Wages of Rebellion Read Free

disintegration from Sumer to Easter Island. The difference this time is that there will be no new lands to conquer, no new people to subjugate, and no new resources to plunder. When the unraveling begins, it will be global. At first, parts of the globe will be safer and more amenable to life. But any sanctuary will be temporary.
    One of the most prescient portraits of our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s novel about a doomed whaling voyage,
Moby-Dick
. Melville paints our murderous obsessions, our hubris, our violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction in his chronicle of the quest by a demented captain, Ahab, for the white whale. Melville, as William Shakespeare was for Elizabethan England and Fyodor Dostoyevsky for Czarist Russia, is America’s foremost oracle.
    Melville’s radical book was poorly received when it appeared in 1851, and two years after publication, the unsold copies were lost in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse. Although more copies were printed, the novel never did sell out its first edition of 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. Melville, unable to survive as a writer, took a job working with the US Custom Service in Manhattan. 10
    It would be some seventy years before the author and critic Carl Van Doren resurrected Melville, praising the originality and importance of
Moby-Dick
in his 1921 book
The American Novel. 11
D. H. Lawrence in
Studies in Classic American Literature
concurred with Van Doren. 12 E. M. Forster called
Moby-Dick
a “prophetic song,” and the critic Lewis Mumford helped enshrine the book in the Western canon. 13 William Faulkner, who had a framed print of Rockwell Kent’s
Captain Ahab
in his living room, said
Moby-Dick
was the one book he wished he had written. 14 Edward Said drew parallels between Ahab’s quest and the folly of empire. 15 C.L.R. James wrote a brilliant study of empire, class, commercialism, and
Moby-Dick
, entitled
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 16
Contemporary social critics, such as Greg Grandin in
The Empire of Necessity
and Morris Berman in
Why America Failed
, have also turned to Melville to buttress their bleak vision of the voyage we have undertaken as a species. 17 In his book
Why Read
Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “Contained in the pages of
Moby-Dick
is nothing less than the genetic code of America.” 18
    In the book, Melville gives shape to the United States in the form of the whaling ship the
Pequod
, named after the Indian tribe that was nearly exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s thirty-man crew—there were thirty states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby-Dick, which in a previous encounter dismembered one of Ahab’s legs.
    Moby-Dick
is narrated in 1850 by Ishmael, a footloose sailor who signs on for a voyage on the
Pequod
with his new friend Queequeg, a tattooed harpooner from an island in the South Pacific. Queequeg, a self-professed cannibal who consults a small idol named Yojo, exhibits throughout the book a generosity and courage that Ishmael admires. The
Pequod
leaves Nantucket on a blustery, gray Christmas Day. Ahab, who remains hidden in his cabin until after the
Pequod
embarks, finally makes his appearance on deck after several days at sea, with his false ivory leg, carved from a sperm whale’s jaw. He incites the crew to hunt down and kill the enormous white whale.
    When whales are first sighted near the southern tip of Africa, Ahab’s private and secret whaleboat crew, led by the mysterious Fedallah, suddenly appears from below the hold to take part in the hunt. As the
Pequod
rounds Africa and enters the Indian Ocean, the crew kill andbutcher the whales, then boil down the oil and blubber in a bloody process that Melville describes in detail. Meanwhile, Ahab remains