Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything. And neither one of them really tests disinterestedness, the ability to make tragic choices between things of equal worthiness and legitimacy — which to my mind explains why so much writing and discussion about whales tends toward melodrama, where right and wrong are always clear, where only one of the terms is justified. “The opposition are not nice guys,” Captain Watson has written. Nice? That seems a simpy word for a big old jackpot of a problem, a lazy and sinister trope suggesting that to oppose (Paul Watson) is to lack niceness, by definition. “I have no time for the arguments of tradition,” Watson, the honorary Indian, has written. And further: “I have no wish to understand them. I have no wish to argue the pros and cons of whaling.” He says, “The tradition of whalekind is of far more value to me.” And this tradition comprises what? “They [the whales] grace the azure blue with a majestic intelligence wedded to an amazing tactile grace. A profound, elusive, ephemeral sentience, they deify the abysmal depths with their regal presence.” If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly. Somehow mere difference has been torqued up and given a moral dimension; by way of solution we know the next step — wearying to think of as another century wanes away — is to call for the annihilation of all distinctions.

The real high-ass muck-a-mucks of the pro-whale debate like to think they cut somewhat quixotic figures, noble, paladin, but the environmental movement in the matter of the whale hunt hasn’t represented the best thinking by the best people; it’s been a disaffecting display, at least for me. Where are the eloquent American saints, where is Thoreau, where Emerson, Muir, Marshall, Leopold, Olson, Abbey? Even David Brower, for God’s sake! It’s too bad Watson’s so blinkered because the man knows cetaceans, as a student of the species and a hands-on advocate, better than anyone. He sees the situation, globally. His knowledge of whales is compendious and compassionate, but in public, dealing with people, he comes off as a bullying prig — his manners on the talk show Town Meeting were particularly appalling. With broader vision — a vision that extends to people even an ounce of the generosity he lavishes on whales — he might really help sort this mess out. He might even be able to broker a deal. He could wangle concessions. But Watson seems paranoid whenever he’s writing about whales; in one astonishing sort of Christic psychomachy ( Sea Shepherd Log , spring 1997) he relates the tale of his conversion, his Damascus experience, his baptism in whale blood, and puts himself across as a persecuted man, a prophet and savior. This messianic aspect of the movement, its higher, holier purity, is hard to stomach. It’s theocratic and imperial and arrogant, and because of it Watson comes across as just another flawed man and broken reformer hiding his human failings behind another lofty and immaculate and inviolate cause.

The acronymic groups — PAWS, AFA, SSCS, PETA, etc. — who’ve organized opposition to the Makah hunt don’t go for killing sea mammals under any circumstances. That’s really their stance, and, boiled long enough, the irreducible core of their case. This intractability has lent a sullen and futile feel to the debate, a mudslinging, lie-swapping, smug, accusational tone that, rather than clearing the air, actually just fouls and debases anybody and everybody who joins in. These people have made up their minds; there’s never been any room to maneuver. They’re into whales, and not real fond of humans. In fact they seem to favor any of God’s creatures over the malignant cancer of humanity. Their misanthropy takes the metaphoric exuberances of the late odd brilliant crank Edward Abbey literally, which is always scary. I mean, from Christ to Nietzsche we know it’s one thing when the rich voice of a solitary radical shouts out and it’s another thing when the echo of the ochlocratic chorus comes roaring back in agreement. Suddenly a certain kind of valence is gone. Abbey was a philosopher, wit, pisser, and prose stylist, and one of the first qualities sacrificed by his adherents is the anarchic soul of a man who claimed the Peace Corps was a “piece of insolence,” “an act of cultural arrogance.” The kind of man who could litter and make the act seem deductive, radical, and exemplary. The kind of man who strongly advocated population control and yet fathered four children himself — but by five wives, he argued, which was, when you did the math, only 0.8 children per woman, well below the national average. But when the lesser souls pick up the program, they smooth out the saving contradictions, flatten the subtleties, excise the humor, empurple the prose, hoist the flag and recite the pledge, and then march forth like fanatics and disciples and crusaders everywhere, ready for jihad and genocide.

Watson’s been assigned the task of interpreting the psychograms sent to him by whales and apparently he’s heard from the whales that they’d rather not be harpooned. His stated claim is that he’d like to return whales to some state pre-everything — Eden, the womb — while the Makah in an obvious clash would in some measure like to return themselves to a pre-contact world, before Captain Vancouver, before Puget, Rainier, etc., and certainly before Captain Paul Watson showed up on the scene.

Myself, I really doubt the efficacy of the Makah project because generally I’m skeptical about movements to restore culture. Whether the project’s conducted by Hitler or Mussolini, Yukio Mishima or Ronald Reagan, or fundamentalists in Iran, Lybia, or Idaho, or by Wovoka and the Ghost Dancers, or by modern communicants who raise their heads heavenward to receive the body and blood, I just don’t think the hoped-for resurrection or the dream of a return to glory is viable. Randall Jarrell once wrote that even in the Golden Age people were always griping about how everything looked yellow; all our hopes elude us. Just as shadows fall across lives, history falls across cultures. Things unravel never to reknit again and contact quite likely brings with it the entropic doom Levi-Strauss talks about in Tristes Tropiques . Our complex intermingling kills. We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood on our hands came from. Knowledge happens just about as often as shit, while innocence is probably returned to by taking yet another bite of the apple, not by pretending there never was a Fall in the first place.

But my despairs are Western despairs and I really don’t know a thing about the restorative capacity of the Makah soul.

Regardless, right or wrong, it’s not up to me to judge the eventual cultural outcome for the Makah of killing a whale off the coast, and not because I’m indifferent to the fate of the environment, or because I agree or disagree with what the sloganeers for either side have to say about whales, but because the Makah are an independent people who ought to be able, for once, to fail on their own, without the encouragement of white folk. Or, vice versa, sort of, they ought to be allowed the chance to succeed without a boost from the BIA, HUD, HIS, Department of the Interior, missionaries, social workers, tourists, etc., on terms they’ve developed by and for themselves. They might like for once to be free of the entangled bureaucracy of being Indian. Or they might like to paint their asses green and play hacky sack by moonlight. I don’t know. I can’t say. The intestine affairs of the Makah don’t really interest me, although I’m certain within the community there are factions, pro and con and even indifferent, but probably what’s not needed now is a lot of high-minded refereeing from the outside. They have a treaty, and really the hunting of this whale is about our honor. We need to think about ourselves.