[FRIAM] Trump is mariner, not albatross

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Thanks, ericS, for this explication.  I have never read (gasp!) the Coleridge poem.  I do have a cartoon idea I am trying to get somebody to draw.  In the upper right hand corner, ship is in flames, healed over and sinking.  We see its slanted deck and we see a stream of something flooding off the deck, and coming toward us in a stream toward us, and.   As the stream gets nearer and nearer we see that it is rats, and in the near left former we see two rats, swimming for all they are worth.  One is saying to the other, "Do you think this will effect our chances in the next election?"

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 9, 2021 12:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Trump is mariner, not albatross

With apologies to the list for a gratuitous posting, because I completely abused a literary symbol earlier (through slovenliness, not ignorance), I am squirming as long as I let it go uncorrected.

Trump is of course not albatross.  Trump is mariner (we wish, but he won’t live long enough).  The albatross is democracy, which term I think I use more as the presence of an aspiration within a society than as any fixed set of norms and institutions. The republicans are the ship’s crew.

Of course, not that I need to tell this list, but:

The albatross was the favored being of the polar spirit, and innocent.

The mariner shot it, not for any particular reason that the poet gives, besides perversity and lack of respect.

The crew initially condemn the mariner (2015 primaries).

Then the ship moves a bit, and they come around “said it was good to shoot such birds, that bring the fog and mist”, if I recall.  With that they bring it on themselves.

Of course, when trouble really hits, they try to pin it back on the mariner, hanging the carcass of the dead democracy around his neck in place of the cross (congressional speechifying).

However, in the later game of dice, life-in-death only gets the mariner; death, the milder of the two, gets the rest of the crew.

So, okay in these days to say trump is the creation enabled by the right, but also okay to say that he is a sort of singular villain or savant of that worldview.  So punish all, but punish differently.

Striking that Coleridge could have written such a neat metaphor for a somewhat complicated community, the more because it was written as an ecological allegory.  Given my background, I have an impulse to suppose that there is an attractor of social structure to which many cases will align.

It is strange; I have been looking for a political cartoon that lays out these characters, for a couple of years, and have not yet seen one, though the map is so obvious and everybody knows the poem.




I think I also want to introduce a convention called the West Capital.  It is used to mark the takeover of a concept that has a good version, considered thoughtfully and with appropriate care, by a convention that just feeds more social dominance.  Thus science -> Science.  And meritocracy -> Meritocracy, for Nick.

Eric



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