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| Captain Queeq |
Hal G.P. Colebatch , an Australian , author, poet,
lecturer, journalist, editor, and lawyer, has lectured in International
Law and International Relations at Notre Dame University and Edith Cowan University
in Western Australia and worked on the staff of two Australian Federal
Ministers.
A perspective on our President Obama from Down Under.
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.
