Friday
My Americanist colleague John Gatta has found unsettling parallels between the demagoguery that incited Trumpists to invade the Capitol and Melville’s Captain Ahab enlisting his crew in his revenge quest. After watching repeated footage of Trump’s speech during the Senate trial and then rereading the Moby Dick chapter, I can report that John is spot on. Both Trump and Ahab are masters at manipulating crowds.
In this drama, first mate Starbuck would be those Republicans who attempt to resist the former president. As it turns out, the first mate proves no more effective than Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.
Ahab, mystifying his three mates, assembled the entire crew on deck and holds what we could call an Ahab rally. The captain begins with a dramatic silence, which has the effect of focusing everyone’s attention.
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men…
Just as Trump employed call and response tactics to pump up his audience (“Who’s going to pay for it?” “Mexico!”), so does Ahab. The effect is to excite those in attendance, pulling them into the speaker’s orbit:
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marveling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
At this point, Ahab goes for a prop, giving his audience something tangible to hang on to:
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
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.
Ahab goes on to describing losing his leg to Moby Dick, immersing them in his inner drama. He has everyone but Starbuck in the palm of his hand:
“[I]t was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed 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!”
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog.
Only a smattering of Republican members are openly declaring that they have larger responsibilities than gratifying the ego of a single man. Ahab’s first duty should be to the commercial enterprise and the Pequod’s owners, just as Trump’s should be to responsible governance and the Constitution. Starbuck attempts to remind Ahab of his proper mission:
I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
At this point Ahab goes epic, sounding a little like Macbeth, a little like Milton’s Satan, a little like an existential figure from Sartre or Camus, as he voices the vengeful rage that gives his life purpose:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.
Then, in a little two-step that is also used by Trump—rile up the crowd but then defuse the critics by telling them it’s all just theatre—Ahab makes a feint towards conciliation:
But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go.
Ahab follows this up, however, by playing the trump card that the former president also employs: I must be right because I have the public behind me:
The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!
Ahab interprets Starbuck’s subsequent silence as acquiescence. He does not hear him say, under his breath, “God keep me!—keep us all!”
Ahab’s egotistical quest takes the ship of state—to use the Longfellow metaphor employed Wednesday by one of Trump’s lawyers—and runs it into disaster, causing the death of everyone on board. Unfortunately for us, Republican attempts to save us from the same fate have heretofore resembled that hurricane-tossed sapling.
While the impeachment trial may not put an end to Trump’s noxious influence, if enough Republicans follow Starbuck’s lead and stand up to him, they can at least dampen it. That’s what’s at stake.
Further thought: In Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of a Nuremberg rally, the director at one point shows Hitler giving a little smirk directly after delivering a particularly effective line. We see that smug satisfaction, the joy in manipulating an audience, in Ahab and Trump as well. Ahab says, in a passage that Melville actually introduces with a stage direction,
(Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.