The Sea Wolf And The Oppressed Oppressor

 

Many decades before Ayn Rand developed her theory of selfishness as a virtue, Jack London had already debunked it in his novel, The Sea Wolf. More than that, The Sea Wolf was an attack on Social Darwinism and Nietzscheism, which were popular at the time. The idea that success and survival were built on strength and will alone. Wolf Larson was a man not only of tremendous strength but also great intellect. More than that, he was a man unafraid to use his strengths in order to be supreme ruler of his ship.

 The story begins with a civilized man who is merely taking a ferry across the bay from Oakland to visit a friend in San Francisco. When the ferry sinks in a collision in the fog, he is dragged out into the ocean and is rescued by the Ghost, the ship upon which Wolf Larson rules as a dictator rules a nation.

 Wolf Larson is the oppressor of all his crew. But dominance is a trait which is taught, so that the stronger of those being dominated by the alpha-male, Wolf, mirror his behavior towards the less strong. Thus, at the bottom of the rung there exists one who is bullied by all, the cook Thomas Mugridge. That is, of course, until the rescued and refined main character, Humphry Van Weydon, is brought aboard.

 Humphry is given the demeaning nickname “Hump”, and now sits at the bottom of the ship’s food chain. And rather than getting any sympathy from or solidarity with Mugridge, he is treated as poorly by Mugridge as Mugridge is treated by everybody else.

 I have sadly experienced people like Mugridge myself. There are those who look in their small ways to use the cruelty they've been taught on others even less capable of defending themselves. So often it is the kind person, the person not used to living in a cruel environment, who become the victim of such people. They become victims not because they are weaker but because they assume that treating one such as he with kindness might help him become a better person.

 I swear to you that I have known people who perceive the kindness shown by others as weakness. Do a favor for someone such as he and he will think he has found an easy touch and will seek to exploit you. He will show you no respect so long as you try to treat him fairly. He will not back off until you demonstrate the only thing he knows as real: strength.

 Sadly, there are many people who are victims of power who become like lesser models of their victimizer. People among oppressed classes, nations, genders, or races who mirror the very thing they should most despise. Aboard the Ghost, cruelty is the lesson taught by Wolf Larson and the lesson learned by his crew.

 “Hump” has come from a different environment, one which is more civilized and less obviously oppressive. Being aboard the Ghost, he is forced to fight for his own rights and dignity, but he does not lose his ideals. He believes viscerally that this is not the way to run a ship.

 This is the only sane reaction to such cruelty, a cruelty that has echoed through Twentieth Century in the guise of fascism and imperialism. We’ve seen societies based on strength, cruelty, and violence. Such ways of organizing either a ship or a society have always been opposed by those seeking justice, whether it be through mutiny or political revolution. Unfortunately, the lesson of cruelty has been learned too well among some belonging to the oppressed class. And while they might support a revolution that will get rid of their oppressor, they are not doing it to achieve justice. They are doing it so that they might get the upper hand over others where before they were powerless.

 In The Sea Wolf, Wolf Larson is unable to live in the world he has shaped for himself and unwilling to imagine another world is possible. He has created a philosophy where cruelty is necessary and strength is the only thing that can shape the world. But inwardly, despite his immense physical and mental strength, he is being destroyed by incapacitating headaches and the very ugliness of his own convictions.

Mugridge and Wolf Larson are eventually killed by the cruel world they cannot escape. Hump has also been forced to contend with the cruelty of the “real” world, the law of struggle, of tooth and claw, and is made stronger as a result. But he refuses to believe it is the only reality possible, and so survives it. 

 Jack London was no stranger to the struggle for life. He was an adventurer in an age of adventurers, exploring a better part of the world the way the underclass does, by hard labor and great courage and endurance. But while he went to the Arctic in search of gold and worked as a crewmember on ships that sailed the oceans, while he saw the cruelty to be found in nature and in man, while he knew what it took to survive distanced from civilization, he maintained a vision of a better world possible.

