Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
President Donald Trump announced out of the blue last week that he wants to buy Greenland, which has the whole world going, “What the rhymes-with-small-waterfowl?”
Well, there are some unsettling parallels.
Erik the Red, one of the most famous of Vikings, gave Greenland its name through a piece of Trump-like hucksterism.
The story goes that Erik was exiled there and didn’t want to go alone.
He called this huge island that consists mostly of ice-covered ice “Greenland,” hoping he could persuade a few Vikings to come on down, thinking they’d find unlimited crop and hunting lands.
So why would Trump be interested in Greenland?
It could be because Greenland might be a good place to park a few warplanes and a missile or two as a message to hostile nations located to our east.
This, however, is Trump.
This is the guy who just told a New Hampshire audience, “You have to vote for me whether you like it or not.”
This is the guy who used an orphaned baby as a prop for a cheerful campaign-style photo op after the El Paso massacre.
This is the guy who re-tweeted the off-the-wall conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of accused child-molester Jeffrey Epstein, which has been ruled a suicide.
Some may remember “The Caine Mutiny,” the Herman Wouk novel that centered around a World War II ship commander’s descent into insanity.
Trump’s idea of purchasing Greenland reminds me of the strawberry incident in “The Caine Mutiny.”
As Captain Queeg, the officer whose sanity was fading in the novel, felt he was losing his grip on command of the Caine, the title ship, he invented for his hapless crew a theft of strawberries and played out a ritualistic scenario of proof that mystified the crew.
As it turned out, one of Queeg’s early triumphs in his naval career was solving a mystery involving stolen strawberries. He proved they were stolen by measuring sand into a strawberry can and having officers dole out sand in the same measures they remembered taking for dessert.
There should have been more, as extra sand in the bottom revealed, and that’s how Queeg proved that some unauthorized “mess-boys” had taken the berries.
As his mental state deteriorated aboard the Caine, he decided in his increasing derangement to re-stage that incident to reinforce his command, leaving his crew open-mouthed.
Today the real Trump has shown recently that he’s having a hard time keeping it together in the face of increasingly serious challenges to his re-election.
Like Queeg, he may be falling back on old triumphs, in his case, very large real estate transactions. To reinforce his presidency, he seems to have decided, he has to close a huge real estate deal.
Hey, why not Greenland?
So what if Greenland is not for sale. Its 56,000 residents say it isn’t and so does the island nation’s owner, Denmark.
But for a president losing his grip it might seem to be a way to renew a sense of triumph.
Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a semi-retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at: