-intelligence, then Americans who have thus far ignored Carl Sagan’s prophetic warning in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark are in for a hell of a ride.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

I don’t know how many times I have quoted that passage in my writing over the years, but it seems Americans are hell-bent on flying recklessly into the flames of a country-sized candle.