Coleridge

The collaboration to which Chris refers actually seems to relate tangentially to Derrida's message. In our English class in our senior year of high school, we were broken up into groups to analyze Samuel Taylor Coleridge's brilliantly lunatic poem, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Chris and I ended up satirizing everyone else by saying that the poem was actually Coleridge's opium-induced altered-state-of-consciousness presentiment of the JFK assassination conspiracy. You see, JFK was the albatross guiding the ship of state through the ice, i.e. the Cold War. The Ancient Mariner, a power-mad Lyndon Johnson, had Kennedy killed out of jealousy. The arbitrarily used, silent and deadly crossbow is a CIA assassin team. This led to all sorts of problems, including the Vietnam War (all of the Mariner's shipmates dying, the hot and sweltering tropic environment), and the drug boom and hippy culture of the late 60s and early 70s (the narcotic and hallucinatory elements are obvious). As penance, Johnson had to go and distract Richard Nixon, the Wedding Guest, to keep him from the wedding, or long enough for Woodward and Bernstein to dig up the dirt on Watergate.

It is a perfectly valid theory. All it takes is a little suspension of disbelief. Alert Oliver Stone.



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