Soon
after the election of Donald J. Trump, the sales of novels depicting life in a
totalitarian state—Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World—shot upward, with George Orwell’s 1984 going to
#1 on Amazon. (It’s still at #3 as I write this.) People are trying to make
sense of the mess we’re in and turning to fiction as one source of
understanding. Me, I’m looking back through my battered copy of the 14th
Century Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, a three part
epic poem depicting Dante’s allegorical journey through hell, then purgatory,
and finally into paradise. During his spiritual quest, Dante also comments on
the politics and political figures of his native Florence, so with apologies to
my distant countryman, I’m going to join him in The Inferno and indulge
in a great guilty pleasure by imagining the punishment awaiting some of the key
players in contemporary American politics. Donald Trump, his cabinet, and his
advisors present so many threats to all that’s holy that in addition to
political action we need to draw on every artistic and cultural resource at our
disposal to give us clarity and hope. If we’re forced to gambol on the edge of
the abyss, let’s use every dance move we got.
Hell
consists of nine concentric circles located deep within the earth: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Each
circle is the realm of a particular sin—lust, greed, violence, treachery—with
each descending circle representing more and more grievous evil until, finally,
there is the center of hell where in the lowest depth, Satan is frozen
eternally in ice, futilely beating his massive wings.
Part
of Dante’s poetic genius is that the punishment he creates for each of the sins
is a physical analogue of the sin itself, and he renders the sights, sounds,
and smells of the physical with grisly vividness. Gluttons, for example, wallow
for eternity in a freezing slush of the rotted garbage their earthly indulgence
produced. Fortune tellers and diviners (part of the circle of fraud) sought in
life the unnatural power of foretelling the future, so in hell their heads are
twisted forever backward, their eyes blinded by tears “that [run] down the
cleft of their buttocks.” You get the idea.
In
my Trumpian Inferno, there will be a special circle for the president’s
press secretary, Sean Spicer, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and his
counselor, Kellyanne Conway. These three long-time Republican operatives were
each critical of Donald Trump during the GOP primary—Conway called him “a man
who seems to be offending his way to the nomination”—but made their peace with
the devil in exchange for power and limelight. Through an endless flow of
double-talk, re-direction, avoidance, and flat-out lying, this unholy trio has
thrown into fast-forward the degradation of our political language. For
eternity, then, let them each be bound to podiums jammed close together in the
blinding light of a press conference, repeating face-to-face ad nauseam and ad
infinitum the blather that has become their stock-in-trade.
Chief
strategist Steve Bannon who revels in provocation and shock-and-awe strategy
would be buried forever in the middle of a vast desert, just enough below the
surface that his endless flailing and blustering produces the tiniest puff of
sand, seen by no one, not ever, affecting nothing at all.
And
down in that icy pit of hell where Satan intensifies the frigid winds of his
damnation through the endless flapping of his wings, down in that cold darkness
will be Mr. Trump himself. For well beyond the end of time, every gilded object
that surrounds him in life will fade to dull gray. The buildings that bear his
name will crumble. A giant screen will broadcast his personal wealth, repeatedly
diminishing to zero for all eternity. There will be three people at his
rallies, the strapped-to-their-podiums trio of Spicer, Conway, and Priebus, a
number too low to make the news. Dante’s hell is full of monstrous creatures
who bite and claw at the damned. Whenever our president utters words like
“huge,” “beautiful,” “fantastic,” a giant winged demon will rip them from the
air, for he has rendered these words meaningless.
We
could go on. The former nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andy Puzder, couldn't take the heat, but his sins might still condemn him to forever and
ever flip burgers or clean toilets for less than minimum wage. I invite you to
join me. Pick your least-favorite member of the Trump playbook and escort him
or her to the vestibule of Dante’s hell.
One
thing, however. As we stand at the threshold of the underworld indulging in our
fantasized retributive justice, I wouldn’t want us to lose sight of a sobering,
all-too-real fact. There are people close to President Trump, chief strategist
Bannon foremost among them, whose view of this actual world we inhabit right
here and now exhibits troubling parallels to Dante’s medieval allegory. Mr.
Bannon, a thrice-divorced ultra-conservative Catholic, sees the world in Dantesque
extremes, apocalyptic, the monumental clash of good and evil. In Bannon’s eyes,
we live in a time of dark chaos that through a purgative catastrophe—one he
desires—will lead to a new world order. Donald Trump has moved this kind of
thinking from the fringes of our society to the center of the White House:
Steve Bannon sits on the president’s National Security Council, the smell of
brimstone in the hallway outside his office.
Over
the year, I’ll be writing further and less figuratively about the terrible
damage being done to our civic language and democratic institutions. But for
now… Ms. DeVos? May I escort you through this gateway, please?
You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.