RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is clearly the wrong approach. Spike Lee, the moviemaker, says it’s time for the president to “go off,” to start jumping up and down and show some entertaining fury and frenzy. The rage should be directed at somebody like BP. Spike knows drama. “If there’s any one time to go off,” he says, “this is it, because this is a disaster.” Well, thanks for that, Spike. Now we know it’s a disaster.

Hollywood knows a disaster when it sees one. James Cameron, the moviemaker who thrilled the children of the world with “Titanic,” is pouting because BP hasn’t invited him to New Orleans to take over direction of the effort to fix things – in the words of Mr. Obama, to “plug that hole.” Mr. Cameron knows how to plug a hole. If you can plug a hole in a script, you can plug a hole in the ground. He not only made a movie about a sinking ship, but he has experience working with undersea robots. Still, it’s a pity that John Wayne is still dead. The Duke even made a movie about fighting oil-well fires. In the movie, he never went to an oil-well fire he couldn’t put out. Somebody could send a DVD of the movie to New Orleans.

We haven’t seen such a Hollywood presence – or attempted presence – in Louisiana since Sean Penn paddled his rowboat to flooded New Orleans in the wake of Katrina five years ago. Sean’s most memorable rescue attempt ended in disaster, but he did get in the way of the grownups and got his picture in the newspapers.

But it’s not just Hollywood folks. Everybody wants a piece of the action. Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian, echoes Spike Lee’s plea for rant and rage from Mr. Obama. He wistfully recalls the president’s talent for sending campaign crowds into rapture and joy, chanting “yes, we can,” and thinks a little of that spirit might plug the hole. “There was a feeling he was going to be one of these presidents [who] moved us with words the way John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did in recent decades.”

Alas, Mr. Obama shows only the unflappability of Jimmy (the “nukuler” engineer) Carter and Lyndon (the wizard of the straddle) Johnson, when what the multitudes need is entertaining bloviation. “In a time of great crisis, people aren’t looking for Johnson or Carter. They are looking for powerful rhetorical leadership – words that move the country in a positive direction.” Maybe a flotilla of ships with crowds of tourists chanting “yes, we can.” James Cameron and Spike Lee could retrieve those Parthenon-like columns that formed the backdrop for Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Chanting crowds need heroic backdrop, too.

Soon everyone will have a solution. A child prodigy in New York, still working on her Ph.D in engineering, says she got to cogitating about the problem and told the New York Post that she figured out what to do in less time than it takes most people to work a crossword puzzle. She would sink flat tires into the well, then inflate them to squeeze a seal. “I figured experts would know more about it than I did but their ideas didn’t work,” says Alia Sabur, 21. “So I started thinking about it.” Miss Sabur read novels at 2 and played the clarinet in a symphony orchestra at 11, so plugging the hole would be child’s work.

The president is doing his best to reassure the multitudes eager to resume chanting that he is, too, angry and furious, full of what our more literate grandparents called “choler.” He even sent his press flack out to tell reporters that he had seen the president rage. The problem, White House sources assure me, is that the teleprompter has been programmed for cool and composed, and there’s no immediately available software for craze and choler.

All the know-it-alls assume that BP, losing millions by the minute, is dawdling and daydreaming while their well continues to send oil profits to salty oblivion. But the smart money is, as usual, on the professionals, hated or not. They’re just not very good at panic.

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.