The Sacred Cartography of the Deluded

Why a 1904 Atlas Is Not the Burning Bush of Nationhood

If you’ve made it this far in life without being fired, cancelled, or publicly flogged for saying something true, congratulations — you’re ahead of me. I write because I can’t not; because silence feels like complicity, and complicity feels like rot. If this piece leaves you nodding, snarling, or muttering, “Well, he’s not wrong,” then you’re precisely the reader I’m writing for.

You’ll get two essays a week — unapologetically long, occasionally bleak, often funny, always honest. It’s eight bucks a month — less than one coffee in Carney’s Canada, or two if you buy the cheap stuff. Everyone says that, of course: “It’s just a cup of coffee.” Fine. But if you’re only going to buy one cup this month, make it mine. It’s $8 a month, and you can cancel anytime.

I have lately encountered a subspecies of online crusader — a sort of digital Neanderthal armed not with a club but with a 1904 atlas — who believes he has uncovered the geopolitical Holy Grail. He flourishes the map like a magician revealing a rabbit and triumphantly points to the word Palestine printed in sepia ink, convinced that this settles the matter of statehood, identity, sovereignty, history, theology, and perhaps even lunch.