The following — a recent episode of The Chris Hedges Report —  is a fascinating brief discussion of Herman Melville’s novel Moby  Dick, by two men well-prepared to understand its relevance to Amercia today. Chris Hedges is one of America’s great public intellectuals and Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In The Heart of the Sea, which “tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick.”

Here’s the summary of the episode from Hedges’ YouTube channel:

“Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville, is among America’s 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 self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. Melville’s description of the ship’s 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 self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation. Melville is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

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