Tuesday
I’m trying to figure out what I think of a comparison that Trevor Potter, the Republican former chair of the Federal Election Commission, has made between DJT and Herman Melville’s most iconic character. “It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick,’” said Potter after the president pressured him to resign while firing the two Democratic members of the commission, whose job it is to assist election boards around the country. Potter elaborated,
He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.
I hesitate about making the comparison because Ahab’s obsession with the whale that cost him his leg is elevated by his madness, somewhat like King Lear, on whom Melville partially based him. By contrast, DJT is just monumentally petty. Ahab at least is a competent sea captain, even if he loses sight of his main mission, whereas DJT is an incompetent bumpkin whose frail ego has never been able to admit that Hillary Clinton received more votes than he did, that Barack Obama drew more people to his inauguration, that Joe Biden won in 2020, or that his razor-thin win over Kamala Harris was anything other than a blowout victory.
Ahab at least acknowledges that Moby Dick bit his leg off.
Both men, however, feel emasculated by their defeats and can’t stop obsessing how they feel diminished. Both, furthermore, bring about the destruction of their respective ships (ship of state, in DJT’s case). Melville is fairly clear that the Pequod is a metaphor for America, with its multicultural crew, its industrial might (the ship functions as a processing factory), and its frontier spirit. But whatever democratic spirit exists within the crew—I think of Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg and of the fellow feeling engendered by squishing sperm with his fellow crew members—is put at risk by the authoritarian who rules over them.
Neither authoritarian, however, could indulge his mania if he didn’t have compliant underlings, although Ahab’s three mates at least have some excuse. To function well, a ship must have a strict hierarchy, which is spelled out so minutely that third mate Flask, who can only begin eating after his fellow officers have sat down and who must be done before they get up, barely has time to feed himself. Trump’s subordinates, by contrast, have sworn an oath to the Constitution, not to the president, and have the responsibility of impeaching him (in Congress’ case) or invoking the 25th Amendment (in his Cabinet’s case) should he imperil the enterprise.
Yet even Ahab knows he must get buy-in, or at least non-resistance, from the crew and from his three mates. He achieves the first with Trump-like drama:
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
Like Trump, Ahab possesses the power to enroll the mob in his personal vendetta:
“Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
First mate Starbuck, by contrast, is harder to win over. In fact, he is horrified at what Ahab is doing:
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
Ahab’s manic energy, however, overwhelms Starbuck not unlike how Trump has overwhelmed the Republican Party. “They think me mad—Starbuck does,” he says to himself, “but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” For his part, Starbuck, again like far too many in the GOP, believes he can’t fight such madness and gives up, saying to himself,
My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! … I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder has observed that we are experiencing “super power suicide.” Just as Ahab’s mad quest results in the destruction of the ship and the death of all but Ishmael, so Trump is determined to destroy the climate, the rule of law, the electoral process, and the world order. In the face of that, there’s only so much that the Starbucks and Ishmaels amongst us can do.
That being said, had the three mates and the crew all worked together, they could have stopped Ahab. The same is true of the American public.
