© Breaking Pofiles
The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville's
Moby Dick. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.
Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the
Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's 30-man crew - there were 30 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 maimed the ship's captain, Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod's destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed - just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.
"If I had been downright honest with myself," Ishmael admits, "I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing."
Our financial system - like our participatory democracy - is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds - much of it worthless subprime mortgages - each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money - because wages are kept low - by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.
Comment: This article obviously needs to be read with heaping mounds of salt. Alain Soral, for example, the "virulently anti-semitic French intellectual", is portrayed as the devil because he speaks the truth:
French writer and activist Alain Soral: There is only the illusion of choice in politics
BBC Newsnight interview with Alain Soral: The French government's actions against Dieudonné are illegal
Just to give readers an idea of how many light years the above author is away from the consensus view of this Dieudonne/Soral/'Jewish'/revolution issue in France, the vast majority are on Dieudonne and Soral's side...
Dieudonné ban "a victory for French Republic", declares Manuel Valls: Poll shows 95% of France disagrees with Interior Minister, jeered by large crowd in Brittany