by Chris Hedges
The road to oblivion becomes, in the end, a narcotic reverie. The sexual, the tawdry, and the inane preoccupy public discourse. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes in Castle to Castle, “… when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! panties overboard!”28
Our major preoccupation is pleasure. Margaret Atwood, in her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, observes that as a species “we’re doomed by hope.”29 The mantra is to be positive, to be happy. This mania for optimism—for happiness—leads to fantasy being mistaken for reality. Reality is dismissed when it is unpleasant.
“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real,” Daniel Boorstin writes in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”30
Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions, elaborate public spectacle, and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against the ancient equivalent of this degeneration and, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered. His severed head and right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, reportedly spat on the severed head, placed it on her knees, opened its mouth, and pierced the tongue with hairpins.31 The crowd roared its approval. Cicero, the crowd was assured, would never speak or write again.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary executions, and disappearances, along with famines, gulags, and a state system of propaganda unplugged from daily reality, give to all totalitarian systems a dreamlike quality. Reality is monstrous. But the portrayal of reality in the state-controlled press and popular entertainment is harmonious and pleasant. Justice, in the narratives approved for public consumption, is always served. Goodness always triumphs. Goals are always attained. This dichotomy, although not on the level of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Nazi Germany, is nevertheless present in American culture and getting worse. The gap between who we are and who we think we are is steadily expanding.
The Master and Margarita is built around Woland, or Satan, who is a traveling magician; a hog-sized, vodka-swilling, chess-playing black cat named Behemoth; a witch named Hella; a poet named Ivan Homeless; and a writer known as The Master, who has been placed in an insane asylum following the suppression of his book. Other characters include The Master’s lover Margarita, Pontius Pilate, Yeshua (or Jesus Christ), and Pilate’s dog Banga—the only creature that loves Pilate.
Moral decency has been banished. The amoral is celebrated. Satan holds a ball where Margarita, as queen, plays hostess to “kings, dukes, cavaliers, suicides, poisoners, gallowsbirds and procuresses, jailers, cardsharps, executioners, informers, traitors, madmen, detectives and corrupters of youth.”32 All these guests leap from coffins that fall out of the fireplace. The men wear tailcoats, and the women, who are naked, differ from each other only “by their shoes and the color of the feathers on their heads.”33 As Johann Strauss leads the orchestra, the revelers mingle in a cool ballroom set in a tropical forest.
In this world of total control, you flourish only if the state decides you are worthy to exist—“No documents, no person.”34 When Behemoth and his companion, Korovyov, an ex-choirmaster, attempt to enter the restaurant at the headquarters of the state-sanctioned literary trade union—filled with careerists, propagandists, profiteers, and state bureaucrats, along with their wives and mistresses—they are accosted at the entrance.
“A pale bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a tassel was sitting on a bentwood chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where an opening had been created in the greenery of the trellis,” writes Bulgakov.
In front of her on a plain kitchen table lay a thick, office-style register in which, for reasons unknown, she was writing down the names of those entering the restaurant. It was this citizeness who stopped Korovyov and Behemoth.
“Your ID cards?” she asked.…
“I beg a thousand pardons, but what ID cards?” asked a surprised Korovyov.
“Are you writers?” asked the woman in turn.
“Of course we are,” replied Korovyov with dignity.
“May I see your IDs?” repeated the woman.
“My charming creature …” began Korovyov, tenderly.
“I am not a charming creature,” interrupted the woman.
“Oh, what a pity,” said Korovyov with disappointment, and continued, “Well, then, if you do not care to be a charming creature, which would have been quite nice, you don’t have to be. But, here’s my point, in order to ascertain that Dostoevsky is a writer, do you really need to ask him for an ID? Just look at any five pages of any of his novels, and you will surely know, even without an ID, that you’re dealing with a writer. Besides, I don’t suppose that he ever had any ID! What do you think?”
Korovyov turned to Behemoth.
“I’ll bet he didn’t,” replied the latter.…
“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the citizeness.…
“Well, but how do you know, how do you know?” replied [Korovyov].
“Dostoevsky is dead,” said the citizeness, but not very confidently.
