Moby Dick: American Civilisation Imperilled

by Kumar David

Herman Melville wrote his only true classic in 1851, one hundred maybe two hundred years before its time which is now. If read as allegory like all great tales it unfolds in different eras with varied import. D. H. Lawrence proclaimed Moby Dick “futurist long before futurism found paint” and “one of the strangest and most wonderful books and one of the greatest book of the sea ever written.” A reviewer in the New Yorker said in 2011; “To my mind, there are only two other works which bear comparison, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights” – when we limit our compass to English novels. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities seem to have slipped his mind. The universal view is that Moby Dick is a prophetic allegory; what does it foreshadow?

Interpretations have been many but two stand out; one is the futility of revenge, the soul destructiveness of bitterness; a morality play. The other is Lawrence’s “Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper in the dark trees of America. Doom of what? Doom of our white day. We are doomed and the doom is in America”. Inflated as oft times with DHL, in simple words he says civilization is in decline; a common view that Melville’s forebodings are about Christian-White civilisation. The text entertains with tongue in cheek ridicule of the Church and ‘savage’ Queequeg is a gentleman in the midst of white trash.

To prognosticate that American Civilisation is in terminal debility and will soon fall is, as Mark Twain declared when he saw news-reports of his death, a little exaggerated. China and India are ‘have beens’ and may soon be ‘once-agains’; America is still an ‘is’, and likely to remain so for some decades. Yes, US imperialism ravaged the earth, but America has also been a beacon for the best and the brightest; Einstein fled from Nazism to Princeton, Chaplin made some of the greatest of all movies in Hollywood, Maria Callas was born six months after her parents migrated to the US and Audrey Hepburn emigrated to America at the age of 22 to become a movie icon. Six of the world’s ten best universities are in America, thousands of the best athletes, scholars, musicians, nut cases and avaricious and aspiring devotees of thannaha, not to mention my readers and my own dear family swoon for a Green Card.

It’s a melting pot, it’s a place like no other. I am neither pro nor anti American, neither pro or anti any nation, race, caste, clan or creed. Sure, I am an agnostic and I hold patriotism to be the “last refuge of the scoundrel” and am surprised how many people take pride in their hela, jathiya and kula, unaware of Portuguese soldiers, day-labourers and itinerant vendors who surely hugely entertained their great and greater grandmothers. The US economy will be demoted to number two in size this decade and China will reach parity in technological sophistication within a generation, but on the broader qualitative indicators I have adverted to in this paragraph the waning of America’s status to just another country will be gradual. I remind you again that if the decline of the Roman Empire commenced with the ascension of Commodus (AD 176), the fall of the Western Empire is dated to 200 or 300 years later depending on which historian you believe.

Nevertheless the medium term compels a pessimistic reading of where the US is heading. The income of Americans at all levels has fallen below that of their parents consistently since the War. The hegemony of the dollar will wither and with it US global power. Americans will not cease to live beyond their means hence domestic and foreign debt will continue to burgeon. Fourth and most worrying is an unfathomable flight from common sense and moderation in political space.

Last week I wrote of the Digital Yuan and attempts by two or three groups of countries to set up Multiple Central Bank Digital Currency Bridges, an arrangement which allows transactions to be cleared directly without recourse to the dollars or SWIFT as intermediaries. The shift from oil to green energy also diminishes the clout of the petrodollar. Both changes dent the dollar’s global hegemony and with it the long term influence of American power.

X-axis: Parental income percentile (50 for example is the Median Income Family)

(Explanation: In 1940 nearly everybody earned about 95% as much as their parents did but by1980 just

40% (Y-axis) earned more than their parents did if they belonged to the bellow 75% (X-axis) income groups)

Covid is under control, new covid cases in the US have fallen tenfold since January. There is a visible recovery in American consumer spending and economic activity. The dynamics however are complicated. Biden has pumped out $3 trillion as inducements for companies and as handouts and relief measures such as very generous unemployment support, a moratorium on evictions for non-payment of rent, food assistance and support for small businesses. In 2020 ordinary people hoarded money for hard times, they were afraid to spend, but now confidence is returning.

