lpara
03-19-2004, 10:18 PM
<span style='font-family:comic sans ms'>Buchanan's White Whale
By Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.co m | March 19, 2004
In these intensely polarized and paranoid times, more than a few people are like the obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, of whom Melville wrote, in one of the supreme passages of American literature: "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... All that most maddens and torments; ... 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."
Today, of course, we don't have whale hunters from Nantucket circumnavigating the globe, but we do have politics—an increasingly ugly, ideological politics in a country that seems to be splitting apart before our eyes. Unsurprisingly, we also have among us, on the both the left and the right, Ahab-style monomaniacs who throw away their reason and blame everything that has gone wrong in the world on a single, all-controlling, evil cause. Such fanatics tend to wrap every issue around the object of their particular rage, coming back again and again to the same complaint, the same burning grievance, the same satisfying theory that explains all of society's problems as stemming from the group they oppose.
Defeating or otherwise weakening the Islamist regimes, Buchanan continues, will do nothing to save us from the real danger to our culture, which is Western peoples' low birthrate compared to that of Moslems. (http://www.frontpagemag.com /Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1 2650)</span>
By Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.co m | March 19, 2004
In these intensely polarized and paranoid times, more than a few people are like the obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, of whom Melville wrote, in one of the supreme passages of American literature: "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... All that most maddens and torments; ... 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."
Today, of course, we don't have whale hunters from Nantucket circumnavigating the globe, but we do have politics—an increasingly ugly, ideological politics in a country that seems to be splitting apart before our eyes. Unsurprisingly, we also have among us, on the both the left and the right, Ahab-style monomaniacs who throw away their reason and blame everything that has gone wrong in the world on a single, all-controlling, evil cause. Such fanatics tend to wrap every issue around the object of their particular rage, coming back again and again to the same complaint, the same burning grievance, the same satisfying theory that explains all of society's problems as stemming from the group they oppose.
Defeating or otherwise weakening the Islamist regimes, Buchanan continues, will do nothing to save us from the real danger to our culture, which is Western peoples' low birthrate compared to that of Moslems. (http://www.frontpagemag.com /Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1 2650)</span>