It's rare for us mere taxpayers and race viewers to get a ringside seat at a corporate decapitation, especially one so fulsomely performed. That Barker retains the face of total surprise and hurt suggests only that, however capable he was at manoeuvring in the face of wind and current at sea, his land legs don't give him the same steady purchase.
What we are really watching is an old Irish drama - at least that's what America's Kennedy brothers called it in Boston - "Don't get mad. Get even."
I'm sure some besides myself recall how the last campaign for the cup went. The score was 8-1 in our favour when Team NZ, one point from final victory, unaccountably called a lay day. On return to the match, momentum - and the water gods - shifted in favour of Oracle Team USA giving them the greatest comeback victory in the sport of cup racing.
Barker was supposed to fall on his sword, keep his bitterness to himself until he wrote his memoir and everyone else had pretty damn well forgotten about it. Suck it up.
But he couldn't - and didn't - and when he got a chance he told the world it was not his decision to give Oracle that extra day. It was Dalton's. Dalton wanted to give his corporate sponsors a chance to witness the victory.
Instead, they saw Oracle's victory. Barker couldn't let history hang that loss on him - but now that history and the story has come back to hang like an albatross around his neck. It may yet come back to bite Dalton, too, as some have called recently for his sacking.
Aside from its dramatic value, why should we care? For one thing, it's clear that, from every angle viewed, Team New Zealand has a dysfunctional management, which has behaved like petulant teenagers ever since Sir Peter Blake left. They bounced Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth and Team NZ promptly lost the cup to them as Alinghi. They had trouble with the boats; now this stoush between Dalton and Barker.
The question raised by this brouhaha is whether the Government should be subsidising a corporate enterprise - and a dysfunctional one at that - of professional sailing with $100 million of our taxpayer dollars. Who benefits when they socialise the costs and privatise the profits?
Why not let them find their own buoyancy in the corporate sponsorship they've been so over-willing to please?
There's a lot better use to which $100 million can be put. There's alleviating things for the 25 per cent of our kids living in poverty. Some of it could be used to teach water safety and prevent drowning - and some money could be dispersed to sailing programmes for children so that several may become the professional sailors on those yachts belonging more and more to the corporate future.
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable
