I’ve often been accused of being an Ahab cripple. Ahab cripples are those cripples who are bitter because they’re crippled and want to take it out on the rest of world.
These cripples are like Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. Ahab is pissed at Moby Dick for biting his leg off. So he drags other people into his obsessive quest to hunt down and kill the whale and thus get revenge. But the thing is, as far as I can tell, Ahab cripples are fictitious. I’ve never met one. Because first off, it’s pretty pointless. In Moby Dick, Ahab loses in the end when the whale drags him into the water and he drowns. But suppose Ahab succeeded in skewering the hell out of the beast, dragging it on board and running it up the flagpole in triumph. So what. He’d still be crippled. So what’s the point? I mean maybe if capturing the whale and drinking its blood would’ve grown Ahab’s leg back I might be able to buy it.
But I’ve never met anybody who, for instance, became crippled because they were run over by a car and was obsessed with finding that car and setting it on fire. And yet this notion that civilization is crawling with Ahab cripples persists and I think it’s largely because of Moby Dick. Don’t get me wrong. Moby Dick is a great book. I’ve got nothing against it. Some of my best friends have read Moby Dick. But I’m tempted to rewrite it just to try to counteract some of the bitter cripple shit.
First, instead of a whale, I’d turn Moby Dick into a chipmunk. And the story goes that Ahab is out jogging or something and suddenly an albino chipmunk shoots across his path and Ahab slips on it and falls like on a banana peel and somehow he loses his leg as a result. So he drags others into his obsessive quest to hunt down and kill the chipmunk. Moby Dick would then be a silly parody of bitter cripple revenge.
Or I might make the story more reality-based by introducing a twist where, after losing his leg, Ahab meets a good, ruthless cripple lawyer. Cripple lawyers are those lawyers that help people get hefty financial settlements after they become crippled. This would have given Ahab a much more productive outlet for his rage. He’d just have to sign the papers, sit back and let the cripple lawyer do the rest. A good, ruthless cripple lawyer will always find somebody to sue no matter what. In a case like Ahab’s, the cripple lawyer would probably sue SeaWorld for not capturing the whale before it could hurt somebody.
Cripples of the 21st Century don’t need to go on hell-bent vengeance rampages. We have cripple lawyers. Cripples are like everybody else. When we feel like we’ve got justice, we don’t need revenge.
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