“I protest!” exclaimed Behemoth hotly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”
“Your IDs, citizens,” said the citizeness.35
Although The Master and Margarita, whose working title was “Satan in Moscow,” was completed in 1940, it did not appear in print in uncensored form until the 1970s.
When societies break down, their words, or at least the words used in everyday discourse, no longer make sense. What is real cannot be spoken about. What is not real is used to define the legal, moral, and linguistic foundations of society.
“The power structure is symbolized by its anonymity and omnipresence, by its mysterious nature, by its total knowledge against which there is no defense, by its ability to penetrate every space, by putting in an appearance at any hour of the day or night,” Karl Schlögel wrote in his book Moscow, 1937 in speaking of the organs of state security during Stalin’s purges. “Investigating officials have no names; they are simply ‘they.’ The word ‘arrest’ is replaced by the sentence ‘We need to sort something out’ or ‘We need your signature here.’ … The authorities are spoken of only indirectly and as if talking about an anonymous body. ‘This can be discovered soon enough,’ ‘They have found out all there is to know,’ ‘Everything has been deciphered,’ ‘All of this will be explained, very quickly in fact.’ Everyone seems to know of the existence of this organization and they all suffer from its ubiquitous presence. People are afraid and go pale whenever it makes its appearance. It takes people away, confiscates manuscripts and seals up apartments.”36
Joseph Roth, in his 1924 novel Hotel Savoy, peels back the facade of power to expose the same decadence and mendacity explored by Bulgakov. In Roth’s novel, Gabriel Dan, an Austrian soldier released from a Serbian prisoner-of-war camp after World War I, finds sanctuary in a hotel that
holds out the promise of water, soap, English lavatories, a lift, chambermaids in white caps, a chamberpot gleaming like some precious surprise in the little brown-panelled night cupboard; electric lamps blooming in shades of green and rose, like flowers from their clayx; bells which ring at the push of a button; and beds plump with eiderdowns, cheerful and waiting to receive one’s body.37
In the grand ballrooms of the hotel, the rich, the war profiteers, and the powerful gorge
themselves in gluttonous revelry, as they did during the war. But on the upper floors, Dan discovers desperate, impoverished debtors, bankrupt gamblers, failed revolutionaries, chorus girls, clowns, dancers, the terminally ill, and idealistic dreamers. Once those in the upper garrets are fleeced of their money and possessions by the hotel management, they are tossed into the street. Roth’s protagonist said:
The people from the upper storeys also came to me, and there was no end to this. I saw that none of them lived at the Hotel Savoy of his own free will. Each of them was gripped by some misfortune, and the Hotel Savoy was the misfortune and they were no longer capable of choosing between this and that. Every piece of bad luck came to them through this hotel and they believed that Savoy was the name of their misfortune.38
Bulgakov and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. Political debate and ideological constructs for these elites are just so much absurdist theater, a cynical species of public spectacle and mass entertainment. These systems, like our own, are organized kleptocracies.
Not long before the invasion of France, a friend asked Roth, who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.”39
Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was as keenly aware as Roth was that the wealth of industrialized societies was violently wrested by Europeans and Euro-Americans from the wretched of the earth. As Marx and Adam Smith had pointed out, it was Atahualpa’s gold that made possible the Industrial Revolution.
All the authority figures on the Pequod are white men—Ahab, Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb. The hard, dirty work on the ship—from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales and “pitch[ing] hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stir[ing] up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet”40—is the task of the poor, mostly men of color. And since a whaler’s pay was based on his “lay,” or share of the catch, and since numerous articles he needed for the voyage were deducted in advance from his lay, he could return after a two- or three-year trip and receive little money or find himself in debt to the ship’s owners. The streets of whaling ports such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, were lined with the opulent mansions of whaling merchants and crowded with bands of destitute sailors. The sailors were little more than sharecroppers on ships.