 We need to be able to maintain a foothold in both camps if we are to build a world that is not ruled by the likes of a Wolf Larson. We need to envision a nobler world while being able to survive in the harsh world as it exists today. To do this we will have to engage with the Mugridges and force them to respect us, because if we do nothing they will eat away at the world we long to create. Because they are incapable of or unwilling to see a world that is not just some smaller version of Wolf Larson’s. I see them today in various groups that talk about building a better society. While they rail against those who oppress them, you clearly see them mirroring the very behavior they say they oppose. They are the ones saying you must fight fire with fire. And while they are not quite emboldened enough yet to use actual violence, they will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to maintain their own personal positions of power and security.

 I see it too in people who were once oppressed who, having the opportunity to rule over others, are little better than their former oppressors.

The problem with a Mugridge is that they live entirely within the world shaped by the Wolf Larsons. They will never shake free of it, and while they may say they are fighting oppression, they are doing so only to free themselves from it, not eradicate it. Such a mindset can never lead to a more just society, it will only change who will be the oppressor and who the oppressed.

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To Go Forward, First You Must Go Inward

This is the door you’ve feared to open. It is the door you must walk through. The way will be dark but I promise you the only true (redeeming) light is to be found on the other side of that darkness. You cannot lock away the darkness, for it will stay inside of you and eat at you. All of us must confront the things we locked away in childhood, the things that warped us and made us grow up into people we never wanted to be.

 I was looking at stock photos on MS Word today, and so many of them made me think “Oh God, I want to be there.” And every single image I saw that elicited that response from me was of something from the natural world. A flower, impossibly complex and beautiful. A panda in the wild, staring at me with eyes that were windows into a soul not so different than yours or mine. A stretch of forest in peak autumn colors. The sky surrendering the sun into the sea for the evening.

 This is where I wanted to be, with nature. Pretty much anywhere. How few of us have the privilege to spend much of our lives in communion with it. How few of us have the time to appreciate it as we drive through our busy lives in order to acquire and build the very things that are destroying all that we should hold most dear.

 We have seriously screwed up, people. As I continued to look through images while caged within the confines of my workspace, I was reminded of the joy and awe that I was able to experience as a child who had the time and the opportunity to witness even the simplest of nature’s wonders. A picture of robin’s eggs in a nest built upon the limb of a blossoming tree, small symbols of the overwhelming renewal of spring.

 This was our lives once upon a time. This is the environment we were created for. Not just on vacation. Not just on the weekend. We were meant to live our lives in nature. We ARE nature. When we cut ourselves off from her, we cut ourselves off from ourselves. Our true selves are locked in a dark room, afraid to even whisper. And yet that we are aware of that truth, though we do not permit it to enter our thoughts.

 We have cut ourselves off from the songs of birds. We do not witness the awesome experience of a sunrise. We do not really understand what the word awesome once meant. We use the word to describe pizza now.

 We do not know nature. We do not know the home that was made for us, that we were made for. We look to the stars as though we were explorers, never admitting we are not running to but running away. We fancy it a great and grand goal to be able to escape the environment we’ve very nearly destroyed.

 Put away your fanciful notions—you will die on this planet. You and everyone you know will die on this planet. The question is will you ever truly live on it? Because you cannot truly live when the better part of you sits in the darkness of fear and repression. Society has taught you its trauma and you have incorporated it into your being and will pass it on to your children, and they to theirs, until someone is willing to open that door and face the pain. That which does not kill you will make you stronger, but first you must feel it. You must be willing to let it touch you. You must open yourself up to it when for your entire life you’ve allowed yourself to believe it does not exist at all.

 We have to accept what we have done if we ever want to change for the better. What we have done because we have allowed others to tell us that's the way the world works. That murder is okay if you can justify it, that polluting our Earth is okay if someone makes money from it. We have to accept what has been done to us if we ever want to be free of it. And we can’t just do that with our intellect, we have to open up our deepest selves to it. Otherwise we are kidding ourselves to the grave.

