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Captain Queeg
[Update: I posted this not knowing that member Gossamer Cat beat me to much the same observation a couple of years ago in this post. And, frankly, GC’s post is the better one. Go read it. — H. ]
I read Herman Wouk’s famous novel a long time ago and saw the 1954 movie adaptation many years later. I don’t recall the novel well enough to know whether the movie is faithful to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but both the movie and the book are excellent. Humphrey Bogart, as the problematic Captain Queeg, ball bearings twirling nervously in his hand as he obsesses about the pilfering of strawberries from the ship’s larder, created a cultural icon for the paranoid in power, impossible to like and an easy target for righteous contempt.
There are spoilers ahead, starting now. (But come on. The movie is older than I am.)
The movie ends after the trial of the ship’s officers for mutiny. Following their acquittal Lt. Greenwald, the lawyer who defended them (played by José Ferrer), finds the men celebrating their victory. Unexpectedly — at least, unexpectedly to a much younger me who certainly didn’t see it coming — their defender turns on the men, accusing them of disloyalty to their admittedly imperfect commanding officer. In a blunt and brutal critique (aimed most pointedly at Lt. Keefer, played by Fred MacMurray in another of his great dramatic roles), Lt. Greenwald punctures their smugness and reveals the men as the disloyal officers they are:
Lt. Greenwald: You didn’t approve of his conduct as an officer. He wasn’t worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You ragged him. You made up songs about him. If you’d given Queeg the loyalty he needed, do you suppose the whole issue would have come up in the typhoon? You’re an honest man, Steve, I’m asking you. You think it would’ve been necessary for you to take over?
Lt. Maryk: It probably wouldn’t have been necessary.
Lt. Greenwald: Yeah.
Ensign Willie Keith: If that’s true, then we were guilty.
Lt. Greenwald: Ah, you’re learning, Willie! You’re learning that you don’t work with a captain because you like the way he parts his hair. You work with him because he’s got the job or you’re no good!
“You work with him because he’s got the job or you’re no good!”
I was thinking of that scene today as I considered the past three and a half years of this administration and wondered how things might have been different — and might still be different — if conservative luminaries had rallied around and supported the very imperfect man we elected.
Published in Elections
I dont know why, but I had always likened Capetian Queeg to Jimmy Carter. A man with a job that was too big for him. A man who spent his days driven to distraction by minor events (strawberries vs tennis courts) … I didnt really remember seeing this movie until the mid 80s – I think TBS used to run it at least once a month for a few years, back in those days.
I read the book more than once, and was a fan of Herman Wouk who, by the way, died last year at the age of 103. Both the book and the movie are pretty good.
I find that talking about The Caine Mutiny is more interesting than talking about Trump.
But I thought I’d mention one big difference about a presidential staff, and a commanding officer in the U.S. military.
A president picks the people around him, and hires them (or hires the people who hires them). These picks are expected to be personally loyal to him.
When a commanding officer takes command, he generally doesn’t know the people around him, and he has not hired or picked any of the people who work for him. That also means that he has to earn their personal loyalty, just as the people under his command have to earn his confidence.
He can enhance or diminish the careers of the officers closest to him through the formal evaluation process, and ruin the career of anyone under his command if he decides to relieve a person.
The people under his command owe him almost absolute obedience, though the loyalty they owe is to the United States.
In a sense, those of Trump’s staff that have tried to undermine him are more despicable than those of the Caine Mutiny, because they accepted a job under him, and didn’t quit when they found they couldn’t work for him.
In another sense, the mutineers on the fictitious USS Caine were more despicable, because they really did violate the oath they took when they accepted their commissions.
And it won’t even matter if the laws , regulations and executive orders are constitutional or correctly passed, they’ll have good ole John Roberts right there to rewrite the Constitution whenever needed.
Carter had two big problems. First, he was more conservative than the leadership of Congress. The second, he did not appreciate the truth of the old saw, “The President proposes and the Congress disposes.”
I’ve been thinking about that almost from the beginning.
If certain people loved their country or their party as much as they claimed to, I wish they had a) questioned and combated the media’s many dishonest narratives about Trump, and b) pitched in to keep Orange Man Bad from being the disaster they said he was going to be.
It is because they don’t really love their nation. They actually hate the people and are appalled they are free enough to vote. Any talk of cult of personality is code for calling fellow Americans stupid and holding them in contempt. They sicken me.
Indeed. Just listen to them spit the word “populist” out. And then in the next breath exclaim the awesomeness of that great populist Ronald Reagan.