McCain's Acceptance Speech Negates Itself

In the end, all McCain has is his story. It was funereal and elegiac at best, but otherwise left unanswered all questions regarding how he'd govern or what's next for the country. It was all about looking back to the past.

McCain's speech concluded with a recitation of his war experience which he wove beautifully into a narrative of spiritual growth. He spoke not as someone embarking on a journey, but as someone whose journey had come to an end. His revelation that he cannot stand alone, that he cannot be the smirking, carefree maverick he was, that he is part of something larger than himself is both a perfect summation of the spiritual wounds of the Vietnam as well as a gentle step away from his own candidacy. His story tells us that his candidacy has been one more step in a journey to resolve the pain of the past, one shared by many veterans, and transform once and for all into the future tense of joy. Like an Ahab, the veteran is someone who no matter where he goes or what he does cannot accept the pain inflicted on him and his fellows by the whale of war. The last 40 years of American politics has been an acting out of that struggle without healing and without resolution. McCain spoke tonight as someone who had found resolution through his career of service, and while he cannot be the one to lead them, offers it as a path to his fellow Republicans and Conservatives.

For McCain to carry forward as the presidential candidate, or, even as president will be to continually revisit the pain of the past, and continually reenact the damage of those wounds in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Georgia, just as any wounded soul returns to the familiarity of his own fall from grace.

For Palin to step up as his running mate will be to continually re-fight the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.

The Republicans are a party and a people doomed by the past, to repeat it and reenact it. There is no hope for change, or resolution in the heart of someone who cannot see that his own story has come to an end. McCain has had his say. He's told his story, and offered nothing in the way of a future. He should now step aside and make way for the next generation, and for Barack Obama.

Moby Dick, I Finished It

It is just as David Milch described it in his lecture: art, poetry, literature - what-have-you - stands contrary to rational thought. Art forces us to stretch, test limits, see how far we can go. It forces us beyond our ego-centric demands for logic and meaning. It makes us confront that dark abyss that underlies everything.

And so with Moby Dick, Melville has this sense that there is something deeply wrong with Ahab's obsessions, and something equally wrong with the existence of this white whale. Ahab's a whack-job and the whale is some sort of demonic force, fine. But how can you explain it? How did this situation arise? Is this typical, or extraordinary? So Melville has to build his case around this idea he has. It's this nagging feeling, like a bad itch, that there's something scary out there in the sea and here in the human heart that is unique and problematic. Something that he can't name but is worth his and the reader's time to struggle with despite the impossibility of its meaning. For 700+ pages that's what he does: slowly, methodically, leaving out nothing. We learn everything he knows about the ocean, about whales, about ships, about the crew, about the rituals of sea-life, until he finally reveals this lacuna at the center of the story where the captain and the whale reside. They live beyond our logical reasoning and occupy a metaphysical space.

Near the end, in the chapter called The Symphony, Starbuck and Ahab talk about life back in Nantucket. Why shouldn't they just abandon the hunt and go home? they wonder. They have wives and children and could live normal lives. And Ahab, pushed to the brink, can't even explain to himself what he's doing out there in the Pacific any longer. Can't justify it to Starbuck, can't justify it to himself. And for just a second, there's a glimmer of an alternative path. Something other than the tragic destiny that Ahab has set for himself.

But the whale is sighted, and as we turn to The Chase, The First Day, you know nothing good is going to happen from here to the end. Once the whale arrives on stage, we're past the point of reason and it's all, "To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

It's unbelievable stuff. An Apollonian novel with a tragic Dionysian heart.

More stupidly, it's like a really well written, intelligent, Lovecraft story. Only its we who call to Cthulhu and not the other way around. Instead of the structures of sanity collapsing all at once at the sight of some horrible tentacled creature from beyond time and space, we see how those structures can be stripped away layer by layer until there's nothing left of the ego to stand between us and the abyss. How obsession leads to darkness, and ultimately destruction. How the life of a community can be destroyed by the overreaching of one madman. How our pleasure seeking, death loving id can send us straight over the edge.

That's art.