 We’ve got to set aside all our distracting and comforting beliefs, our looping programs that are triggered whenever discomfort creeps up in us. We have to let go of all the crap society has told us and just feel. We have to feel Hiroshima. We have to experience its full horror without trying to rationalize it. We have to feel centuries of slavery. We have to feel the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking, the Armenian Genocide, the Massacre of the Congo. Feel it. Feel all the horrors humans are capable of. Not to fellow humans only but to every living thing. Admit the horrors of factory farming. Acknowledge how it must feel to work at an animal processing plant, see yourself as that person operating the bulldozer that is tearing down a forest while an orangutan tries to step between the machine and its home. Feel it, admit it, let it inside, because that is what you and I and us are.

 We are the ones polluting our rivers and streams, killing the life of the oceans themselves. It is not them, it is not the system, it is not the government it is not the corporations it is not capitalism or communism or men or white people or the Chinese or the Jews or the Trump supporters or the liberals. Don’t blame it on the powerful, because we are all the powerful, most of us just refuse to believe it. Most of us choose to lock the belief in the power we have by right of birth away because we have been traumatized. Most of us would rather live our entire lives only half-living because we are afraid to confront the trauma brought upon us. Because the people who caused it were grownups beating the resistance out of children the way it was once beaten out of them.

 Just let yourself feel. Open yourself up to the inside voice rather than trying to make peace with the outside voices, those voices that were put inside your brain to silence your own. Whatever you feel is yours, no one can explain it to you. No one can judge you, no one can call you weak for confronting and dealing with that which tried to control you from the outside, which planted its seed in you and tried to make you act according to its example. Finding your own true self may make you think you look weak in the eyes of others, but it is far more important to feel strong in your own skin.

 Feel what needs to be felt. Don’t defend, don’t deflect, don’t deny, just feel. It will feel as if there is a wave so great behind the damn of fear you have built that it will crush you, will destroy your entire world.

 Let it splash over you. These are your feelings. Don’t deny them. They ARE you. Let it be released. Let YOU be released. As it does rushes over you, it will so completely cleanse your insides that the water will pour out of your eyes. Let the tears flow. Let yourself feel like you have never allowed yourself to feel before. It is healing. It will make you strong. It will make you strong in the way you always tried to be but never really believed you could.

 When you open up that door, you are not letting the darkness out, you are letting the light in. You are letting it in so that you will never have to feel that fear again, you will never have to run from yourself or the life you want again. You will never again have to carry around that darkness, that fear, that lie.

 You will never have to try to be strong again because the strength will flow through you, a strength greater than any you could ever have summoned through will. You have misunderstood what strength means. You have thought it meant the ability to behave as someone once told you you should if you were to be a man. Or a woman. Or acceptable. Or loved. Strength does not come from the outside, but from the inside. Strength is not achieved by carrying the bull shit of others but by freeing yourself of it. Strength is never again having to defend the stories and the narratives of others.

 You will never have to be afraid again, because fear no longer has a place to live within you. You have opened that door where it sought refuge. You have subjected it to the light, and it has withered.

 This is the door you feared to open, and it has brought light into the dark places. This is the dark path you feared to walk through, and it has brought you to a light that made all things clear. You are once again a child of nature, in touch with your own nature which cries out for the natural. Your path is clear, your mind is clear, your heart is clear.

 You are free. 

You are powerful.

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A Poor Fashion Choice

 

I’ve never been into fashion because I always figured it was just another way the elite were trying to dictate how we should live. Not bad enough that they were always telling us how to organize our society or who we should bomb, they wanted to dress us, as well. And as a straight, white, blue-collar male, I figured fashion had little to do with my type.

 

But in the 21^st Century, I can’t help noticing us Joe Six-packs are as much victims of fashion as anyone. I see it everywhere I look nowadays among aging males with beards, bellies, and calloused hands, wearing all kinds of apparel with the letters HD prominent in order to denote the name brand. I never thought I’d see the day where my fellow boilermakers were making me feel self-conscious about my sartorial choices.

 Another new fashion choice I’ve noticed among my fellow metal fabricators recently is the faded or darkened U.S. flag. I see it everywhere, but nowhere so much as when it is used to cover people’s mouths and noses in this, the Covid-19 era. I think it is the gun-owner’s way of subtly protesting the need for masks, a way of saying that their rights are being trampled by the pandemic without actually resisting.

