Mt. Obama
People who have really make it in this world buy themselves a place at the exclusive Mill Reef Club in Antigua. It is a fair bet that those who frequent the snooty precincts of the Mill Reef Club tend to be politically conservative, because being rich tends to make a person conservative - ask Dick Scaife, if you don't believe me. Why, as soon as I become rich, I intend to become conservative myself.
(This doesn't mean that people of modest means aren't conservative sometimes; it means that the rich are especially prone to be influenced by self-interest, or so I have found as an observer at the better class of cocktail parties).
I wonder how the residents of the Mill Reef Club have taken to the news that Antigua's highest mountain has been renamed Mt. Obama? They probably think it is positively ghastly, darling, and this thought should cheer us all up.
David Bear, described as the Post-Gazette's travel editor emeritus, wrote about the 1,327 foot Mt. Obama, more properly the Mount Obama National Park, on Sunday. The mountain was formally known as Boggy Peak. Although one can fairly wonder how much of an honor it is to have something called Boggy Peak renamed for you, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer was sincere as seeing Obama's election as the hope of the world.
Of course, Antiguans can rename their prominent features anything they like but it is always perilous to rename anything after a living politician.
The voters of San Francisco recently turned down a proposal to rename a sanitation plant for George W. Bush, which was wise. After all, sanitation plants are useful.
What if someone had named a Mt. Carter in honor of President Jimmy? There's one mountain they would have wished to be eroded to a hillock.
More than half a year into Obama's presidency, the verdict should be still out on his presidency, except for those who declared him a failure one minute after he took office. The fact is that he's too busy scaling Mt. Health Care to get a good fix on him yet. In any event, he's not going to be a Mount Washington.