TOM EATON | America just got cut down to size in more ways than one

As powerful, dangerous men strive to redraw the map of the world to reflect how badly they were parented, the United Nations’ new map, showing the correct relative sizes of the continents, should be a cause for celebration. But not everyone will be pleased by this burst of bureaucratic continental drift.

For what it’s worth, I think the new version of the world, which elongates Africa while shrinking the northernmost parts, is a good thing, especially for the people of Togo whose government proposed the UN motion and who have been championing the cause under the banner of Correct The Map.

Togo, after all, is a relatively tiny country, a narrow, vertical strip of land sandwiched between Ghana and Benin, and stretching the whole of Africa will make Togo look like a substantially longer strip, which, in these days of retreat and surrender, is quite a lot.

The media campaign around the redesign was also quite inspiring, explaining that “you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare.”

Given that the US and much of China and Europe will, in fact, be fitting into Africa as soon as the Atlantic current collapses and the northern hemisphere freezes, it is gratifying to know that there will still be land to spare.

Still, it’s inevitable that there will some grumbles from those who feel they’ve drawn the short straw.

Chief among these, of course, will be the Mercator family, who will now miss out on all that sweet Projection money as they find themselves on the ash-heap of geography with the likes of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, cartographic has-beens whose descendants haven’t seen a single drachma since mapmakers started adding woke, newfangled bits like everything south of Algeria.

Our local tourist industry, too, will not be pleased.

For years we South Africans have maintained a superb façade as we limp through customs at Heathrow or Frankfurt, discretely trying to massage the blood back into our legs as we tell our hosts with well-acted nonchalance that there was a bit of turbulence over the DRC but otherwise it was a lovely flight.

It’s tempting to point and laugh. Certainly, the prospect of Africa suddenly getting much bigger and the US getting much smaller must have been a jolt of pure horror straight to the quivering inner child of many white supremacist bedwetters.

But we know the truth. We know that science claims the longest distance it has ever measured is 33-billion light years, but we also know that that science is wrong, because we know that there is nothing longer in the observable universe than that part of the flight that takes you from northern Nigeria to the Mediterranean; an endless limbo in which you can gaze down at a dusty expanse, and then, thousands of episodes of Modern Family later, you can gaze down at exactly the same dusty expanse.

This was our secret; knowledge we kept behind tightly controlled smiles and even more tightly bandaged deep vein thromboses. But now foreign tourists will know it, too, just by looking at the map. Africa is very big, and South Africa is very, very far away.

Still, neither of these groups will be quite as angry as the Americans, who were the only country in the world to vote against it being redrawn more accurately, denouncing it as a “radical ideological project”.

It’s tempting to point and laugh. Certainly, the prospect of Africa suddenly getting much bigger and the US getting much smaller must have been a jolt of pure horror straight to the quivering inner child of many white supremacist bedwetters.

But I must also admit that I understand the position taken by Donald Trump’s loyal meat-puppets in the UN.

After all, to an administration performing a daily ritual of self-abasement before a sexual abuser and fraud, presenting objective reality ― in this case by presenting a more accurate image of the world ― is a radical ideological project.

I mean, just think of what would happen if we all started showing things as they really are? Before you knew it you’d have to report on the runaway national debt, or the fact that Trump’s tariffs and unwinnable war against Iran are bankrupting the farmers who voted for him, or on his actual cognitive state ― my God, even his real height! ― and then where would we be? Communism, that’s where.

And that’s to say nothing of the agony of having to tell the president that Greenland is way, way, smaller than it looks his vision board.

No, I get why the US said no to the new map.

Still, isn’t it curious how trying to look bigger than you are can end up making you look so small?