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Time to Free Capt. Queeg From Trump's Tentacles [1]
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Date: 2023-05-11
Before Donald Trump delivers his last harangue, and is mercifully silenced by voters, the courts, or the supreme overlord, there needs to be a reckoning in his misalliance with Captain Queeg, the infamous fictional mariner who was relieved of his command in “The Caine Mutiny.”
At outset of Trump’s candidacy and deep into his presidency, his bellicose posturing and blunderbuss rants prompted comparisons to martinets and chicken hawks, war lords and sad sacks, real and mythical, from Mussolini to Sgt. Bilko, Genghis Khan to Gen. Buck Turgidson.
But no member of Trump’s militaristic cohort was so prominently and frequently cited as Capt. Philip Francis Queeg, whose maladroit seamanship and perceived cowardice cost him the command of the USS Caine, along with a court-martial, in Herman Wouk’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize novel, “The Caine Mutiny.”
As prime evidence that Queeg’s craven image has stuck to Trump like barnacles, there was the New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who wrote: “There will be no G.O.P. mutiny even if Trump resembles Captain Queeg more each day.”
Right on one count, wrong on the other. As Friedman predicted, there’s been no mutiny by servile Republicans or MAGA lackeys, despite the magnitude of Trump’s transgressions, which led to the two impeachments, the House investigation of the Capitol insurrection, and the multiplying criminal and civil indictments.
And Trump’s swaggering re-entry into the 2024 battleground strongly indicates that he and Queeg are likely to be hype-cast as a misfit twins again. But a close inspection of the matchup between the two -- a disabled seaman versus a cowardly liar -- proves that Queeg’s inclusion in that motley brigade of Trump archetypes and clones was clearly a false equivalence, a case of wrongful identity, a spurious simulacrum.
For now, each day brings another frontal assault by Trump on our social, political, F and moral landscape, which makes it more evident that there’s even less resemblance to the woebegone Queeg.
As Trump’s campaign heats up, it’s time to give Queeg a break and set the records straight, to prevent the virulent Trump from further poisoning the fictional captain’s already blighted name, and taking him down with his ship of ghouls. However faulty his seamanship and his mental state, Queeg deserves better than to be conjoined with Trump and turned into a hapless twin, a sidekick, a stooge.
While the Trump insurgency has made Queeg’s miliary snafus seem trivial by comparison, a conscious uncoupling would serve Trump just as well, distancing him from a legendary loser. The repeated references to the Trump/Queeg misalliance by Friedman and his colleagues assume an awareness of a 70-plus-year-old blockbuster and its ill-fated captain – making it likely that present generations, X,Y,Z and, their immediate predecessors, will be stumped, raising the cry: “Who the (bleep) is Queeg?”
There was a fleeting answer to that question in 2019 with the death at age 103 of Herman Wouk, the prodigious World War II novelist and essayist, who based the “The Caine Mutiny” on incidents and shipmates from his WWII service on two minesweepers. The obituaries for Wouk prominently resurrected Queeg, the most enduring and disgraced character from his dreadnought best-seller, reinforcing his name as synonymous with military bungling, cowardice, and paranoia.
Rather than the book, “The Caine Mutiny” is probably best remembered for the 1954 movie version, sparked by Humphrey Bogart‘s Oscar-nominated performance as Queeg, the abominable seaman who’s totally lost his bearings, leading to his crew’s mutiny and seizure of the Caine. Less famously, there were also stage and TV adaptations of the book’s concluding episode, titled, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.”
It was the indelible Bogart image of Queeg that caused columnist Leonard Pitts to compare Trump’s mortifying UN performance in 2018 (“rambling on with no conviction and less energy about his innocence, his mistreatment by the media, his unappreciated greatness)” to Queeg’s “mental disintegration” in “The Caine Mutiny.” Recalling Bogart’s crackup as the tragic skipper, Pitts described an unstable Bogart/Queeg “rambling on the witness stand about strawberries and tow lines and the supposed lies of his subordinates.”
With boosts from its screen and stage versions, the Wouk novel elevated the name Queeg – - from Queequeg, the tattooed harpooner who went down with the Pequod in “Moby-Dick” – to a level of everlasting infamy, equaling and possibly surpassing that of Captains Ahab (“Moby-Dick”) and Bligh (“Mutiny on the Bounty” ). (The Trump resemblance in “Moby-Dick” could easily apply not just to Ahab but to the white whale.)
Before Trump went completely off the deep and deranged end, claiming a stolen re-election and spearheading his war on American democracy, there were legitimate reasons to see how his unhinged performance as commander-in chief put him on a disastrous parallel course with the woebegone Queeg. Those were most in evidence in Queeg’s stumbling and painfully revealing testimony at his court-martial.
That’s the pivotal moment in both the novel and theatrical versions when it becomes tragically clear to Queeg’s accusers and defenders just how far off course the muddled skipper has drifted not just nautically but psychologically. Similarly, Trump’s impromptu, shoot-from-the-lip performances– during rallies, debates, and rose garden psychodramas -- starkly revealed his precarious command of reality, his glaring inability to guide the U.S. ship of state.
