Ahab and Cockwomble Trump

 I’ve been rereading _Moby Dick_, or rather reading it really for the first time because I last went through that tome back when I was a wee tyke in HS, and that sort of doesn’t count some 55 years after the fact. Anyway, I came across this passage in the chapter 41, titled “Moby Dick”:

certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were ben on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

 

The passage made me immediately think of cockwomble, raging away in his cockwombly way. And then it made me wonder what cockwomble’s White Whale might be. What is it in his history that led to the “unabated rage” that makes him “intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge”?

 

To be sure, cockwomble’s is not a “supernatural revenge.” All too natural, alas. But to pursue the parallel, it must be America itself that is the source of that “unabated rage,” since it’s America itself that cockwomble is voyaging to destroy, as Ahab the whale. Is the revenge fueled by his New York billionaire peers' refusal to take him seriously? To see him as anything more than a bloviating cockwomble, rich to be sure, but rich by naked chicanery and deceit? Is it their disdain that leads to his monomania?

 

But then, America is not just the whale. It’s also the Pequod that cockwomble navigates to destruction. And those idiotic “old acquaintances on shore,” eager to make profit on cockwomble’s mad scramble for revenge, will be destroyed along with him and the nation.