What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?
It’s early in the morning and I don’t know what to do with my drunken sailor. On the one hand I need him and on the other hand a drunken sailor is more a liability than an asset. Can you still keel-haul someone? For those unfamiliar with the practice, it is an odd and drastic punishment that was used in the Dutch and perhaps English navies to discipline wayward sailors. Like so many forms of punishment, it was meant more to horrify other sailors and thereby keep them in line rather than effect a reasonable punishment. People seem to think it was like walking the plank and something pirates did. But pirates didn’t do it because they didn’t need to do it. They were not about discipline for its own sake, they wanted discipline to get from here to there.
There is an interesting dynamic that exists in any collective enterprise. A group of people get together in some manner to get something done. They head down the road all doing what they think they are supposed to do (not unlike a ship heading out to sea with a bunch of generalist sailors and a few specialist sailors with specific skills). While at sea, the Captain finds that one of the sailors is a drunken sailor and not up the tasks he is assigned. If it is a generalist sailor, no big deal, you sideline the drunken sailor. When the sailor in question is a specialist and his skills are necessary to the common cause, that’s when you have a major issue. What then do you do with the drunken sailor?
The choices are to try to sober him up and use him as best you can during the voyage, never to be used again. Or you can simply be done with him and keel-haul him or have him walk the plank for sheer incompetence. The former seems enlightened and the later seems harsh. But what about repeated offenses? When the sailor continues to get drunk and continues to screw things up through his drunkenness. Isn’t there a point where you are better off without him?
I have faced these ideas many times over many years in many different configurations. Let’s just say I have Captained many a ship and faced many a drunken sailor issue. I generally favor the enlightened approach since I don’t believe in management by fear and I have no need to make an example of anyone. I am also a believer that hindsight is often very revealing that every sailor makes his contribution over time and that occasional drunkenness may not take in the entire picture. Some will call that a Pollyannaish view of life and sailing. Today I am in a frame of mind to think it is just that.
My drunken sailor is drunk again, and I am quite livid since it has impacted the mission. What is worse than a drunken sailor? A drunken sailor that doesn’t think he is drunk and thinks he can do no wrong, and also thinks he is the best sailor in the world. Now that is suddenly a world-class problem. You now have a drunken arrogant sailor on your hands. What to do?
I tend to think that arrogance falls into the Cardinal Sins of sailing where mere drunkenness is more a Venial Sin. Technically, pride and gluttony are on a par in the ranking of sins. Gluttony or drunkenness can find an end (remember we are speaking in euphemisms). Pride and arrogance are inherent and do not disappear so easily.
Arrogance is born of pride and pride is the high regard for oneself. We are taught that we must love ourselves, but that is quite different than feeling we are the smartest or best in any given room. That is very damaging to any collective effort as it implies an inability to be wrong and a mirror image sense that one is always right.
I prefer the exact opposite view of the world, that we are all fallible and that there is no shame in being wrong, only shame in not admitting when we are wrong.
Our President is a drunken sailor. He is both drunken and arrogant. He hurts our country every day. He needs to be removed from the ship of state for fear that he will scuttle the ship. I do not call him Captain since on issues of democracy, I (and every other citizen) are the captains of this ship. His arrogance alone makes him dangerous, but his arrogant drunkenness is devastating to the nation as he wanders the globe (both in body and tweet).
What do you do with a drunken sailor when that sailor occupies the Presidency? I believe you impeach, but the galvanized electorate and the highly partisan state of Congress seems to make that a difficult punishment. Some suggest that the politicized nature of impeachment is imbedded in the constitution, I believe the constitution makes impeachment of such a vastly flawed sailor an imperative. Impeachment is the keel-hauling of our democracy. If the sailor lives, he lives. If he dies he dies. It is not cruel or unnecessary, it is necessary to keep the ship functioning.
Dear Mr. Clayton Moore,
Keel-hauling was most frequently a death sentence since there are sharp barnacles aplenty on the hull of the boat. A most unpleasant experience and certainly the rest of the crew would think seriously about their own behavior. I also would wonder where the drunken sailor was getting his extra grog enabling him to get drunk. To me it shows some ingenuity, though leading to an undesirable end.
I don’t like to judge too harshly, either, someone who is rocking the boat. To look at it in the most generous light it is that they may be thinking ‘outside the box’. Or out of a bottle as the case may be. One of my favorite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, had a few of quotes that are somewhat germane. “In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone”. And “In the United States. though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes “. He also said “Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted’.
I am in no way a fan of the present ‘Commander In Chief’. I have been been presumed to be because, while getting my degree in economics, I found my favorite economist to be Milton Friedman and lean toward fiscal conservatism. I’m a social liberal so I prefer to be called an independent.
I am not giving the ‘Donald’ credit for thinking outside the box either and standing alone against the onslaught of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Rather, like Macbeth, just that he is on the crazy side. Doesn’t he ever shut up? Perhaps he is following another of Galbraith’s quotes, “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular failure”.
I guess what I’m saying is that we are getting the government we payed for, though more and more it is the vested interests, not us, putting up the dough. We are sold a bill of goods that is rarely what we wanted, no one in the government ever goes against the tide, never admit to being wrong and they do think very highly of themselves because they feel they have ‘the power’. Thus paralysis and aspersions all around. How can anybody in Washington throw the first stone? I have contempt for all of them. And it doesn’t start there. Tip O’Neil said ‘all politics is local’ and he nailed it. Just open your front door.
A Chinese proverb says that ‘the tallest tree in the forest catches the most wind’. Ed Koch would use that one when he was criticized and also was an anomaly in that he WOULD admit when was wrong. I liked him. But the tallest tree now isn’t only taking the most wind but creating blow-back by being such a non-thinking blow hard !!
At this point I see very little light at the end of the tunnel. The presumption that a second term is inevitable saddens me greatly. The show that is going on in DC reminds me of Colonel Kurtz’s analyses of the Vietnam War when he equates it to a circus being run by clowns who can’t give it away fast enough.
I may have meandered a bit and certainly used enough quotes however , for whatever reason, I am not quite to the point of seeing our ship of state sinking. We do need to start bailing and getting rid of the flotsam and jetsam.
Sincerely, Lonny
I agree