Wages of Rebellion Read Online Free PDF

end of the novel gives us two glimpses into Ahab’s internal battle between his maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, like most of us, yearns for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip—who fell overboard during one hunt and subsequently went insane—is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness and fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool does in Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, a play Melville knew intimately. Ahab warns Pip away from Ahab, away from himself. “Lad, lad,” says Ahab,
    I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.… If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be. 50
    This moment of weakness in Ahab says something fundamental about us. Ahab is nearly diverted from his obsessive quest by the thought of a child, by the power of paternal love. King Lear is transformed by this love once he is stripped of power and authority and able to see. Lear, at the end, embraces his role as a father, and a man, whose most important duty is to care for his child, for all children. It is not accidental that it is love for a child that nearly transforms Ahab and does in the end transform Lear. It is only when the care of another, especially a child, becomes our primary concern that we can finally see and understand why we were created.
    For those of us who have spent years in wars, it is the suffering of children that most haunts us. If, as a society, we see that our principal task is the care of children, of the next generation, then the madness of the moment can be dispelled. But idols have a power over human imagination, as they do over Ahab, that defies reason, love, and finally sanity.
    One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. The crew of the ship is “morally enfeebled … by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of in Flask.” 51
    Starbuck especially elucidates this peculiar division between physical and moral courage. The first mate, “while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.” 52 Starbuck is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s “impious end, but feel that I must help him to it.” “But he drilled deep down,” Starbuck exclaims, “and blasted all my reason out of me!” 53 Moral cowardice like Starbuck’s turns us into hostages. Mutiny is the only salvation for the
Pequod
’s crew. And mutiny is our only salvation.
    Moby-Dick rams and sinks the
Pequod
. The whirlpool formed by the ship’s descent swallows up all who followed Ahab—except one—“and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” 54

    O ur corporate hustlers are direct descendants of the whalers and sealers, of butchers such as George Armstrong Custer, of the gold speculators and railroad magnates who seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, and wiped out the buffalo herds, of the oil and mineral companies that went abroad to exploit—under the protection of the American military—the resources of others. These hustlers carry on their demented wars and plundering throughout the Middle East, polluting the seas and water systems, fouling the air and soil, and gambling with commodity futures while the poor starve. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded