Everything We Believe is Absent or Negative

Steeped in the Calvinist theology of the Puritans and rich in biblical and historical allusion, Moby-Dick is Melville's great American novel, itself an attempt to lasso a white whale, to define what it is about America that so signally distinguishes it from the rest of the world. The answer Melville provides is (roughly speaking) the scorning of limits, of mystery, in favor of belief in our ability to solve the human condition as if it were some mystical Rubik's Cube, through sheer, unadulterated willpower. It is not hard to read Melville's vision of America into the war in Iraq--justified, ultimately, as the first step in a wholesale transformation of Middle Eastern monarchies into terrorist-free, American-friendly democracies--or the hippie dream of peace spreding like ripples across the globe from the feelings of universal goodwill at Woodstock, or the attempt to determine the course of foreign governments and contain godless communism that brought us Vietnam. They are all various ways of taking over the desity of humanity, of ridding the oceans wide of a notorious white whale.

From Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks

and the Darkside of the American Psyche by Gordon Theisen

It's one of those passages in a book you go back and reread a couple times. It doesn't matter Gordon Theisen never really links Moby-Dick and Nighthawks; instead he links Moby-Dick to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Nighthawks. But that's fine. It's a book like Hip: The History, filled with loose connections and long rambles and you don't care if a few of the arguments are just ridiculous because it's fun watching the author reach. Staying Up Much Too Late takes every facet of Edward Hopper's most famous painting and runs with it, from the history of the diner to the commodization of sex. It's a fun excercise that makes a good book -- but I couldn't help but feel that Theisen buries his most interesting argument about the painting three pages from the end: "This is the question that gives Nighthawks its most alluring quality: What would happen if we entered this scene where everything we believe in--capitalism, democracy, progress, productivity, the bountyh of nature--is either absent or turned into a negative?"