Persian Flashbacks

Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' is a visionary, prophetic work that
speaks to the United States' national destiny/fate.

In the 1850's (the time of the mythic hunt for the Great White Whale)
the vast majority of the people of the United States were of Northern
European ancestry, and the vast majority of these were Anglo-Saxons.
Yet the demographics of the crew of the Pequod are much like the
present population of the United States' which is peopled by all
varieties of the Human (The officers of the Pequod, however, were
uniformly savage Quakers from Nantucket Island).

And of this multi-hued crew of the Pequod, Persians constituted an
important and disturbing component.

Ahab, out of his own pocket, employed his own harpoon boat crew
consisting of his personal prophet Fedallah and four other outlandish
Persians.

Fedallah is the harpooner. His origins are mysterious, and we know
little more than that he is a Parsee, or Persian fire-worshipper, that
he wears a black Chinese-style jacket, and that he has his long white
hair wound like a turban around his head.

"...concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic
people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but
dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging
Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the
continent - those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which
even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly
aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the
first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked
of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when
though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the
daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
indulged in mundane amours."

Fedallah also likes to stand in Ahab’s shadow so that he seems,
eerily, not to cast a shadow of his own.

It’s fated that Fedallah must die before Ahab will or can die.

My fate/destiny has been strangely interwoven with the fate/destiny of
Persians, the Persian Nation (Iran). During the travels of my youths I
was there, experienced, lived through (just barely) the Islamic
Revolution.

This experience was defining, life changing. I am flashing back as I
observe what is happening now.

The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) overthrow of a
democratically elected government in Iran (the Mossadagh Government)
in 1953, and the creation of the Shah's regime defined the United
States' style of carrying the big stick and strutting the world any
way the corporate agenda dictated.

The overthrow of the Shah in 1979 announced the beginning of the time
of the United States' loss of control, the beginning of the loss of
the power to fulfill every iota of the corporations' agenda.

I cannot foresee what this revolution of Persian fire-worshippers will
bring. My guess is that whatever comes, it will come forth from a sea
of blood and tears. And whatever comes will be strangely interlinked
to the destiny/fate of the United States.