The Albatross Necktie

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the apparently spelling-challenged poet Samuel Coleridge Taylor tells the story of a sailor who shoots an albatross with a crossbow and I never found out exactly why he did that because it’s the longest poem Taylor ever wrote and if a poem won’t fit on a birthday card I consider it too much work to read unless it starts out:

“There was a girl from Nantucket.”

OK, so the Ancient Mariner has a dead albatross on his hands and apparently that pisses off who and/or whomever is in charge of supplying wind (and it seems like I should mention Donald Trump right about here) and the Ancient Mariner’s ship gets becalmed so his overly-whiney shipmates blame him for the lack of wind and make him wear the dead albatross around his neck.

An extremely strange choice of punishments, but let’s move on because we’ve got lots more weird shit to unpack.

So then Death shows up and starts killing off the crew and the Ancient Mariner’s punishment is watching his shipmates die which makes me wonder about a Belief System that thinks killing an albatross is wrong, but killing people is OK which I believe is the founding principle of Greenpeace. (You might want to double-check that last fact because I just made it up.)

I’m also thinking the Ancient Mariner probably wasn’t all that upset about Death killing all his shipmates because they were the ones who made him wear a dead albatross around his neck, so screw them and the seahorse they rode in on.

But then it rains and the dead shipmates come Back to Life to steer the ship home, but it sinks before they can get there which makes it sounds like Death is pretty indecisive and also has extremely questionable judgment which is demonstrated by the fact that John F. Kennedy died at 46 and Henry Kissinger is still alive at 100.

The Ancient Mariner’s punishment is wandering the earth and retelling his story and teaching his lesson to others and as near as I can tell the lesson is:

Go ahead and shoot an albatross because you’ll live while all your coworkers die and if they’re the kind of asshat coworkers who make you wear a dead albatross around your neck, that’s a pretty good deal.

I used the “albatross around your neck” metaphor to describe a Republican party that now has to deal with all the MAGA extremists, Proud Boys, Flat Earthers, Election Deniers, Bible Thumpers, Gun Nuts, Racists, January 6^th Insurrectionists and QAnon Advocates they’ve climbed in bed with and for my money they would have been better off shooting an albatross.

To understand the cartoon you just looked at you need to know there was a TV show called MacGyver and he was a “top secret” agent and he was constantly doing stuff like building a hang glider out of a paper napkin and a coat hanger or defusing a bomb with a rubber band and a toothpick or creating cryptocurrency out of thin air, so when Joe Biden signed the debt ceiling bill just before the country was going to default and possibly implode, that’s the image that occurred to me.

I had Joe cut the “red” wire instead of the blue one, because more Republicans opposed the bill than Democrats, although that particular joke might be too subtle which is a problem I rarely have and will quit worrying about immediately.

And now some completely unnecessary MacGyver information:

Angus MacGyver is lucky that his show started in 1985 and ended in 1992 because if he’d been a “top secret” agent between 2016 and 2020 you know President Trump would have invited him to Mar-a-Lago and blown his cover over martinis in the clubhouse after a strenuous 18-holes of cheating at golf.

“Hey, guys, this is my top secret agent Angus MacGyver! And while we’re at it, would you like to see our plans for invading Canada?”

(There was a “reboot” of the series in 2016 and as you might have already figured out, “reboot” is what they say in Hollywood because “we ran out of ideas so we copied a really mediocre show from the ‘80s” wouldn’t fit in TV Guide and for the purposes of my Trump joke I’ll ignore the reboot’s existence which is a position a majority of TV viewers seemed to agree with.)

Also; if you can have “top secret” agents can you have “middle secret” agents and “bottom secret” agents and if so, despite his popularity in movies I think James Bond would qualify for that last designation because once he arrives at a Monte Carlo casino or a Sotheby’s art auction or a Taylor Swift concert, he immediately announces he’s:

“Bond, James Bond.”

007 seems every bit as bad at keeping secrets as our 45^th President which leads us to our next cartoon.

Joe Biden went to the Air Force Academy graduation and while crossing the stage tripped over a sandbag and tripping and falling is not a good look for anybody (with the possible exception of the young Jackie Chan) especially a 106-year-old president who is fighting the perception that he’s too old and out of it to lead the country.

Let’s face it, that’s kinda like Henry V giving the St. Crispin’s Day speech and then falling off his horse or George C. Scott giving the opening speech in Patton and then falling off the stage or Hall & Oates comparing themselves to the Beatles and then falling off the charts.

None of which inspires confidence.

All the people who don’t want you to vote for Biden pointed out that he tripped and while I’m not a Joe Biden fan, if my other choice is a guy who stumbled over the U.S. Constitution when he told his followers to go “fight like hell” and overthrow the government because he lost an election, I’m still voting for the Fall Guy.  

As I’ve pointed out before and seem doomed to point out again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants everybody to focus on his battles against “woke” policies like refusing care for transgender kids or limiting what teachers can say in their classrooms or getting pissy about pronouns, possibly because Florida has a lot of problems and for the average person Our Nation’s Penis seems like a pretty lousy place to live and DeSantis doesn’t want us to think about any of that.  

According to the following Time magazine article (written in March of this year) Florida is 49^th in teacher pay, has the seventh-lowest per pupil funding and the 16^th worst health care system.

https://time.com/6266618/ron-desantis-florida-governance-essay/

And according to the next article, Florida tops the list for most-polluted lakes in the United States and here’s a picture from that article that might make you decide to never, ever go in the water again:

https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/environment/2022-03-18/florida-tops-list-for-the-most-polluted-lakes-in-the-u-s-study-finds

And all of these wonderful accomplishments are at least partially due to DeSantis wanting the Rich and the Corporations That Produce Them to pay as few taxes as possible which makes me wonder about all those Blue Collar Voters who seem to think the Republicans represent the Common Man.

It’s kinda like the Sheep voting to put the Wolves in charge.

Also, Republicans like DeSantis don’t like “woke” politics because it’s somebody else pushing their beliefs on you and then those same Republicans will tell you what books you can’t read and that you can’t get an abortion or treatment for your transgender kid.

OK, once again that’s it for today and somehow I skipped mentioning Donald Trump in that last segment and I’m contractually required by my Socialist Party Masters to mention Donald Trump at every possibly opportunity.

And that’s the albatross around my neck.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/