Educating Yourself Through Political Cartoons

So yesterday I was re-finishing a desk in my garage, and I spread out some newspaper on the floor. As it turned out, one of the pages happened to include a political cartoon by Mike Lukovich. Let me first say, I'm glad I finally found something useful to do with a Mike Lukovich cartoon.

I was also intrigued by the cartoon itself, which is as follows:



Now I must admit, I don't know very much about history, and I never saw the movie "Titanic." But based on this cartoon, I think I can glean the basic story, which must have gone something like this:

There was this giant boat, the captain of which liked to randomly execute certain of his passengers, usually based on their ethnicity, but sometimes just because of his own paranoia. In fact, he was one of history's most brutal killers (why he was given the command of a luxury cruise liner, I haven't yet determined). Oh, and the captain also liked to commit acts of piracy against other vessels.

Anyway, at one point the United States Navy must have decided it had had enough with all this piracy crap, so it took over the vessel in one of the most effective military strikes in world history, captured the capatain and killed his two sons, and completely dispersed all organized resistance by the crew. The Navy then gave the vessel and its passengers free and fair elections, provided more electricity than the ship had ever enjoyed, built schools, set up civil and criminal courts, and stopped government-sponsored mass genocide against the people on the lower decks.

While the U.S. Navy was doing all of this, apparently the U.S. media were busy misrepresenting the navigability of the oceans, claiming (falsely) that the ship had capsized, and flat-out lying about the number of dead.

Again, I haven't seen the movie, but I assume Leonardo DiCaprio played one of the homicidal sons of the captain or something. If so, then maybe the movie is worth seeing just on the basis of watching Leo getting cut to pieces by Marine gunfire.