Thursday
I once had a talk with John Bohannon, a former state senator from southern Maryland, as he grappled with Fox News’ impact on voters. “People wake up, turn on their televisions, and by the time they leave home, they’re mad as hell,” he told me. That anger helps explain Donald Trump’s bedrock loyalty with a certain segment of voters: they’re grateful that he hates the same people they hate, and everything else, including an out-of-control pandemic and a cratering economy, are irrelevant.
Dante understands the emotions well.
In Inferno’s Fifth Circle, Dante the pilgrim encounters those are thrashing around in anger. Of these, there are “the wrathful” who outwardly vent their anger on others and “the sullen” who keep it within, where it boils ceaselessly.
We see the energies at work even before we meet the people:
And crossing over to the chasm's edge
we came to a spring that boiled and overflowed
through a great crevice worn into the ledge.
By that foul water, black from its very source,
we found a nightmare path among the rocks
and followed the dark stream along its course.
Beyond its rocky race and wild descent
the river floods and forms a marsh called Styx,
a dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant.
Dante first meets those who vent their anger on others:
And I, intent on all our passage touched,
made out a swarm of spirits in that bog
savage with anger, naked, slime-besmutched.
They thumped at one another in that slime
with hands and feet, and they butted, and they bit
as if each would tear the other limb from limb.
The sullen are no less violent, only their violence is internal. Virgil, the voice of reason, explains to Dante that they are fixed in the river’s slime, their inner turmoil making its way to the surface through air bubbles caused by their chanting:
And my kind Sage: "My son, behold the souls
of those who lived in wrath. And do you see
the broken surfaces of those waterholes
on every hand, boiling as if in pain?
There are souls beneath that water. Fixed in slime
they speak their piece, end it, and start again:
‘Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;
in the glory of his shining our hearts poured
a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;
sullen we lie forever in this ditch.”
This litany they gargle in their throats
as if they sang, but lacked the words and pitch."
The distinction between the wrathful and the sullen is similar to that between hot anger and cold anger that one encounters in Beowulf. The Grendels are the monstrous image of the first—in their pain, they lash out against others—while the Dragon represents the second, retreating into his cave and scaling over. Each can tilt over into the other, however: Grendel’s Mother retreats into her underwater lair while the Dragon erupts in fiery fury when disturbed.
Sen. Bohannon felt the effects of such anger in 2014, losing to rightwing extremist Deb Rey (by 76 votes!) despite his long and conscientious work on behalf of his district. Although she herself proved so inept that she did nothing for the area and lasted only a term, followers could feast on the daily dish of resentment that she fed them. She even warned that St. Mary’s College would start confiscating the guns of people who drove along the state road that runs through campus on their way to a firing range.
Those who inhabit Dante’s Inferno are those whose sin so consumes them that they are blind to God’s light. In other words, they create their own hells.
How many of Trump’s supporters are submerged in that black and boiling water? For that matter, any Trump opponents in danger of becoming absorbed in their own fury must regain perspective. While there is much to be angry about, we need Virgil’s Reason and Beatrice’s Love to keep us from being consumed by it.
Joe Biden wants us to remember “the air made sweet by the sun.” “Lock ’em all up” Trump only feels alive when he butts and bites.
