What literary character does Paul Craig Roberts resemble?

Speaking of Mexico’s posing a threat to the U.S., I’m reminded of how Paul Craig Roberts not long ago called for the Mexican conquest of the U.S., if only it would result in the elimination of the neoconservatives.

And speaking of Roberts, Gintas writes:

The picture of Paul Craig Roberts accompanying his latest article at the Chronicles website is great: the thundering prophet of doom surveying the wasteland. In a tuxedo.

When I went to the page Gintas had linked and looked at the photo of Roberts, seen from below, gazing heroically into the distance, my first thought was of the opening of The Fountainhead:

Howard Roark laughed.

He stood naked at the edge of a cliff.

But though Roberts is certainly in proud, individualist, Randian mode, he looks too grim to be the laughing Roark, not to mention that he’s wearing a tux. He looks more like Henry Rearden, the unhappy industrialist hero of Atlas Shrugged.

But a commenter in the Chronicles thread has a better idea:

3 Comment by jamesvkruse on 14 January 2009:

That picture of PCR has got to go.

4 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 14 January 2009:

Yes, I agree. I love PCR’s writings, but he looks like he’s posing as Captain Ahab on the Pequod’s deck.

Yes, that’s it. Captain Ahab, searching the horizon of the world with fanatical, insane determination for the White … Neocons!

The Neocons swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung…. All that most maddens and torments; … all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in the Neocons. He piled upon their collective head the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

* * *

LA writes:

I’ve used that passage from Moby Dick once before, in an article about Patrick Buchanan and Israel several years ago. But I think the description of a man maddened and tormented by the object of his hate fits Roberts better.

LA writes:

Here are a few past VFR pieces on Roberts:

Paul Craig Roberts’s Modest Proposal
Paul Craig Roberts: Still crazy after fours years
Paul Craig Roberts
PC Roberts goes over the cliff

- end of initial entry -

Bruce B. writes:

I thought he looked a little like Clint Eastwood (the current, older Eastwood).

LA writes:

Roberts could also be the Walter Huston character in the 1936 movie “Dodsworth.”

Jim N. writes:

Or a puffy Peter Graves, stoically surveying his next Impossible Mission.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2009 10:53 AM | Send