Crayon world: If in grade school I had copied the world map that was attached to our classroom wall and used crayons to make my own map in which the totality of communist China and Soviet Russia was/were covered by American flags, I would surely have been judged a bit odd. But all my artwork would have been excused to childishness and immaturity. What then does it say of a president who instructs his team to create a fake image of European Union leaders camped out in the Oval Office to look at a map that shows Canada, Venezuela, and Greenland with American flags superimposed over them? Childish and immature it most certainly is, but this is work ordered up by an 80-year-old adult who has come to understand, shrewdly, that social media is much about fakeness and trolling with no principal present to restore order. Nor, in an increasingly ignorant world, is anyone around to make clear the obvious, namely that the three countries are not American fiefdoms and what is making them snicker is in appallingly bad taste, if such a concept even exists among the president’s supporters. The funny-ness that might have been associated with my childhood mastery of crayons is now nowhere to be found, leaving some adults to wonder, and I count myself among them, how it is that the world, from presidents to teenagers, has been returned to first grade.