Friday
While, in the January 6 Congressional hearings, we’ve learned about various government officials who heroically thwarted Donald Trump’s coup attempt, sometimes their heroism comes with an asterisk. After all, if some of these men had spoken up during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial—just as if John Bolton had spoken up in the first—they might have stopped the toxic myth of a stolen election in its tracks. Instead, they waited for a year and a half, giving Trump’s lies a chance to metastasize.
Perhaps they deserve the reward of the heroic gunner in Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three.
Set in the year 1793, Hugo’s novel describes a cannon that has gotten loose and threatens to destroy the ship. (I believe this is the origin of the phrase “loose cannon.”) It’s a disastrous situation, not to mention a fairly good metaphor for the damage that Trump has been inflicting on our own ship of state:
This is perhaps the most dreadful thing that can take place at sea. Nothing more terrible can happen to a man-of-war under full sail.
A cannon that breaks loose from its fastenings is suddenly transformed into a supernatural beast. It is a monster developed from a machine. This mass runs along on its wheels as easily as a billiard ball; it rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching, comes and goes, stops, seems to meditate, begins anew, darts like an arrow from one end of the ship to the other, whirls around, turns aside, evades, rears, hits out, crushes, kills, exterminates. It is a ram battering a wall at its own pleasure. Moreover, the battering-ram is iron, the wall is wood. It is matter set free; one might say that this eternal slave is wreaking its vengeance; it would seem as though the evil in what we call inanimate objects had found vent and suddenly burst forth; it has the air of having lost its patience, and of taking a mysterious, dull revenge; nothing is so inexorable as the rage of the inanimate. The mad mass leaps like a panther; it has the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of the axe; it takes one by surprise, like the surge of the sea; it flashes like lightning; it is deaf as the tomb; it weighs ten thousand pounds, and it bounds like a child’s ball; it whirls as it advances, and the circles it describes are intersected by right angles. And what help is there? How can it be overcome? …You can reason with a mastiff, take a bull by surprise, fascinate a snake, frighten a tiger, mollify a lion; but there is no resource with the monster known as a loosened gun. You cannot kill it,—it is already dead; and yet it lives. It breathes a sinister life bestowed on it by the Infinite. The plank beneath sways it to and fro; it is moved by the ship; the sea lifts the ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its comings and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that has ideas, and changes its direction at any moment. How can one arrest an object in its course, whose onslaught must be avoided? The dreadful cannon rushes about, advances, recedes, strikes to right and to left, flies here and there, baffles their attempts at capture, sweeps away obstacles, crushing men like flies.
Fortunately, the heroic efforts of two men save the day:
Suddenly in the midst of this inaccessible circus, where the escaped cannon was tossing from side to side, a man appeared, grasping an iron bar. It was the author of the catastrophe, the chief gunner, whose criminal negligence had caused the accident,—the captain of the gun. Having brought about the evil, his intention was to repair it. Holding a handspike in one hand, and in the other a tiller rope with the slip-noose in it, he had jumped through the hatchway to the deck below.
What follows is even more breathtaking than the committee hearings. A second man throws a bale of paper between the wheels, at which point the gunner darts forward with a spike:
The bale had the effect of a plug. A pebble may block a log; a branch sometimes changes the course of an avalanche. The carronade [cannon] stumbled, and the gunner, availing himself of the perilous opportunity, thrust his iron bar between the spokes of the back wheels. Pitching forward, the cannon stopped; and the man, using his bar for a lever, rocked it backward and forward. The heavy mass upset, with the resonant sound of a bell that crashes in its fall. The man, reeking with perspiration, threw himself upon it, and passed the slip-noose of the tiller-rope around the neck of the defeated monster.
The combat was ended. The man had conquered. The ant had overcome the mastodon; the pygmy had imprisoned the thunderbolt.
For his heroism, the cannoneer is applauded, just as we are applauding those who resisted Trump’s coup:
The old man looked at the gunner.
“Step forward,” he said.
The gunner advanced a step.
Turning to Count Boisberthelot, the old man removed the cross of Saint Louis from the captain’s breast, and fastened it on the jacket of the gunner. The sailors cheered, and the marines presented arms.
Then, since it was the gunner’s fault that the cannon got loose in the first place, there’s this:
[P]ointing to the bewildered gunner he added:
“Now let the man be shot!”
Stupor took the place of applause.
Then, amid a tomb-like silence, the old man, raising his voice, said:—
“The ship has been endangered by an act of carelessness, and may even yet be lost. It is all the same whether one be at sea or face to face with the enemy. A ship at sea is like an army in battle. The tempest, though unseen, is ever present; the sea is an ambush. Death is the fit penalty for every fault committed when facing the enemy. There is no fault that can be retrieved. Courage must be rewarded and negligence punished.”
These words fell one after the other slowly and gravely, with a certain implacable rhythm, like the strokes of the axe upon an oak-tree. Looking at the soldiers, the old man added,—
“Do your duty!”
People like Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General William Barr, even while enabling our loose cannon-in-chief, at least stood tall in the closing moments. I’m not saying that they should be shot, but if they are to be rewarded for their courage, they must be punished for their negligence.
One other thing: Arizona State representative Rusty Bowers, who was threatened with violence by Trump supporters after refusing to send fake electors to the Capitol, said after his testimony that he would vote for Trump were he to once again be the Republican nominee. Barr, who told Trump that claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” has said the same. If they were the gunner in Hugo’s novel, it’s as though they would willingly release the cannon once again.
Having once chosen country over party, they sound prepared to reverse course in the future.
