I went to the Metropolitan Opera the other night to see the new opera, Moby-Dick.
It was a black-tie gala, and the performance was tremendous, but the evening was somber. It began with the orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem to “honor Ukraine and its brave citizens as they fight to defend their country and its cultural heritage.” Still, the operagoers were really mourning the sellout of a sovereign state to Russia’s Vladimir Putin by an American president.
There were tears in the eyes of much of the audience. This is just days after the spectacle of Donald Trump berating Volodymyr Zelinskyy in the Oval Office and the United States siding with Russia, North Korea, and Iran and voting no on the U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Peter Rough of the conservative Hudson Institute said, “It’s too much to say that everything depends on Ukraine. If it did, we’d be fighting there. But I think the war is shaping everyone’s perceptions of American power and the durability of the American-built system.” That’s hawk-speak for “Our word in the world now means nothing.”
The opera, in two acts, with music by Jake Heggie and libretto by Gene Scheer, had all the elements of a grand opera: huge settings of outsized proportion, a tragic hero, rising melodramatic action, and an unraveling of the plot, with tragedy as the final curtain descends. The singers performed their hearts out.
An understudy, the able baritone Thomas Glass stepped in for the indisposed Swedish star Peter Mattei on a few hours’ notice to sing the role of Starbuck, the conscience-driven First Mate of the doomed Pequod, the whaling ship captained by Ahab. The critics said he sang the part masterfully, with clear lyricism and excellent diction.
I hadn’t read the book since college. It is unquestionably a political metaphor about what happens to the ship of state with a madly obsessed captain at the helm. It must be a political novel because William F. Buckley said towards the end of his life, “There is only one thing I want to do before I die, read Moby-Dick.”
In an eerie way, Herman Melville’s novel fits Trump and our moment quite neatly.
The mini plot of the opera extracted from the book is this. The Pequod, a Nantucket whaler, is captained by a peg-legged man called Ahab, obsessed with killing Moby-Dick, the white whale that claimed his leg at their last encounter.
Ahab knows how to hold a grudge. When Starbuck condemns the irrationality of “vengeance on a dumb brute that smote thee from blind instinct,” Ahab replies, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” There’s a parallel. Trump once said, “If you come for me, I am going to come for you.” Isn’t it bizarre that he can’t lay off Joe Biden, much less Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Ahab sails the seven seas looking for the whale and turns down one opportunity for a treasure in whale oil—the booming business soon to be replaced by petroleum was the Silicon Valley of its day–so he can continue his relentless hunt. When he relents and allows the crew to kill another whale, he squanders the whale oil treasure he has captured.
Obsessed with revenge, Ahab is without conscience. He makes little effort to find Pip, his cabin boy temporarily lost at sea. He refuses to join the search for the son of the captain of another whaler because he thinks he is behind schedule.
His crew is unhappy, but he calls them back together with the rallying cry “Death to Moby-Dick” while his first mate warns: “Those that follow Ahab become Ahab.”
Eventually, the Pequod catches up with Moby-Dick, but it is really the other way ‘round. The monster destroys the whaleboats one by one, and finally, the Pequod, too. Grand opera usually ends with a death or two.
Melville’s novel serves as a metaphor for the Trump administration. We have an Ahab-like madman at our helm–with his familiar obsessions about illegal immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” DEI, wokeness, draconian tariffs to be imposed on trading partners, transgender people in women’s sports, the Bidens, and it goes on and on.
Trump’s most dramatic attacks have come from First Mate, Elon Musk. The world’s richest man with his callow band of brothers leads the dismantling of duly funded government agencies, slashing the federal workforce, and bathing himself in sensitive government data. The shoe is on the other foot when he says risibly, to “restore democracy” from the hands of unelected bureaucrats. Musk is under legal scrutiny, with 100 lawsuits considering whether he and his swashbuckling tech bros violate privacy laws, federal workers’ rights, and the Constitution’s checks and balances. It is early days to tell whether Musk will mutiny on Trump or the 47th president, feeling threatened by a younger, richer man with more children by more women, will dispense with Musk’s services. Of course, their unholy alliance could hold.
At the same time, Americans feel the pain at the grocery store and the pump, as well as the stock market. Trump sailed into office by ignoring a moderate inflation rate and focusing on a higher cost of life for many Americans. Face it: the price of butter, gas at the pump, and, of course, eggs have skyrocketed. But in office, Trump has ignited inflation with draconian tariffs, provoking trading partners into a trade war.
On his rampage, Trump ignores the Constitution. It finds an analog in Moby-Dick. Starbuck thought Ahab’s pursuit of the whale was blasphemous. Ahab ignored God. Trump would prefer to win in court because the judicial imprimatur would enshrine his legitimacy. But if he doesn’t win, he may ignore the courts, channeling Andrew Jackson, whose portrait hangs in the Oval, not far from his desk. “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” Jackson is famously to have said of the chief justice. Jackson ignored the Court, and thousands of Cherokees, as well as other Native Americans and African Americans, died in the infamous “Trail of Tears.”
The weary crew of the Pequod was naïve to the existential threat of Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the white whale. They declined to mutiny. Let’s hope Trump understands the existential threat of the Russians and Americans, the existential threat of this unbridled Trump second term.
Somehow, it all feels like the “peace in our time”1938 all over again. Neville Chamberlain at Munich thought the Nazis could be appeased by forcing the Czechs to hand over the German-speaking portions of their country. Gobbling up the Sudetenland did not satisfy Hitler, and Putin will not be satisfied with the territories he seized in this latest way any more than he was by snapping up Crimea in 2014. If Trump loses Europe to Putin and Asia to China, if sovereignty no longer matters, if fact is fiction, we are all on the Pequod. And, you know how that ship ended up.
Sorry to be so gloomy, even after a glorious night at the opera. Call me Ishmael.
