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Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about a Maureen Dowd column in which she uses two literary works to characterize Donald Trump’s performance in the recently concluded New Hampshire primary. Yesterday I focused on her comparing Trump with Grendel and complaining about his opponent Nikki Haley failing to step up as a Beowulf. Today I look at a comparison with Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Caine Mutiny (1952). It so happens that it’s a comparison I myself made in the last year of Trump’s presidency. I am reposting that essay today.
In her column, Dowd wrote that Trump was so rattled by Haley’s continued opposition that he couldn’t refrain from a “Captain Queeg rant.” At which point Dowd writes, “Ah, but the strawberries.”
It’s an allusion that, I suspect, will elude many if not most of Dowd’s readers. I’m not sure if the strawberry rant shows up in the Humphrey Bogart film—it’s been decades since I watched The Caine Mutiny—but it’s a major incident in the novel. I’ll let Wikipedia describe what happens with the increasingly unhinged captain:
Queeg’s next act of paranoia begins when over half of a prized container of strawberries is discovered to be empty. He concocts elaborate and time-consuming procedures in which to catch the thief. These occupy all of the officers and crew for long hours and further erode confidence in and respect for the captain. When Queeg’s pet theory is finally decisively flouted, he disappears into his cabin, leaving the ship in executive officer Lieutenant Stephen Maryk’s hands for days.
Here’s the novel’s version of Queeg’s action:
The captain deliberately lit a cigarette. “Gentlemen, ten minutes before I called this meeting, I sent down for some ice cream and strawberries. Whittaker brought me the ice cream and said “They ain’t no mo’ strawberries.” Has any of you gentlemen an explanation of the missing quart of strawberries?” The officers glanced covertly at each other; none spoke. “Kay.” The captain rose. “I have a pretty good idea of what happened to them. However, you gentlemen are supposed to keep order on this ship and prevent such crimes as robbing of wardroom stores. You are all appointed a board of investigation as of now, with Maryk as chairman, to find out what happened to the strawberries.”
“You mean in the morning, sir?” said Maryk.
“I said now, Mr. Maryk. Now, according to my watch, is not the morning, but forty-seven minutes past three. If you get no results by eight o’clock this morning I shall solve the mystery myself — noting duly for future fitness reports the failure of the board to carry out its assignment.”
Here are a couple of snippets from Trump’s speech as reported by Dowd, who periodically points out the Queeg parallels by inserting, “Ah, but the strawberries”:
“I said I can go up and I can say to everybody, ‘Oh, thank you for the victory. It’s wonderful.’ Or I can go up and say, ‘Who the hell was the impostor that went up on the stage before and, like, claimed a victory?’ She did very poorly, actually.” He added: “I don’t get too angry. I get even.”
Ah, but the strawberries.
“But I felt I should do this because I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullshit. You can’t. You just can’t do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, come up, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won.’”
As I noted in April of 2020, Trump prefers a comparison with a different captain, that being Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. After all, Bligh is a tyrant with life and death power over his crew. But Trump is more Queeg or, better yet, the captain in David Eggers’s novel The Captain and the Glory. The post was written in the early days of Covid and captures (lest we forget) the constant chaos that characterized the Trump presidency. It also shows how Trump was already beginning to throw in his lot with insurrectionists.
Reprinted from April 15, 2020
Those of us interested in cultural allusions were struck by a recent Donald Trump Tuesday tweet referencing Mutiny on the Bounty. Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s reflections on the reference alerted me to an even better one: Trump as the captain in David Eggers’s comic novel The Captain and the Glory. It so happens that Eggers’s captain is based on Trump, and the parallels are spot on.
Trump’s tweet requires some deciphering:
“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all-time favorite movies. A good old-fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
The governors have started setting up multi-state consortiums to address the pandemic. (When it’s working properly, the federal government should be that consortium.) So is Trump thinking of himself as Captain Bligh and perhaps New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as first mate Fletcher Christian? Is he in effect saying, in a patronizing manner, “Ah, isn’t it cute– the governors are declaring their independence when it would be so much easier just to ask me for help?”
That he sees the governors as engaging in mutiny is revealing.
Of course, they’ve more or less given up asking for help given how little good it’s done them. As Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday,
We have gotten very little help from the federal government…I’ve given up on any promises that have been made. I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don’t expect it anymore.
Unlike Trump, however, Bligh is an accomplished captain, even if he shares his brutishness. When cast adrift, he somehow manages to navigate a lifeboat with 19 passengers 3500 miles to safety. Would that we had someone with these abilities guiding our ship of state.
We also need a captain like Brett Crozier, who warned that authorities that Covid-19 was rampaging through his aircraft carrier and was subsequently fired for his truth telling. (One sailor has since died and 580 have tested positive.) (Update: The number is now 655, with six sailors hospitalized.)
A more accurate parallel is Trump as Queeg in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny. There we encounter a captain who freezes whenever action gets too hot to handle. At one point, Queeg flees rather than escort low-lying landing craft to their line of departure. At another, he freaks out in the face of a typhoon. Our own captain is doing all he can to avoid responsibility and escape reality.
Queeg also falls apart on the witness stand, just as Trump breaks into a rage when asked tough questions by reporters.
Milbank, however, has steered me to a much better parallel in Eggers’s novel. Here goes:
He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.
This is what it has felt like to have Trump as our president for the past three and a half years. Pray to God that the American public rises up in November and replaces him. Thankfully, electoral mutinies have the full support of the Constitution.
Further thought: I just have a new take on Trump’s tweet after seeing new tweets where he supports people defying governors’ settle-in-place orders: he imagines he is one of the mutineers (“exciting and invigorating”) rather than captain of the ship.