The signs come down on Friday. Six of them, per the council schedule, starting with the big one by the roundabout. A crew has been booked, and the drizzle, presumably, will provide itself.
By evening, the Dutch village of America will be Ontario. The council confirmed the change days after Washington's push to rename Lake Ontario. The Dutch logic runs as follows: if North American names are being pulled off maps and left wandering, a responsible country should take one in.
"The name was clearly no longer being cared for," a municipal spokesman said. "We are rehoming it. Ontario needed somewhere quiet to live, and we had a vacancy."
None of this is new, of course. Great powers have always renamed things when the actual problems proved stubborn. Petrograd tried it. Chips tried it, in 2003, and took years to recover. The lesson is always the same, and it is always ignored: the map changes, the territory sulks on regardless.
