LITTLE SNAPPERS: THE UNBELIEVABLY CHURLISH AND TREASONABLY INCOMPETENT BEHAVIOR OF THE ACTING SECRETARY OF THE NAVY AND THE BREATHTAKING FOOLISHNESS OF CORONAVIRUS DENIERS.

 LITTLE SNAPPERS: THE UNBELIEVABLY CHURLISH AND TREASONABLY INCOMPETENT BEHAVIOR OF THE ACTING SECRETARY OF THE NAVY AND THE BREATHTAKING FOOLISHNESS OF CORONAVIRUS DENIERS.

 By:  Paul S. Marchand

When you are in a hole, stop digging.

                -Old management proverb, much quoted in the Armed Forces, the U.S. Navy among them.

There’s a turd on the deck. Don’t kick it.

                -Another old management proverb, also much quoted in the Armed Forces, the U.S. Navy among them.

FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)

                -Apocryphal Armed Forces acronym.

Tell the truth, and fuck the consequences.

                -Advice often given by mentors to young officers of the Navy and the Marine Corps.

The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.

                -From Terminiello v. Chicago, (1949)337 U.S. 1, Jackson, J., dissenting at 36

The right of free exercise of religion does not trump the rights of others.

                -Attr, in various forms, to Rev. Canon Susan Russell of All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, California.

Dum Spiro Spero (while I breathe, I hope.)

            -State Motto of South Carolina

Are you bloody mad?

                -Variously attributed, most recently from incoming Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Summary: The firing of Captain Brett Crozier, formerly CO of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), has managed to metastasize into a political cause célèbre underlining the churlishness and treasonable incompetence of the Trump administration, the Trump organized crime family, the outgoing acting Secretary of the Navy, and Donald Trump himself.

Responses to the Covid-19/coronavirus outbreak have begun themselves to break down on partisan lines. Democrats, sensible people, and members of mainline churches are tending to comply with shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines. The Trump Protestant Nonconformist evangelical base, on the other hand, is trying to cloak its defiance of safety measures in a gaudy sarape of “religious freedom” hypocrisy. Apparently their freedom to waive Bibles in everyone else’s face trumps the freedom of the rest of the community to be safe and healthy.

---------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, April 7, 2020 –- during my brief flirtation with the United States Navy in the late summer of 1981 – that is, before I was deterred from a naval career because I knew that I was an unrepentant incipient queer boy– people I knew who had served in the Navy tended to adhere to a number of fairly simple principles.

One of these was the idea that when you are in a hole, stop digging. This principle seems to have been lost on Donald Trump, on Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and most certainly on just-resigned acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly.

In a 15 minute rant to the crew of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) in Guam yesterday, the outgoing acting Secretary flayed Capt. Brett Crozier, the carrier’s quondam CO, who has since tested positive for coronavirus, as “naïve” and “stupid,” for having had the effrontery to tell the truth about a rapidly metastasizing COVID-19/coronavirus outbreak aboard the vessel, one of America’s 11 frontline aircraft carriers. There was a turd on the deck, and SECNAV kicked it, vigorously, several times.

In his unbelievably ill-considered, FUBAR remarks, Modly accused Captain Crozier of having “betrayed” the Navy. That is the kind of allegation that normally leads to an Article 32 hearing and a possible General Court Martial for the servicemember so accused. It is tantamount to accusing someone of one of the gravest crimes of which the Uniform Code of Military Justice takes cognizance.

In civil tort law, to make such an allegation, if the allegation is false or if it is made without probable cause to believe that it is true, constitutes the tort of slander per se.

Modly should perhaps consider himself lucky that he was able to disembark with his person — albeit not his career as acting SECNAV — intact after the way in which he disrespected the entire ship’s company of the Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, Modly’s shipboard temper tantrum is emblematic of the way in which the most corrupt, inept, treasonably incompetent administration in American history responds to anyone who does not trumpet or parrot the official party line of the Maximum Leader Donald Trump.