Ahab appears on the quarterdeck after secreting himself in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage and holds up a doubloon, an extravagant gold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale. He knows that “the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man … is sordidness,” and he plays to this sordidness.41 The whale becomes, like everything in the capitalist world, a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed grips the crew. Ahab’s obsession infects the ship, though Starbuck, the first mate, protests, “Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”42
Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist worship of violence and death, on the deck with the crew. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts “hot as Satan’s hoof.” Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ship’s harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo—his “three pagan kinsmen.” He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons, and he fills the upturned sockets “with the fiery waters from the pewter.” “Drink, ye harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby-Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”43
Later in the novel, Ahab invokes Satan as he tempers his newly forged harpoon—forged specifically to deal death to the white whale—with the freely given blood of his pagan harpooners: “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli” (“I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil”). And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest, he knows that Starbuck cannot “stand up amid the general hurricane.” “Starbuck now is mine,” Ahab says to himself. The first mate “cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”44 “Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered.”45
The Pequod was black. “She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” The ship, Melville writes, was festooned “like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory,” with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales.46
“Whales were described,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick in In the Heart of the Sea, his book about the real-life incident that inspired Melville’s novel,
by the amount of oil they would produce (as in a fifty-barrel whale), and although the whalemen took careful note of the mammal’s habits, they made no attempt to regard it as anything more than a commodity whose constituent parts (head, blubber, ambergris, etc.) were of value to them. The rest of it—the tons of meat, bone, and guts—was simply thrown away, creating festering rafts of offal that attracted birds, fish, and, of course, sharks. Just as the skinned corpses of buffaloes would soon dot the prairies of the American West, so did the headless gray remains of sperm whales litter the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.47
The fierce and massive fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a “red hell.”48 Philbrick quotes a green hand (a sailor with no previous sailing experience) from Kentucky: “A trying-out scene [in which the blubber is boiled down aboard a whale ship] has something wild and savage in it, a kind of indescribable uncouthness, which renders it difficult to describe with anything like accuracy. There is a murderous appearance about the blood-stained decks, and the huge masses of flesh and blubber lying here and there, and a ferocity in the looks of the men, heightened by the red, fierce glare of the fires.”49
Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordnance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit, we too ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to halt his quest for forty-eight hours to help the frantic captain of a passing ship find his twelve-year-old son, who is adrift in a missing whaleboat.
And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into Ahab’s internal battle between his maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, like most of us, yearns for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip—who fell overboard during one hunt and subsequently went insane—is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness and fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool does in Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play Melville knew intimately. Ahab warns Pip away from Ahab, away from himself. “Lad, lad,” says Ahab,
I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.… If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.50
This moment of weakness in Ahab says something fundamental about us. Ahab is nearly diverted from his obsessive quest by the thought of a child, by the power of paternal love. King Lear is transformed by this love once he is stripped of power and authority and able to see. Lear, at the end, embraces his role as a father, and a man, whose most important duty is to care for his child, for all children. It is not accidental that it is love for a child that nearly transforms Ahab and does in the end transform Lear. It is only when the care of another, especially a child, becomes our primary concern that we can finally see and understand why we were created.
For those of us who have spent years in wars, it is the suffering of children that most haunts us. If, as a society, we see that our principal task is t
he care of children, of the next generation, then the madness of the moment can be dispelled. But idols have a power over human imagination, as they do over Ahab, that defies reason, love, and finally sanity.
One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. The crew of the ship is “morally enfeebled … by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of in Flask.”51
Starbuck especially elucidates this peculiar division between physical and moral courage. The first mate, “while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.”52 Starbuck is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s “impious end, but feel that I must help him to it.” “But he drilled deep down,” Starbuck exclaims, “and blasted all my reason out of me!”53 Moral cowardice like Starbuck’s turns us into hostages. Mutiny is the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. And mutiny is our only salvation.
Moby-Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The whirlpool formed by the ship’s descent swallows up all who followed Ahab—except one—“and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”54
Our corporate hustlers are direct descendants of the whalers and sealers, of butchers such as George Armstrong Custer, of the gold speculators and railroad magnates who seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, and wiped out the buffalo herds, of the oil and mineral companies that went abroad to exploit—under the protection of the American military—the resources of others. These hustlers carry on their demented wars and plundering throughout the Middle East, polluting the seas and water systems, fouling the air and soil, and gambling with commodity futures while the poor starve. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as service to the “beast.”