The Chris Hedges Report: Moby Dick and the soul of American capitalism

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is among Americas greatest novels. It is a prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a nation and perhaps a species. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable selfdestruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. Melvilles description of the ships captain, Ahab, is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities, and generals who, through the power of propaganda, fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with selfinduced obsessions that spur us toward selfannihilation. Melville is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia. Joining Chris to discuss Melvilles novel is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Why Read Moby Dick , as well as books such as In the Heart of the Sea: The T