Throughout the entire COVID-19/coronavirus crisis, this administration’s handling of the epidemic has been characterized by a combination of callow stupidity, such as that displayed on a regular and ongoing basis by Trump’s son-in-law, the ridiculous Hofjude Jared Kushner, and treasonable incompetence, such as is displayed by Donald Trump himself every time he speaks in one of his marathon, mendacious, turgid, straight-outta-Pyongyang, I wanna-set-my-hair-on-fire, campaign rally coronavirus “briefings.” 

Most of what we have heard from the Trump administration on the subject of COVID-19/coronavirus has been the kind of willful lies and untruths in which Donald Trump has trafficked since he was first spawned, a freakish homunculus germinated outside lawful procreation. In short, everything that has come from the mouth of The Donald on the subject of COVID-19/coronavirus has been at best a distortion of the truth, and usually an arrant falsehood.

Now, historically, the Navy, and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Marine Corps, have traditionally had a culture of truth-telling, and fuck the consequences. In an actual war, it may be necessary to give the truth a convoy of lies, but, Trump and his “wartime president” bullshit notwithstanding, a medical emergency is not a war.

A medical emergency demands the same culture of truth-telling, of speaking truth to power, that the Navy and the Corps have always sought to internalize. To borrow a conceit from former Secretary of State John Kerry, when leaders lie, servicemembers die. When civilian leaders lie, particularly in the context of a contagion, citizens die. This was the reality Captain Brett Crozier was confronting aboard his vessel.

Though Theodore Roosevelt is one of the largest vessels in the United States Navy, it is, like all naval vessels, a relatively cramped place in which to accommodate nearly 5700 souls. When 5700 servicemembers are crammed together in close proximity in a hull 1092 feet long and 134 feet wide, it is altogether tempting fate to expect a viral contagion not to spread rapidly among the crew. Crozier’s impulse, to land as much of his crew as possible so they could be quarantined and the ship could be disinfected and returned speedily to service, appears to have been very much the correct one.

By contrast, the Trump administration’s response to his actions to protect his crew and his command, and to make his ship ready again for combat, has been rightly characterized by several members of the House Armed Services Committee as “a reckless, political move that reeks of undue command influence.”

Certainly, the Trump administration has sent and reinforced a message to every senior commander in the armed services that they had better be prepared to toe the administration’s line, even at the risk of the lives of the servicemembers under their command, or else.

This is very much akin to the message Iosif Stalin sent to his Armed Forces in the late 1930s when substantial numbers of the senior officer ranks of the Red Army were purged, either being shot or disappearing into the gulags until, in 1941 and 1942, with the Wehrmacht at the very gates of Moscow, Stalin discovered that he had contrived to purge the brains of his military and brought back many of the still-living purged officers. Stalin’s purge of the Soviet Armed Forces also sent a message to Herr Hitler and his generals that the Soviet Union was ripe for invasion, and would collapse if attacked.

Of course, the Soviet Union did not collapse after the Germans invaded it on June 22, 1941. But, the Soviets took a hell of a beating during the Great Patriotic War. Something in excess of 20 million Soviet citizens died during that war. And in large measure they died because of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin’s treasonable incompetence in purging the Soviet Armed Forces in the late 1930s.

Now, as pleasing as it may be to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to contemplate the prospect of a wholesale, Stalin-esque purge of the United States Armed Forces, and while it might be gratifying to The Donald to contemplate such a thing, we Americans do not take the kind of shit from our elected leaders that Russians have been taking from their Tsars and dictators from Ivan the Terrible through Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I, right down through Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin himself.

Thomas Modly, who gloried — until his resignation today — in the title of “acting” Secretary of the Navy, may very well have set a spark to tinder by insulting in Captain Crozier’s person the entire crew of Theodore Roosevelt. That discontent may very well spread through the Navy, the Corps, and the other components of this country’s armed forces.  