Another loose connection between Queeg and Trump begins with a military maneuver in Wouk’s novel. While the USS Caine is escorting landing craft during the invasion of Kwajalein, Queeg orders a yellow dye dropped into the sea and hastily flees the battle scene – a cowardly act that causes his crew to tag him “Old Yellowstain.”
For reasons of vanity rather than cowardice, that nickname could just as easily apply to Trump -- alluding to the stain that colors his mindsweeping yellow pompadour.
But on closer scrutiny, Trump and Queeg are far from a perfect match. However tarnished his judgment and seamanship, Queeg enlisted to end a war, earning combat ribbons and brass medals the hard and honorable way -- in service to his country. The ophidian Trump has demonstrated a different kind of brass with his unsteady-as-she-goes performance at the White House, threatening shooting wars with Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, launching trade wars with China, Canada, and other allies.
Trump’s industrious military complex was even more on display at his 21-howitzer salute to himself, featuring massive military hardware at the 2020 White House and Mt. Rushmore Fourth of July celebrations. Among other embarrassments, this Trumpian display of mountebank fervor served as a painfully ironic reminder of the president’s dubious 4-F deferment from military duty, earning him the rank of “Private No-Class Bone Spurs.”
The Queeg matchup is missing another crucial component that’s a tipoff to the captain’s hazardous mental state, a vital prop that Trump lacks: A pair of steel balls (or ball bearings) that Queeg unconsciously deploys, rolling them between his thumb and forefinger, so that the metallic clicking audibly signals his confusion and embarrassment.
As a “metaphor analyst” for Novelguide.com put it: “Whenever Queeg becomes frustrated or unsure of himself, he reaches for the balls, which he rolls incessantly in his hand. Since Queeg strives for perfection and control, but rarely achieves it, the balls can be seen as a symbol of his neutered masculinity. During the trial, one of the Navy psychiatrists suggests that the balls could be ‘an expression of rage and hostility toward the world.’"
Rage, hostility, neutered masculinity – those could well be among the prime motivations for Trump’s tantrums and threats and tweets, reckless missiles aimed at any offending person or dissident group that strays into his cross hairs.
At the courtroom climax of “The Caine Mutiny,” merciless interrogation by a Navy prosecutor leaves Queeg shamed and incoherent. Testifying about his crew in movie dialogue paraphrased from the novel: “. . . They were all disloyal. I tried to run the ship properly, by the book, but they fought me at every turn. The crew wanted to walk around with their shirt tails hanging out, that's all right, let them. Take the tow line, defective equipment, no more, no less. But they encouraged the crew to go around scoffing at me, and spreading wild rumors about steaming in circles, and then old yellow-stain. . . .”
The soliloquy trails off in an embarrassed silence, with Bogart/Queeg lowering his eyes in regret, realizing how he’s scuttled his own case. In the novel, Wouk describes a defeated, but sympathetic, figure, retiring from the courtroom, “his shoulders hunched, head down, feet scurrying, the balls rolling in his fingers.” At novel’s end, Queeg has been permanently relieved of sea duty and reassigned to a naval supply depot in Iowa.
He’s an old sailor fading away into silence and obscurity – a drastic departure from the reverse course Trump has taken in losing his role as commander-in-chief. What should have been Trump’s conciliatory farewell has played out with his howls of a rigged election, refusal to show for President Biden’s inauguration, encouraging the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other misfit militias to ransack the nation’s’ capitol and lynch Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and other MAGA apostates.
In the intervening years since the novel was published, the movie released, revisionary forces have made Queeg appear less a coward than a wounded warrior, who conducted himself honorably if not heroically, in Pacific battles, earning citations and medals. His Caine downfall was precipitated by battle fatigue, better understood and accepted today as PTSD.
With Queeg disqualified from any posthumous guilt by association with Trump, that leaves a doppelganger gap in the Trump organization of rotters, scoundrels, common and uncommon criminals. But there’s still a long line of highly qualified replacements, real and fictional -- assorted traitors, enemies of democracy, champions of moral decay, beginning at the top with Mussolini, with competition in no particular order from Goring, Milosevic, Orwell’s Napoleon, Milo Minderbinder, Boss Tweed, Grendel, Popeye’s Brutus, Lonesome Rhodes, Humbert Humbert, and Quisling (Quisling who?).
Whoever succeeds Queeg in inhuman bondage with Trump deserves condolences rather than congratulations. Who among the quick or the dead would want to be identified with Trump? But the match game, in the end, is a zero-sum enterprise. Even with his tarnished legacy, Queeg does his best to play by the rules of democracy, while Trump, with his latest ploy to suspend the Constitution, does his very worst to jettison it.
John Blades is a retired Chicago Tribune book editor. He is the author of the novel, “Small Game,” and fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.
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