 I deem these darkened or damaged flags a fashion statement rather than a political one because there is no explicit ideology or cause tied to it, just a posture. It is no BLM or Gay Pride or Blue Lives Matter flag. A political statement is an explicit statement. A fashion statement may be a statement, but it is a subliminal one, one not fully or perhaps even partly understood by those who engage in it.

 The underlying statement made by this current darkened flag fashion seems to be a commitment to a particular narrative of our nation no matter how tattered or dark it becomes. It is a narrative they must have picked up when they were mere children and never developed or modified since then, a narrative best symbolized by muscle cars, Rambo, and professional wrestling. I like a 440 big block as much as the next guy, but I recognize the days of Superbirds are never coming back. I'm not going to mistake nostalgia for patriotism, nor am I going to get all Goth about it.

 I had notions of what the flag stood for when I was young, too. I remember how pretty the U.S. flag looked to me. I was 10 years old during the Bicentennial when patriotism was on the rise. It was a time for looking back at two hundred years of history, and as we prepared for the anniversary, we prettied up our nation. In the same way as we might dust off ornaments we are to use for a holiday, everything American was dusted off to make it look new and bright and vibrant. I remember our fire hydrants were painted up to look like patriotic figures like Uncle Sam and Abe Lincoln. I remember, even though our country was two hundred years old, that we were giving it a careful makeover to ensure that it was in proper shape to meet the future. We were celebrating the past because it had stood the test of time and felt our country was poised to thrive for another two hundred years.

 The flags on display were new. Their colors were sharp, vivid, distinct. There was a richness to be found in the simple reds and whites and blue. There was a crispness to the material. It made a child feel good to be American

 Flashforward to a present where few people would know how to put a decent crease in a pantleg. The flag they wear—which was never meant to be worn—is a mockery of the one I knew. It is menacing. It’s unsettling the way Nazi sculpture is unsettling. Like fascism, it does not stand FOR something but seems to stand AGAINST something. Anything. Everything. It is nihilistic. I can only imagine how a child feels who sees one of these dark flags.

 I find the notion of embracing a worn and faded flag, rather than repairing it or sewing a new one, to be unhealthy. It’s like sticking to a diet of cheeseburgers after your third heart attack. And being proud of it. It’s like trying to fit into the same clothes you wore in high school when you’re fifty. It’s like never really letting go of your first love and never finding happiness. It’s like failing to adjust to a new environment. It’s like not feeling the need to improve yourself but instead resting on former glory. That dark flag is like Al Bundy sitting on his couch telling you how he won the big game back in high school.

 Like I said though, I don’t think the black flag is an overt statement of politics but a subliminal expression of a mood or trend. People have flirted with fascism as fashion before. I wouldn’t accuse those who sport the dark flag of being fascists but I won’t approve of their fashion choice, either. And if it is in fact a political statement, I don’t much care for it. I’ve always been suspicious of those who use fashion to announce their political beliefs because I’ve always seen it as posturing over substance.

 My suggestion to those who wear a darkened or faded flag because they identify with it is this: delve into the history of the United States with an open mind and an open heart. Do not seek to deny or white wash the darker elements, but find the ideas and moments in our history that make you feel good. Not necessarily proud, because pride is the worst of the deadly sins, but something that makes you feel good. And then carry that into the present and see how it relates to today. Because if something makes you feel good—not proud or superior—it very definitely has value in the present. Take the very positive feeling you have from being a part of the United States, and use it to create something positive in the present that will make future Americans proud of the country they happened to be born in.

 But for God’s sake, the future will not look back proudly at an ugly and menacing flag like the kind you’re covering your face with.

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What Can Hamlet Tell Us About Reparations?

 

Great literature can teach us a lot about life. Take for example, Hamlet. There is a scene in it where Claudius contends with his guilt for killing his brother, Hamlet’s father. There is honest regret in his words and a desire to pray to God for forgiveness. He states his moral dilemma thus:

 Then I’ll look up, my fault is past.

