The Real News Network Premiered Jul 29, 2022 “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. Joining Chris to discuss Melville’s novel is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of “Why Read Moby Dick?”, as well as books such as “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleboat Essex”, “Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War”, “Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy”, and “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and The Battle of the Little Bighorn”. Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.