In Herman Wouk’s classic World War II novel, The Caine
Mutiny, there is a moment when a group of the ship’s officers
are getting away from the increasingly eccentric Captain Queeq by
relaxing ashore.
Suddenly the malcontent Lieutenant Keefer asks the others: “Does
it occur to you that Captain Queeg may be insane?
In fact Queeg is not insane, at least not at that time. He is
simply grappling, more and more disastrously, with a job too big
for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he becomes paralyzed and
nearly sinks the ship by failing to give the obvious orders. At the
subsequent court-martial he appears quite normal until he breaks
down under the pressure of cross-examination. Before this, the
officers have searched the regulations for guidance, but the
regulations refer only to a captain who is clearly and unmistakably
insane, not one who is merely guilty of eccentricity and bad
judgment. At a lower level of responsibility, Queeg might have
performed adequately, but with Keefer’s question, the remaining
respect for Queeg’s office has gone.
Obama’s second inauguration speech may be his Queeg moment — an
undeniable demonstration that, in an emergency, he is incapable of
grappling with reality. For all his unceasing invocation of the
word “change,” the outstanding thing about Obama has been his
apparent inability to react, even to an imminent crisis. Like
Queeg, he stands frozen on the bridge as the waves grow higher, or
obsesses over issues like homosexuals and women in the military as
the typhoon rises.
Faced with the worst looming fiscal cliff-fall in world history
Obama, like Queeg in the typhoon, has done nothing at all, but has,
increasingly, resorted to meaningless words. His pseudo-Keynesian
fiscal notions and a mantra-like repetition of old and failed
ideas, suggest a serious lack on mental versatility.
Economics is not an exact science, but some of its rules are now
well-known, and one is that a government cannot spend its way out
of a recession.
Yet Obama does not project any sense of urgency, merely a smug,
radiating sense of his own greatness. The one fiscal measure to
which he seems committed — taxing the rich — is infantile stuff,
like Queeg’s obsession with who ate the wardroom strawberries. Any
first-year politics or economics student knows that there are not
enough rich, even in as wealthy a country as the United States, to
have raising their taxes make any appreciable difference. President
Reagan’s application of the Laffer Curve proved emphatically, and
only a short while ago, that the way to both stimulate the economy
and to increase government revenues is to lower taxes. And it is
not hard to pick some areas as least where towering taxes would
make no appreciable difference to public infrastructure.
Like Queeg, Obama shows an inability to change course when such
a change is desperately needed. Giving 20 F-16 fighters and hundred
of tanks to Egypt was never, in my opinion, a clever idea. Even
when Egypt was an unequivocal friend its security required things
like armored cars to put down street violence, not these hi-tech
weapons whose only conceivable use would be against Israel. Indeed,
Obama seems to show no awareness that Egypt and other major Islamic
countries have changed from being friends to something like enemies
in a few months. For a President of the United States there is a
difference between making a bad policy choice and clinging to that
policy when it is plainly completely wrong, like the Caine
steaming in a circle and cutting its own tow-line. Mistakes that
cannot be ignored are always someone else’s fault (refer George
Bush).
The dancing is still there, the golf, the celebs, the
multi-million dollar holidays, but behind them it is possible to
detect a desperate emptiness, a interconnected mosaic of failure.
The one much-boasted triumph, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was
the work of other men. One of those most responsible, Dr. Shakil
Afridi, rots in the hellhole of a Pakistani jail, abandoned.
Obama’s oath to bring the Benghazi murderers to justice seems to
have been forgotten as soon as it was made, something — I am not
sure if there is a word for it — actually below the level of a
campaign promise. Allies have been lost or slighted in almost every
part of the world, the Afghan war has brought the U..S and NATO
humiliation and Russia and China lead in Space. The defenses of the
U.S.’s major allies, such as Britain, are in an even more dire
situation.
This does not even consider the exploding levels of domestic
poverty. Restoring flexibility to the wage system, so as to give
American industry a reasonable degree of competitiveness, seems out
of the question.
The Western position in Mali seems to have suddenly collapsed
without warning, or without preventative action being taken, and
meanwhile, we have had the North Korean threat. I somehow doubt we
would have had that if Reagan had been at the helm. What, exactly
have things come to when a cockroach of a country, apparently run
by real, certifiable lunatics, can threaten the United States with
nuclear weapons? The typhoon waves are starting to break over the
bridge.
Photo: UPI
