Illus. from “Moby Dick”
Wednesday
A recent Martin Longman article in The Washington Monthly has invoked Moby Dick to describe the obsession with the Clintons shared by many on the extreme right. However, rather than focus only on “Clinton Derangement Syndrome”—which brackets Bush and Obama Derangement Syndrome—I want to look at how the article accurately describes unhinged ideology. Those who turn their opponents into evil whales risk getting destroyed by their own obsession.
Longman notes how the obsession with the Clintons that brought down Newt Gingrich in the 1990s has led to the rise and (in all likelihood) fall of Donald Trump:
If you thought that the Republicans’ defeat in the 1998 midterms, the acquittal of the president, and the resignation of Newt Gingrich were the equivalents of Captain Ahab being lashed to the White Whale and dragged to the depths of the ocean, then you obviously didn’t watch last night’s debate. Because Captain Ahab lives!
In one of the earliest reviews of Herman Melville’s epic, George Ripley of Harper’s wrote that Ahab “becomes the victim of a deep, cunning monomania; believes himself predestined to take a bloody revenge on his fearful enemy; pursues him with fierce demoniac energy of purpose.” That seems like a good description of Donald Trump’s whole campaign, as he seeks vengeance for being humiliated by the president at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. In a broader sense, though, it’s a description of the itch Trump was scratching last night for his base.
Longman goes on to describe all the ways that Trump was preparing to humiliate Hillary in Sunday’s debate, including inviting to his family box women who claim to have been assaulted by her husband:
“We were going to put the four women in the VIP box,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who represents Trump in debate negotiations. “We had it all set. We wanted to have them shake hands with Bill, to see if Bill would shake hands with them.”
Longman observes that only someone as unhinged as a Clinton obsessive would come up with such a plan, which was thwarted by the Republican co-chairman of the debate commission. Nevertheless, Trump still went on to refer to the women as the debate opened. Longman observes,
It was his chance to lob the worst accusations ever made against Bill Clinton like some kind of magic harpoon that would finally make the American people recognize the satanic possession of the Clintons. Also in Trump’s quiver were the most unhinged interpretations of Hillary’s missteps and vulnerabilities, from Benghazi! to the “missing” emails to her alleged role in silencing her husband’s accusers. To drive home the point, Trump referred to his debating partner as “the devil” and “Satan.”
This dogged focus prompted Longman to think of Ahab’s obsession, described by Ishmael as follows:
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.
When Trump, in the debate, said that Clinton has “hatred in her heart,” he was clearly projecting. It is a projection that he shares with his followers:
In circumstances like these, speaking to and for a base that has hunted the Clintons around the seven seas of American politics for more than a quarter century now, Trump’s performance was guaranteed to excite and stimulate the limbic system of hardcore Republicans, including many who have no use for Trump as a candidate or potential president. It must have been an almost euphoric experience for them.
The reality, however, is something else altogether:
Moby Dick was never “all evil” personified. Moby Dick was just a whale.
Likewise Hillary bears little resemblance to the demon lady that her opponents have made her out to be. She is a conventional center-left politician with a mixture of virtues and vices.
Because she is a woman, she has one interesting thing in common with Moby Dick, at least as seen through the eyes of Ahab-type rightwingers. The whale emasculates Ahab by biting off his leg, and we are seeing any number of emasculation anxieties surfacing in this election. Trump certainly sees his masculinity under attack. During the Sunday debate, a number of pundits speculated that he was trying to assert gorilla dominance, as described by Jane Goodall, as he stalked his opponent and towered over her.
Indeed, one wonders whether the GOP chose a blatant misogynist as their candidate because they were unhinged by the prospect of a woman as president. That’s how obsession works: that which you violently oppose, you help bring into being. Or as Ahab realizes on the third day of the final hunt,
[H]e’s chasing me now; not I, him—that’s bad.
If Trump were in this all by himself, it wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Ahab takes the Pequod down with him. Even if Trump ends up on the bottom of the sea on November 8, we will be digging through the wreckage for some time to come.