Ahab (Capitalist) & the red hand and hammar of Tashtego (Socialism) go down together

[Mark Kohut]

not many better verbal riffs than one of Melville's for the first work day of the new year.
"It's about work"---Alice.........Thanks, alice.
 
Think Progress site reports "progressive' is the term most view favorably in PEW Research
poll.....over 70%.......


________________________________
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2012 6:40 AM
Subject: Ahab (Capitalist) & the red hand and hammar of Tashtego (Socialism) go down together

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the
flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the
destroying billows they almost touched; at that instant, a red arm and
a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of
nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A
sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from
its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding
Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad
fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously
feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his
death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven,
with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and
his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his
ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
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