Wages of Rebellion (8 page)

Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordnance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit, we too ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to halt his quest for forty-eight hours to help the frantic captain of a passing ship find his twelve-year-old son, who is adrift in a missing whaleboat.

And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the 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,

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 drive for profit as service to the “beast.”

Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.

Walter Benjamin argues that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion” but an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mystery of life.
⁵⁵
And it is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey.

“A Religion may be discerned in capitalism,” Benjamin writes, “that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”
⁵⁶
Capitalism, Benjamin notes, has called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and ultimately futile quest to find fulfillment in the endless amassing of money and power. This quest creates a culture that is dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy, and self-loathing and that enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages.

Benjamin calls capitalism “a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.” In this system, “things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult.” Capitalism, he notes, has no specific dogma or theology. Rather, “utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones.” It “is the celebration of the cult sans rêve et sans merci [without dream or mercy].” There are no weekdays. Every day is a feast day filled with consumption. With every acquisition the starting point for new desires, capitalism leaves human beings with a sense of never being able to achieve equilibrium. “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement,” Benjamin writes. The system, he continues, “is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end.”
⁵⁷

The barbarism of our new Dark Age will hold out Faustian pacts at the expense of others; first the poor in the developing world will be sacrificed, and then the poor at home. Communities and communal organizations that manage to break free from the dominant culture will find a correlation between the amount of freedom they enjoy and the amount of independence they attain in a world where access to land, food, and water has become paramount. Such communities that share the burdens of a disintegrating society, such as the ad hoc one formed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, are our best hope for sustaining the intellectual and artistic traditions that define the heights of human culture and permit the common good. As those who build these communitarian structures discard the religion of capitalism, their acts of charity and resistance will merge—and they will be condemned by the corporate state.

L
ynne Stewart, with short, cropped gray hair and a dark, zippered fleece jacket, sat with her hands folded in front of her at her son’s dining room table in Brooklyn, New York. She had been released from a Texas prison thirty-seven days earlier because she had stage 4 cancer and had been given six months to live. She had served four years of a ten-year sentence.

As an attorney, Stewart stood up to state power for more than three decades. She defended the poor, the persecuted, and the marginalized. She wept in court when one of her clients, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was barred from presenting a credible defense. But at the end of her life she was on trial herself, disbarred and imprisoned. Her career coincided with the collapse of the American court system and the rise of the post-constitutional era, in which the courts are used to revoke the constitutional rights of citizens by judicial fiat.

“Can’t even work in a law office,” the seventy-four-year-old Stewart said when we spoke. “I miss it so terribly. I liked it. I liked the work.”

When she started practicing law in the 1970s, she said it was a “golden era” in which a series of legal decisions—including rulings that affected police lineups and the information and evidence that the government had to turn over to defendants on trial—created a chance for
a fair defense. But these legal advances were steadily reversed, she said, in a string of court decisions that, especially after 9/11, made the state omnipotent. As citizens were stripped of power, she said, the bar experienced “a death of the spirit.” Lawyers gave up. They no longer saw defending people accused of crime as “a calling, something that you did because you were answering a higher voice.”

Stewart, working with former US attorney general Ramsey Clark and lawyer Abdeen Jabara in 1995, was the lead trial counsel for Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim, known as “the Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted for alleged involvement in an aborted bombing campaign in New York City. He received life in prison plus sixty-five years in 1996 for seditious conspiracy, a sentence Stewart called “outlandish.” She said that Abdel-Rahman was put on trial, not for any crimes he committed, but because both Washington and the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak were frightened by his influence over the Egyptian population. The United States, along with Egypt, wanted to “take him off the scene” and “get him put away where he would no longer exert the influence he had.” The cleric, seventy-six and in poor health, is imprisoned in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.
²

The proceedings at the Abdel-Rahman trial were a harbinger of the judicial assaults against Muslims in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. I was based in Egypt as the Middle East bureau chief for the
New York Times
when Abdel-Rahman was arrested. I was stunned at the repeated mendacity of the government prosecutors, who blamed Abdel-Rahman for terrorist attacks he had publicly denounced. The prosecutors, for example, accused him of orchestrating the killing of seventy people in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, although the sheikh at the time condemned the attack and had no known connection with the Egyptian group that carried out the massacre.
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When the guilty verdict was read, Stewart burst into tears, “the only time I ever cried in the courtroom.”

Stewart continued to visit the sheikh after the sentencing. Three years after the trial, the government severely curtailed his ability to communicate with the outside world, even through his lawyers, under “special administrative measures” (SAMs).

Abdel-Rahman asked Stewart during a prison visit in 2000 to release a statement from him to the press concerning a negotiated ceasefire
between the Egyptian government and militants. The Clinton administration did not prosecute Stewart for conveying the press release, although she was admonished and prohibited from seeing her client for several months.

The Bush administration, however, in April 2002, with the country baying for blood after the attacks of 9/11, decided to prosecute her for the two-year-old press release.

Minutes before her arrest on April 9, 2002, her husband, Ralph Poynter, who later would organize the successful fight to win her a compassionate release from prison after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, was outside on the stoop of their house, which in New York, she said, “is where you go sit on the steps in the summertime when you can’t afford to go to East Hampton.” She heard him in a heated conversation.

“I go to the door, and I hear him saying, ‘I don’t see any badge, I don’t see any warrant, what are you doing here anyway?’ ” she said.

Assuming Ralph was being arrested, she told him to take it easy, she would have him home by lunchtime.

“I come around the door and the guy looks and says—and he was clearly a cop, you know, the cheap shoes—and he says, ‘We’re not here for you. We’re here for her,’ pointing to me,” she said. “I was flabbergasted.”

The FBI agents arrested her. She was released later on a $500,000 bond.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft came to New York in April 2002 to announce the arrest and appear on
The Late Show with David Letterman
. He told the television audience that the Justice Department had indicted Stewart, along with a paralegal and an interpreter, on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization.