Thursday
I was digging around in James Barrie’s Peter Pan the other day and came across something that caught me by surprise. Captain Hook’s relationship to Peter is a lot like Donald Trump’s relationship to Barack Obama. Both Hook and Trump feel outclassed.
As many commentators have pointed out, Trump’s hatred of Obama seems deeply personal. Democratic strategist Bob Shrum observed a year ago,
His only guiding principle seems to be to undo what Obama did. His driving motivation seems to be his animosity towards Obama. We know he has no deep convictions of his own so Obama became his negative reference point.”
Shrum’s observation can be seen in Trump policy positions. As the Guardian pointed out in the May 2018 article,
Trump is working through his Obama checklist at a rapid clip. He made good on his promises to withdraw from the TPP, Paris and Iran agreements. He partially reversed what he called a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba, reinstating some travel and commercial restrictions. He ordered the Pentagon to reverse an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender people to serve in the military.
Washington Post’s Greg Sargent thinks that Trump’s recent decision not to visit Denmark is partly a fear of being shown up by Obama, who is wildly popular there and who will be visiting the Danes in September.
It would be difficult for any politician, let alone Trump, to achieve Obama’s style and popularity amongst the people whom he thinks count (the “coastal elites”). Many of them, like millions the world over, consider America’s first black president to be a class act. Those Trump supporters who hate Obama and show up at MAGA rallies don’t have Trump’s respect. Indeed, he regards them with contempt, as a conman views his marks.
Hook’s version of class act is “good form.” In his boarding school, he was never admitted to an elite social club (perhaps Eton’s “Pop”) or a high status house, and it has haunted him ever since:
[H]e had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her, and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained the passion for good form.
Good form! However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this is all that really matters.
Having good form sounds like a version of being a gentleman in Victorian times. You couldn’t buy your way into gentleman status, nor did you necessarily inherit it. Achieving great things also might not help. And if you tried too hard to be a gentleman, as Antony Trollope points out in The Way We Live Now, that definitely meant you weren’t one.
It’s the same with good form:
From far within him he heard a creaking as of rusty portals, and through them came a stern tap-tap-tap, like hammering in the night when one cannot sleep. “Have you been good form to-day?” was their eternal question.
“Fame, fame, that glittering bauble, it is mine,” he cried.
“Is it quite good form to be distinguished at anything?” the tap-tap from his school replied.
“I am the only man whom Barbecue feared,” he urged, “and Flint feared Barbecue.”
“Barbecue, Flint—what house?” came the cutting retort.
Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?
His vitals were tortured by this problem. It was a claw within him sharper than the iron one; and as it tore him, the perspiration dripped down his tallow countenance and streaked his doublet. Ofttimes he drew his sleeve across his face, but there was no damming that trickle.
It doesn’t matter that his pirate band never raise the issue. After all, he can easily silence them by waving around his hook, just as Trump frightens Republicans with the mere threat of a tweet. What matters is how he sees himself.
His bo’sun Smee, by contrast, has natural good form, which presents the envious Hook with an impossible dilemma:
Had the bo’sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of all?
He remembered that you have to prove you don’t know you have it before you are eligible for Pop.
With a cry of rage he raised his iron hand over Smee’s head; but he did not tear. What arrested him was this reflection:
“To claw a man because he is good form, what would that be?”
“Bad form!”
In his final battle, Hook must contend with a character who has natural good form. Pan flies around Hook, stabbing at him as Obama verbally stabbed at Trump at the Correspondent’s Dinner and as he psychologically stabbed him simply by being a classy president:
Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe’s defense, but his shorter reach stood him in ill stead, and he could not drive the steel home. Hook, scarcely his inferior in brilliancy, but not quite so nimble in wrist play, forced him back by the weight of his onset, hoping suddenly to end all with a favorite thrust, taught him long ago by Barbecue at Rio; but to his astonishment he found this thrust turned aside again and again. Then he sought to close and give the quietus with his iron hook, which all this time had been pawing the air; but Peter doubled under it and, lunging fiercely, pierced him in the ribs. At the sight of his own blood, whose peculiar color, you remember, was offensive to him, the sword fell from Hook’s hand, and he was at Peter’s mercy.
“Now!” cried all the boys, but with a magnificent gesture Peter invited his opponent to pick up his sword. Hook did so instantly, but with a tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form.
As with Smee, proof of Pan’s good form is his obliviousness to it:
Hitherto [Hook] had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.
“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily.
“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.
Hook’s only consolation before stepping off his ship and into the crocodile’s mouth is that he momentarily gets Pan to show bad form:
He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter kick instead of stab.
At last Hook had got the boon for which he craved.
“Bad form,” he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.
Trump thought that, by becoming president, he would get the respect and admiration that is accorded to Obama. Because he is a racist, misogynist, bully and thug, that was never going to happen. But who knows, maybe if Obama did something unclassy, Trump would be freed of his obsession and could become the president of all Americans, not just of his cultish followers.
Or maybe not.
Further thought: Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson succinctly sums up Trump’s Obama obsession in a recent column:
Again and again, he tried desperately to compare himself favorably with his predecessor, Barack Obama. He did so by telling ridiculous lies that are easily disproved by the historical record — no, Obama didn’t institute the cruel policy of separating thousands of migrant families at the border, Trump did; no, Obama wasn’t denied permission to land Air Force One in the Philippines. You had to wonder whether Trump, who was the loudest voice in the racist “birther” movement, might have some kind of obsession with Obama and his continuing popularity around the world.
Trump said he canceled his planned state visit to Denmark because the Danish prime minister was “nasty” in calling Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland “absurd.” It is absurd, of course, but leave that aside. It happens that Obama is scheduled to visit Denmark in September. Might Trump have feared that he would be met with protests and then have to watch Obama bask in the adulation of much bigger crowds?