By treasonably incompetently interfering with good order and discipline in the service of which he is ostensibly the civilian had, Thomas Modly will have only himself to blame if the entire political order in the United States is upended by a single bullet with Donald Trump’s name on it, fired at him by a disgruntled Navy sniper. It would be even better, and karmically appropriate, were the sniper in question a registered Republican who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

    * * * * *
    Of course, if the Trump administration’s treasonable incompetence in handling the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in aiding the Russian State by undermining good order, morale, and discipline in our Armed Forces, it has also had the effect of emboldening that pernicious, malignant tendency among Protestant Nonconformist evangelicals toward the denial of anything resembling science and evidence-based evaluation of facts.

Around the country, reports are surfacing of large Protestant, Nonconformist evangelical conventicles whose pastors are encouraging and conjuring their easily deceived parishioners into defying public health authorities’ orders concerning sheltering-in-place and social distancing.

Rather than act with loving care and concern for the well-being of those who have entrusted themselves to their spiritual ministrations, these so-called pastors have been encouraging their flocks to attend services in packed mega-churches as a gesture of defiance to those public health authorities, and presumably to the “deep state.”

Now, from a purely Darwinian standpoint, it might make sense to call the herd and conduct a prophylaxis of the gene pool; from a purely Malthusian standpoint, there is something to be said for eliminating useless mouths wired to non-functioning brains and connected to uptight, hemorrhoidal, assholes.

However, correctly believing Christians do not organize their thinking along such grim, reductionist lines. We believe in a radically inclusive Gospel which commands us to love our neighbors, to care for our neighbors, and insofar as we are able, to keep our neighbors’ dumb asses out of harm’s way. In the context of COVID-19/coronavirus, that means not importuning your flock to come to your church, flouting all social distancing recommendations, just so they can stroke your ego and fatten your collection plates.

Indeed, if these pernicious pastors want to elevate to the level of a constitutional imperative their rights to infect their flocks with a potentially deadly virus, the law can and will respond appropriately to their illegal, antisocial, criminal, to say nothing of unchristian, activities.

For despite what these preachers of perdition may believe, no constitutional right or freedom is absolute. It is well-settled, for example, that, in a free speech context, the government may regulate the time, manner, and place in which speech happens, as long as the regulations are content-neutral, and narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest. That analytical framework may appropriately be applied to the exercise of any constitutionally guaranteed right.

Thus, even the right of the free exercise of religion may be subject to reasonable regulation if it is content and viewpoint-neutral, and narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest. In this case, all the empirical data at our command suggest unanswerably that large worship gatherings have the unfortunate side effect of being strong vectors for COVID-19/coronavirus transmission. 

Social distancing regulations and restrictions on gatherings, to the extent they are truly content and viewpoint-neutral, and tailored to advance a compelling government interest in maintaining the health of a given community, should therefore be considered constitutionally permissible, notwithstanding the generalized First Amendment guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of Religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As long as such regulations are temporary, and sunset at the earliest possible time, the regulations may be defended on that basis. After all, the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. See. e.g., Terminiello v. Chicago (1949) 337 U.S. 1 at 36 (Jackson, J., dissenting).  The free exercise right, in such a context, should not trump the civil rights of others, including the most important right of all, the right to life. After all, as the state motto of South Carolina assures us, Dum Spiro Spero, "while I breathe, I hope."

While pernicious preachers may preach promises of perdition to their flocks, and while those flocks themselves are perfectly free, in our constitutional theory, to believe that Donald Trump is some kind of Fourth Person of the Trinity, Who will miraculously save them from the ‘Rona, the rest of us have a right to say to them “are you bloody mad?” and resist their invasion of our rights under color of asserting their own.
-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. His allegedly nonessential office is running on a very limited basis in consequence of the contagion, and he himself has had only incidental contact with another human being in days. If the birds in his courtyard start talking to him, he will know that he has been socially isolating for too long, and that the ‘Rona is having a bad effect on his mind. This post was originally written yesterday, prior to Acting SECNAV Modly’s resignation. Overtaken by events, it has been revised to reflect the changed situation.