#7: SS Trump

Toles, Tom. "Rub a dub dub, Republicans in a sinking tub." The Washington Post, 9 December 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/09/rub-dub-dub-republicans-sinking-tub/.

When seeking a political cartoon to analyze today, I turned to Tom Toles, a Washington Post cartoonist whose style I particularly enjoy.

Toles, being a cartoonist, draws in a cartoonish manner. His landscapes are often abstract, as we see above; his characters are simple; their features are exaggerated. I've long enjoyed Toles' drawing style—particularly the way in which he depicts President Trump, which I find hilarious. Toles depicts him as a short, perpetually angry man, with beady eyes and bushy, angled eyebrows. The mouth, which resembles a donut, is my favorite part; it finishes off the caricature. The President is one of Toles' most common characters, alongside such personified ideas as the GOP elephant, who appears as a stylized, humanoid elephant in a suit.

Here we see the President and the GOP on a sinking boat labeled "SS TRUMP." The President appears smug and ignorant of his surroundings. He is shown vainly attempting to control the sinking boat using oars, apparently oblivious to his predicament as it inexorably slides into the depths of the sea. Meanwhile, the GOP remarks that "this is the lifeboat," suggesting that there is truly no way out of this situation. The elephant does not appear to be helping in any capacity.

The combination of labels ("SS TRUMP;" "GOP"), the symbolism of the elephant, the "sinking ship" analogy, and the satirical representation of the President himself make Toles' message clear: the administration is collapsing, and both the President and the Republican Party are going down with it. The fact that the President controls the oars suggests that the predicament is his fault specifically, or a combined result of his incompetence and Republican inaction. It is implied that the GOP could have not boarded the boat to begin with, but that now it is too late. Put simply, Toles predicts the imminent downfall of both President and Party.

Finally, Toles often includes a caricature of himself in the bottom right corner of his cartoons. Here, he snidely remarks on the administration's abandonment of American principles. Toles has no sympathy for the occupants of the sinking vessel.

Find more Tom Toles here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#3: Lists and Luddites

Happiness is a chemical reaction. That much is clear. It's harder to pin down what causes the chemical reaction in the first place. Everybody has a different list. Personally, I'm happiest when my homework is done and my medications are working. At the same time, I hesitate to call antidepressants a source of happiness. Generally they do nothing but make actual sources more effective. Key word: generally. Sometimes antidepressants work so well that they are the cause, and sometimes they don't work at all. I'm also unsure of whether to call "lack of stress" a source of happiness. It's certainly satisfying to have nothing to do. I just think that saying "lack of stress" is like saying "lack of depression" or "lack of a gaping wound in one's chest." Of course it's nice to not be stressed or depressed or bleeding to death, but does it make us happy? Maybe it does. Maybe our default state is happiness, but there is so
Read more

#2: The Greatest Commercial of All Time

Image
This is the greatest commercial of all time. "Hi, Phil Swift here with Flex Seal!" I'm serious. No other commercial has embedded itself so thoroughly in our collective psyche - from my perspective as a young person on the internet, at least. It has inspired hundreds of parodies, thousands of posts, and hundreds of thousands of comments. Phil Swift, always excited and eternally grinning, is a veritable deity of internet memes. His immortal words, " That's a lot of damage! " (from a different Flex Seal commercial ), are arguably better known than the product itself. Phil Swift is the CEO and spokesman of Flex Seal Products, which produces the eponymous Flex Seal, the product Phil describes as "liquid rubber in a can!" Backed by optimistic electronic music, this two-minute 2015 infomercial features him fixing pots, sealing leaks, and trying and failing to destroy Flex Seal with a blowtorch and liquid nitrogen. To top it all off, Phil repl
Read more