Monday, November 30, 2020

Reading Critically

And the answer is: "No."

Queeg is a fictional character whose every action is determined by Herman Wouk and screenwriters.  Trump assembled a decent cabinet, and then proceeded to ignore every one of them because he's a "very stable genius" and knows more than all his generals and "gets science" because he had an uncle on faculty at MIT.

My father was an accountant; I'm an English major.  Whatever skills he had in numbers didn't pass to me.

The "establishment" tried to work with Trump.  He wasn't Queeg.  He wasn't a hapless man in over his head but the product of a Naval system of discipline that could have been appealed to by his fictional (and non-Navy careerist) officers.  The comparison doesn't work, on any level.  Well, except the tear-the-ship-apart-to-find-the-strawberries part.

1 comment:

  1. When Ishmael first signed on to the Pequod his first roommate was a Pacific Island harpooner named Queeg-Queeg. Was it simply a coincidence that Wouk foreshortened that name for the subject of his case study in life at sea?

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