American Ahabs

In describing Captain Ahab’s obsession with the whale, Melville said this in “Moby Dick”:

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it."

It’s a grave and stirring portrayal of obsession, madness, and an anger so honed and refined as to focus a man’s entire life on the point of vengeance.

Something similar is happening in American politics today.  There is an anger festering, at first hidden behind the usual partisan rhetoric one expects around any election season and later out in the open, in every bit as full view as the AR-15 assault rifles some protestors were carrying during a speech by President Obama.

It would be equally easy to dismiss this as, say, the self-righteous anger of the anti-war protestors of President Bush, such as Code Pink and Cindy Sheehan.  They were obviously and admittedly angry about the perceived injustices they were protesting.

Yet, this feels different.  There wasn’t the talk of revolution, civil unrest, or coordinated and repeated angry disruptions of any meeting where the object of scorn was speaking.  The Secret Service, for example, weren’t on a continual heightened alert due to increased threats by domestic fringe extremists.

The Presidency of George W. Bush was called into question because of a very public, very grueling recount process following the 2000 election in which there was reasonable doubt regarding the outcome if this or that recount had been allowed to finish.  There wasn’t a concerted movement to discredit Bush’s very citizenship, to call into question his upraising or heritage.

President Bush’s tenure was marked by tax cuts coupled with increased government spending.  He was the first US president to request a budget breaking the $3 trillion mark, yet there weren’t mass protests by taxpayers or accusations of some Marxist/Stalinist/Socialist agenda.

The very public and open piety of George Bush’s faith was never called into question, never called a lie or a front for some “secret faith” wholly opposed to American cultural norms.  Yet, all of these things are happening now, and among the same demographics of people, over and over again.  They are a minority in the American political spectrum, to be sure, but they are a highly vocal minority, made so all the more by the advent of the Information Age.

To be sure, this brand of political thinking isn’t new on the American scene.  Rick Perlstein recently reminded us of the history of such thinking in the US, most especially from the 20th century and beyond.  In his article, such familiar rhetoric was heard in describing the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman as “20 years of treason”.  The accusation of Soviet or communist plotting was rampant and anything not deemed in accordance with “traditional values” was described as being the work of said plotters.

These statements from the past seem laughably familiar to those of us who have listened to Michele Bachmann’s claims of FEMA concentration camps (so similar to the Alaskan mental health hospitals of Kennedy’s day).  Yet, they are all being repeated today, with new ones piled on.  Worse still, they are mustering disparate groups of like minded individuals together, allowing their anger to build, feed on itself, and become more irrational.

Any and all accusations are juxtaposed and hurled at President Obama, regardless of how non-sensical they are to anyone educated on their actual meaning.  He’s been called a Muslim Socialist, despite the fact such ideologies don’t go together...at all.  Outspoken conservative Jonah Goldberg even penned a book titled “Liberal Fascism”, an absurd glomming together of wholly opposite notions, yet eagerly gobbled up and repeated by right wingers intent on “exposing the agenda”.  (As a side note, do visit the Amazon page for Goldberg’s book and take a look at some of the other titles listed in the “More Results” portion.)

Where this new and seething anger becomes clear is meeting one of these right wingers, face to face.  No reasonable argument is possible.  It inevitably devolves into shouts and accusations of being in league with the enemy.  I have indeed encountered such people and it caused me to wonder, possibly too rightly, if the meeting was going to come to actual physical blows being thrown.

Most worrying of all is that the endgame for this paranoid, irrational hatred and anger isn’t yet clear.  Right wing groups such as the KKK and similar neo-Nazis proclaim an imminent war in the US.  Right wingers like Lew Rockwell predict civil unrest and the breakdown of society any day now.  Indeed, to that end, they sound more like Captain Ahab with each passing day, standing on the deck of the Pequod, the whale in his sights:

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"