Obama Admin. vs. Justice & Constitutionality - Again!

[Peter Lemkin]

ChrisHedges

WeAre All Aboard the Pequod

Posted on Jul 7, 2013

By ChrisHedgesThemost prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimatefate as a species is found in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick."Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violentimpulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible inhis chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He isto us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or FyodorDostoyevsky to czarist Russia.Ourcountry is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, namedafter the Indiantribe exterminated in1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's30-man crewthere were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrotethe novelis a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the huntis a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter,maimed the ship's captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. Theself-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we areon, assures the Pequod's destruction. And those on the ship, onsome level, know they are doomedjust as many of us know that aconsumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitationand the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed."IfI had been downright honest with myself," Ishmael admits, "Iwould have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancybeing committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying myeyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon asthe ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects anywrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in thematter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even fromhimself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and triedto think nothing."We,like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence,for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sanelimits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with theflashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid meltingof glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, cropfailures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bowslavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion oflimitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternalwellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing willhalt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law."The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon mysoul is grooved to run," Ahab declares. We have surrendered ourlives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death.Microbes will inherit the earth.Inour decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form ofpatriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred andfear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists,real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a waron terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manningto Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. Webelieve, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify theearth. We are blind to the evil within us. Melville's descriptionof Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards,politicians, television personalities and generals who through thepower of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory andlust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-inducedobsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.Afterthe attacks of 9/11,EdwardSaidsawthe parallel with "Moby Dick" and wrote in the London newspaperThe Observer:

Osamabin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar toAmericans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowyfollowers might have had before they became stock symbols ofeverything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination.Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drivefor war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of MobyDick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for thefirst time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has becomea suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.

Ahab,as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book "RegenerationThrough Violence," is "the true American hero, worthy to becaptain of a ship whose wood could only be American.' "Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood,of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by ourceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, whitesupremacy and exploitation of nature.Melville,who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly awarethat the wealth of industrialized societies came from the exploitedof the earth. "Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens camefrom the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans," Ishmael says of NewEngland's prosperity. "One and all, they were harpooned anddragged up hither from the bottom of the sea." All the authorityfigures on the ship are white menAhab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb.The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of thewhales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color.Ahab,when he first appears on the quarterdeck after being in his cabin forthe first few days of the voyage, holds up a doubloon, an extravagantgold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots thewhite whale. He knows that "the permanent constitutional conditionof the manufactured man … is sordidness." And he plays to thissordidness. The whale becomes a commodity, a source of personalprofit. A murderous greed, one that Starbuck denounces as"blasphemous," grips the crew. Ahab's obsession infects theship."Isee in him [Moby Dick] outrageous strength, with an inscrutablemalice sinewing it," Ahab tells Starbuck. "That inscrutable thingis chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the whitewhale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me ofblasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."Ahabconducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist of violence and blood, on the deckwith the crew. He orders the men to circle around him. He makes themdrink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled withdraughts "hot as Satan's hoof." Ahab tells the harpooners tocross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons andanoints the ships' harpoonersQueequeg, Tashtego and Daggoohis"three pagan kinsmen." He orders them to detach the iron sectionsof their harpoons and fills the sockets "with the fiery waters fromthe pewter." "Drink, ye harpooneers! Drink and swear, ye men thatman the deathful whaleboat's bowDeath to Moby Dick! God hunt usall, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" And with the crewbonded to him in his infernal quest he knows that Starbuck ishelpless "amid the general hurricane." "Starbuck now is mine,"Ahab says, "cannot oppose me now, without rebellion." "Thehonest eye of Starbuck," Melville writes, "fell downright."Theship, described by Melville as a hearse, was painted black. It wasadorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the hugeteeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes, a "cannibalof a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of herenemies." The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turnedthe Pequod into a "red hell." Our own raging fires, leaping upfrom our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance acrossthe Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit weignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses tohelp the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching forhis son who has fallen overboard.Ahabis described by Melville's biographer Andrew Delbanco as "asuicidal charismatic who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who woulddeflect him from his purposean invention that shows no sign ofbecoming obsolete anytime soon." Ahab has not only the heatedrhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internalsecurity force on the ship, the five "dusky phantoms that seemedfresh formed out of air." Ahab's secret, private whale boat crew,which has a feral lust for blood, keeps the rest of the ship inabject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutalcoercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they markthose on Melville's ship. C.L.R.James,for this reason, describes "Moby Dick" as "the biography of thelast days of Adolf Hitler."Andyet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novelgives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab'smaniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love.He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip isthe only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahabis aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as theFool did in Shakespeare's "King Lear." Ahab warns Pip of Ahab."Lad, lad," says Ahab, "I tell thee thou must not follow Ahabnow. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yetwould not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which Ifeel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, mymalady becomes my most desired health. … If thou speakest thus tome much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; itcannot be." A few pages later, "untottering Ahab stood forth inthe clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow tothe fair girl's forehead of heaven. … From beneath his slouchedhat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific containsuch wealth as that one wee drop." Starbuck approaches him. Ahab,for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuckof his "forty years on the pitiless sea! … the desolation ofsolitude it has been. … Why this strife of the chase? why weary,and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How thericher or better is Ahab now?" He thinks of his young wife"Iwidowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck"and of hislittle boy: "About this timeyes, it is his noon nap nowtheboy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him ofme, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yetcome back to dance him again."

Ahab'sthirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction, however, overpowersthese faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatredwins. "What is it," Ahab finally asks, "what nameless,inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord andmaster, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against allnatural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, andjamming myself on all the time. …"

Melvilleknew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can bebrave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called onto stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiardivision. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what heforesees as Ahab's "impious end." Starbuck, "while generallyabiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or anyof the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstandthose more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimesmenace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man."Andso we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces thatwill finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack thefortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod'screw. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us intohostages.MobyDick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all whofollowed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship's descentcollapses, "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolledfive thousand years ago."