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Thursday
I post today on a Dante passage that a political commentator uses and then withdraws to capture his feelings about Donald Trump’s election victory. It’s a nice instance of how, even when not altogether applicable, literature opens up rich opportunities for exploration.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, former basketball great (some think the greatest) and a remarkably thoughtful observer, talks of feeling betrayed by those Americans who elected “a conman who represents the opposite of what the U.S. Constitution stands for.” He says watching those “who made his ascension possible” is like “finding your drug-addict son robbing your safe to buy drugs.”
“You still love him,” Abdul-Jabbar comments, “but you grieve over who he has become. The first is the grief of immediate fear, the second is the grief of damaged love.”
Then comes the allusion to Dante’s Inferno Circle #9, which is the circle of betrayal. It involves four levels: betrayal of family, of country, of guests and of benefactors. The souls there are encased in ice because betrayal involves a cold closing down of the heart, entirely shutting out God’s love.
Abdul-Jabbar misremembers the episode slightly, putting Cain as well as Judas in the lowest level. (The first level, Caina, is named after Cain but he doesn’t himself appear.) The other two figures who join Judas in the jaws of Satan—perpetually devoured by the three heads of the ultimate betrayer–are Brutus and Cassius. Their cold-blooded betrayal of their friend and benefactor Julius Caesar, whom Dante regarded as an essential part of God’s plan for human happiness, makes them worse than every other sinner in human history. Well, except for Judas.
So are we to see Trump supporters as irredeemable sinners who have sabotaged democracy and all hope for human happiness? You can see why a man of color would feel that way towards people who supported a racist that openly courted White supremacists. But Abdul-Jabbar then makes it clear that this is only how it feels to him—how he feels betrayed—rather than what these people are actually like. And he ends his short essay on the hopeful note that Trump voters will come to see the error of their ways. “I’m hopeful,” he writes,
that as the next four years progress, they will eventually slap their foreheads and cry out, “What was I thinking!?!” And reason and compassion will once again prevail. Or, as Joni Mitchell sings in “Woodstock”: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
The souls in Dante’s Inferno are incapable of such rethinking, which is why they are there in the first place. Those who, however bad their behavior, ultimately open themselves to God’s love—to divine reason and compassion—end up in Purgatory, not in Hell.
Until they rethink, however, Abdul Jabbar says that “our goal for now is to fasten our seatbelts, fling our arms across the chests of our children to protect them, and hang in there. Americans have corrected course before…”
So, Inferno—which many times I’ve applied to Trump himself–may not describe his supporters.
Previous Posts about Trump and Dante’s Inferno
—Trump and Dante’s Corrupt Popes (Feb/ 1. 2021)
—Dante’s Weighs in on Trumpian Sins (April 28, 2020)
—Trump Infernos: 9 Circles, Pick One (April 27, 2020)
—Flattering Trump Is Like Wallowing in S*** (July 24, 2017)
—In a Dante-esque Prison of His Own Making(April 18, 2024)
