Cartographic Propaganda

I wasn’t going to write anything today. I wasn’t going to write anything for a week. Maybe longer! But I haven’t done a sarcastic political piece in a while, and frankly, this is driving me nuts. Really? We’re going to take our map cues from a television show?

This is the webpage that seems to be going viral, and in it is embedded this video {below} if you don’t want to jump over.

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.
{Pr. 18:17}

If you watched the clip and felt like your whole world was rocked and why, oh why, haven’t I heard this before, you need to wonder if, perhaps, there is a reason.

In this case…

The old Mercator map was not an “erroneous” map. People utilized it for safe navigation for half a millenia. The map had a purpose and its purpose was navigation. No one cared about its political implications because, when you’re sailing, not getting shipwrecked is slightly more important than how big Africa might be compared to Greenland.

The “new” map they are promoting here has a different purpose, and that is to reveal land mass size, and to possibly right all wrongs. If we could just change the map, sin would disappear, right? Ah, Utopia.

Here’s the deal:

Any time we try and take something spherical and represent it on a flat surface, there will be distortion.

And my guess is that public school children have had access to globes all this time. There isn’t some big conspiracy on the part of Western nations to make Africa look smallish.

Robinson Projection Map, courtesy of Wikipedia

By the way, there is a third kind of map, called a Robinson Projection. That is what I have on my wall, and you might, too. It is very popular these days. It is the one that makes the earth appear like an oval, but in general it tends to be more visually accurate than either of the two maps in the West Wing clip.