There is a particular brand of exhaustion that comes with watching the leader of the so-called free world treat a globe like a Rorschach test. We have reached the point in our collective descent where geography is no longer a matter of latitude and longitude, but rather a flexible hallucination shaped by the whims of a man who likely views the North Pole as a potential site for a luxury hotel with subpar plumbing. The recent spectacle of the American President confusing Iceland with Greenland isn’t just a slip of the tongue; it is the final, wheezing breath of an educational system that gave up decades ago. It is the pinnacle of American exceptionalism: being so powerful that you don't even have to know which frozen rock you’re currently threatening to destabilize.

Let’s look at the facts, if anyone still remembers what those are. The President, currently obsessed with the colonial throwback of 'purchasing' Greenland—as if he’s browsing a 19th-century catalog of imperialist acquisitions—blamed a dip in the stock market on Iceland. 'Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money,' he claimed, while actually referring to the market’s nervous reaction to his threats against Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland. It’s a masterful display of cognitive dissonance. To the Right, this is likely framed as 'strategic ambiguity' or some form of 4D chess where the King moves like a drunken toddler to confuse the opponent. They will tell you that by naming the wrong country, he’s actually putting the entire Nordic region on notice, keeping them 'off balance.' In reality, he just can't distinguish between two islands that both happen to have 'land' in the name. It’s the same intellectual rigor one applies to choosing between brands of diet soda.

Then we have the Left, whose performative outrage has become its own industry. They will spend the next seventy-two hours clutching their pearls and tweeting maps of the North Atlantic as if a JPEG can cure a systemic lack of basic literacy in the executive branch. They love this. It gives them the dopamine hit of feeling intellectually superior while they continue to ignore the fact that their own party’s platform is usually about as coherent as a wet paper bag. They will call it 'unpresidential,' a word that has lost all meaning in an era where the presidency has the dignity of a late-night infomercial for a product that gives you chemical burns. Their critique is purely aesthetic; they don’t care that the world is burning, they just care that the man holding the match can’t correctly identify the fuel.

And what of the markets? Those grand, mythical entities that represent the 'health' of our society. The stock market took a dip because of a real estate dispute involving a territory that isn't for sale. We are living in a global economy that reacts to the geographic illiteracy of a single individual with the sensitivity of a Victorian waif with a fainting habit. Billions of dollars in value evaporated because the man at the top thinks he’s playing a game of Risk against a board that he’s holding upside down. It reveals the utter fraudulence of the entire financial system. If a confusion between Iceland and Greenland can shake the foundations of global capital, then the foundations were made of termite-infested plywood to begin with. We are gambling our futures on the erratic synapses of a person who views the world as a series of branding opportunities.

Historically, empires have fallen for many reasons—lead pipes, barbarian invasions, overextension. But we might be the first civilization to collapse because we simply stopped believing in the reality of the map. Iceland and Greenland have been the subject of a thousand-year-old joke regarding their names—one is green, one is icy—but the joke has finally turned on us. We have a leader who doesn't get the punchline because he doesn't know there’s a joke. He sees assets. He sees obstacles. He sees 'money' being lost to a country he couldn't find with a GPS and a personal guide. This is the endgame of a culture that values 'vibe' over 'verify.'

The irony, of course, is that Iceland and Greenland are probably both looking at the United States and wondering if they can buy us, if only to shut us up and put us in a museum of 'Failed Experiments in Representative Democracy.' But they won't. They’ll just watch, like the rest of the world, as the superpower with the largest nuclear arsenal in history debates whether or not a map is 'fake news.' It’s all very boring, really. The stupidity has become a steady, humming background noise, like a refrigerator that’s about to explode. We are trapped in a room with a man who thinks the walls are moving, and half the people in the room are cheering for the walls. The other half are writing sternly worded letters to the architect. Meanwhile, I’m just waiting for the roof to cave in so I can finally stop listening to the argument.