But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder?”

That cannot be for I am still possessed

of those effects for which I did the murder.

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

May one be pardoned and retain the offense?

In other words, he realizes it is useless to pray for forgiveness when he is unable to let go of what he has gained by his brother’s death. He then goes on to say that perhaps man’s justice might let him get away with it, but God surely sees through his lack of repentance.

 Actually, Claudius sees God as the sterner judge, but He is far more merciful than man can be. For as Claudius speaks, Hamlet looks on, planning to kill him where he kneels. Hamlet is now convinced that his uncle has killed his father. He sees Claudius seemingly at prayer, seemingly contrite, and pauses. He does so not out of pity but with the thought that if he kills him as he is praying for forgiveness, he will be forgiven and go to Heaven. Hamlet does not simply want to kill his Uncle, he wants to make sure his Uncle spends eternity in Hell for his crime.

 No, it is far wiser to depend on God’s mercy than man’s. But Claudius realizes even God will not extend mercy to one who yet retains the rewards gained by his crime. Even someone so horrible as to engage in regicide and fratricide can yet see this clearly.

 Let’s for a moment extend the story into the hypothetical. What if both Claudius and Hamlet survived to have descendants? Would the children of Claudius be without sin if they too held possession of the crown and the castle that by rights belonged to Hamlet and only came to them through murder? I was never fond of the Biblical passage that talks about God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation” but it seems appropriate in this circumstance. What was unjustly taken will be a source of contention until the crime no longer rewards the guilty.

 I think about this when hearing people so lightly dismiss the past injustices suffered by others. “African Americans were slaves,” they say, “but that was a long time ago. No one alive now experienced that.”

 But an injustice must not merely be undone but rectified. Atonement must be made or it will hang over even generations that had no part in it. For if they are still possessed of the effects of their ancestors’ crimes, can they be forgiven by God let alone man?

 But perhaps your family came to America after slavery was outlawed. You possess no land that was farmed by slaves. Surely you owe no debt.

 Yet the land you now own was once the land where others lived. They did not leave voluntarily. Because of the sins of others, you now have what you have. So long as you participate in the spoils of a sin, you share in the guilt.

 Even if you are a poor white person with no land and little wealth, you share in the guilt of those who have unjustly taken from others. The phone you use contains minerals mined by children in Africa. The food you eat was farmed by itinerant labor. The beans that make the coffee you drink were picked by exploited peasants. Much of the clothes you wear were made by children or by those whose ability to earn a living will be used up at an early age.

 But let us put aside the question of what we owe to our fellow man and to man’s justice. Let us ask what debt we owe to our very planet. How can we claim to own what we have obtained by her rape? The crimes we are committing now will be paid for by all our children, who will never share in the wealth we created by our planet’s destruction. What possession is worth retaining in the light of the punishment we will pass on to our children’s children? How can we hope to gain God's forgiveness, let alone theirs? 

 Our choice, as it was for Claudius and as it would have been for his descendants if he had had any, is a choice between seeking God’s forgiveness and keeping all we have acquired through theft and murder. As Claudius realized, it is not an easy choice. In his case, it would have meant abandoning his crown, his wife, his wealth, his renown. In our own case...well, that is what we must decide. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say, there is no cheap grace, no easy path to God’s love.

 It is surely the easiest path to say we need not account for sins of the past, sins committed by those long dead. But until those who continue to benefit from such crimes make an earnest attempt to redress them, an earnest attempt to foreswear all that we possess through those crimes, even if they were not committed by us, we will of necessity continue to participate in those sins. As with Claudius’ and Hamlet’s hypothetical descendants, that which was taken by the father must be defended by the son, one generation to the next. Until the day that God’s or man’s judgment is exacted.

The choices are stark. Claudius’ choice was between repentance or continued killing. If Claudius had passed his ill-gotten gains to his children, he would have passed along with them the need for generations of subjugation of those who were dispossessed. Our choice is not so different. The path forward will not be easy—as it has not been easy for generations of those who sought forgiveness while possessing the offense—but it is not obscure.

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