The rich splurged on an asset buying binge, putting stimulus money into the stock market and property, creating a significant asset-price bubble. Q1-2021 GDP growth rate was up at 6.1% annualised, and inflation picked up smartly to 4.2% annualised in April 2021. Inflation is well above the Fed’s target rate of 2% to 2.5% and Biden’s spending splash is sending shivers down the spine of the well to do moneyed classes. They fear that if a still reluctant Fed is forced to raise interest rates the asset-price bubble would pop losing them billions of dollars in ill-gotten asset values. Economists worry that it may put a brake on the economic recovery. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says “Milton Friedman said inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. This is wrong: inflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon”. Well of course “always and everywhere” is incorrect but I grant it is so right now.

Though covid induced supply-chain bottlenecks are putting a brake on imports the accelerating consumer binge will take its revenge and America’s trade deficit will swell again. The monthly trade deficits from January to March 2021 in billions were as follows: $65.7, $67.5, $70.5 and $74.5 pointing at an annual trade deficit just shy of a trillion dollars which is much larger than at any time in the past. The US National Debt right now is $29 trillion and is rising inexorably – but if unfunded promises like future Medicare, Social Security and other liabilities are included this rises to the gigantic figure of $130 trillion. About $7 trillion of current National Debt is held by foreign countries, principally Japan and China. US GDP in 2019 was $21.5 trillion (2020 statistics are and 2021 will be atypical). It has to be appreciated is that the US is a colossally indebted country and can get away with it only because everybody is willing to hold the greenback, an international currency.

What is relevant to the doomsday scenario in this column is that the stature of a great imperial power is threatened if ever its finances run aground.

Melville does not depict Captain Ahab as clinically insane but as overcome by hate and demented by an obsession. Ahab is Trump and Trump is Ahab; a leg chewed off there and a self-destructive obsession driven by the White Whale of a million-strong half-crazed grassroots juggernaut here. This is not adjectival overload; there are one, or two million white supremacists, neo-fascists and weirdos in the Trump Base. But the worry is not these weird ones, it is the near entirety of the Republican Party and about a third of the population. Three in four Republicans believe that Trump won the election and it was stolen by a conspiracy of election officials and massive voter fraud; maybe they also believe that the moon is made of green cheese. Americans say that their country is the greatest democracy on earth and some in the same breadth declare that it is the site of the greatest electoral fraud ever.

Schizophrenia on this scale is dangerous; the Republican Party hangs on it and encourages it. All Republican Senators and Congressmen except one or two endorse this dystopian reality. Liz Cheney, daughter of a former presidential candidate was booted out the leadership caucus for publicly saying “Trump lost the election”. Her popularity among Republicans has slumped to 15% – Trump’s popularity in the Party is 84%. Though the world ridicules Donald Trump and sees him as an oafish lout his popularity in the GOP mass is sky high. His overall public approval must be about 30 to 35% if one in three Americans is a Republican and a few neutrals also like him. This is scary; were one-third of Germans infatuated with Hitler so early in the game of encroaching fascism?

“America is no more immune from collapse than some most stable and impressive consensual governments” warns Victor Davis Hanson. “Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many elected governments of early 20th-century Western Europe destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.” Of all the symptoms indicating the ailments of democracy in America the most worrying is the political deficit in moderation, reason, sobriety and tolerance. Hindutva is the most widespread of all mass ideologies in India now; rank Sinhala Buddhism has claimed ownership of this country for two generations. It is gangrene if ignoble Trumpism makes deep inroads; if fascism wins in America it will take the world down with it. There will be no one left to call Ishmael, it will all be ‘Call me Fuhrer!’ thereafter.

END

(Maybe omit this pic; it has become commonplace)