Are Dems Hampered by “Moral Claptrap”?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2020
John McLenan, illus. of Hartright confronting Fosco

Tuesday

I recently finished reading Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, which led me to take special notice of a former GOP strategist’s advice to Democrats. “Democrats play to win an argument; Republicans play to win an election,” contends Rick Wilson, author of the just released Running to Beat the Devil: How to Save America from Trump—and Democrats from Themselves. Seeing the election through Collins characters, the Democrats are Walter Hartright, the Republicans Count Fosco.

 In order to gets his hands on a large inheritance, the devious Italian works with Lady Laura Glyde’s husband to have her stripped of her identity and imprisoned in an asylum. Hartright, who loves Laura, goes after the pair, which inadvertently leads to the death of the husband. Fosco, however, sends a warning through Laura’s half-sister Marian that his disregard for “the laws and conventions of society” will make him much tougher to defeat. Marian reports to Hartright,

“He spoke last of you. His eyes brightened and hardened, and his manner changed to what I remember it in past times—to that mixture of pitiless resolution and mountebank mockery which makes it so impossible to fathom him. ‘Warn Mr. Hartright!’ he said in his loftiest manner. ‘He has a man of brains to deal with, a man who snaps his big fingers at the laws and conventions of society, when he measures himself with ME. If my lamented friend had taken my advice, the business of the inquest would have been with the body of Mr. Hartright. But my lamented friend was obstinate. See! I mourn his loss—inwardly in my soul, outwardly on my hat. This trivial crape expresses sensibilities which I summon Mr. Hartright to respect….Let him be content with what he has got—with what I leave unmolested, for your sake, to him and to you. Say to him (with my compliments), if he stirs me, he has Fosco to deal with. In the English of the Popular Tongue, I inform him—Fosco sticks at nothing.’”

Later, when Hartright and Fosco come face to face, the Italian declares,

If the lives of twenty Mr. Hartrights were the stepping-stones to my safety, over all those stones I would go, sustained by my sublime indifference, self-balanced by my impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you love your own life! 

What impedes Hartright, Fosco tells his foe, are his moral principles. “Your moral clap-traps have an excellent effect in England,” he says, channeling Machiavelli. “Keep them for yourself and your own countrymen, if you please.”

Hartright prevails in the end but his victory is not of his own doing. If Fosco weren’t assassinated by a secret society that somehow shows up at novel’s end, he would undoubtedly kill Hartright.

So the Democrats, according to Wilson, are essentially kept back by their moral clap-traps. They naively think they should play by the rules and operate according to principle. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell consequently outmaneuver them time and again, from the Merritt Garland nomination to the Mueller investigation to the impeachment trial.

In my own moral universe, the soul is more important than political victory. But maybe Wilson would say that’s the problem.

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When the Court Itself Is on Trial

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2020
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch

Tuesday

What kind of impeachment trial can we expect with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell informing us that he’s “coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this, to the extent that we can”? And with one of the jurors, South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, asserting, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here”?

It’s safe to say we’ll probably see a trial similar to the one in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, complete with predetermined outcome.

We see oaths sworn in both. As The Hill reports about the one in the Senate,

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath to senators, who were standing at their desks on the Senate floor with their right hands raised. 

“Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god?” Roberts asked senators. 

Senators then walked down to the front of the chamber as their names were called to sign the oath book.

While we don’t see the jurors in the novel sworn in, we do see Bob Ewell swearing—falsely swearing as it turns out—to tell the truth and nothing but the truth:

In answer to the clerk’s booming voice, a little bantam cock of a man rose and strutted to the stand, the back of his neck reddening at the sound of his name. When he turned around to take the oath, we saw that his face was as red as his neck. We also saw no resemblance to his namesake. A shock of wispy new-washed hair stood up from his forehead; his nose was thin, pointed, and shiny; he had no chin to speak of—it seemed to be part of his crepey neck.

“—so help me God,” he crowed.

As the trial unfolds, it’s clear that the Ewells have fabricated a rape that never happened. In our own trial, it appears that Donald Trump’s defense team may not even contest the fact that he extorted Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. As more damning evidence emerges every day, we may be like the hopeful Jem, who along with Scout and Dill is witnessing the trial from the balcony:

Jem seemed to be having a quiet fit. He was pounding the balcony rail softly, and once he whispered, “We’ve got him.”

As a child, however, Jem is under the mistaken impression that the truth matters. Dill, meanwhile, is so unnerved by the ugliness of the prosecution that he becomes sick. The town’s supposed drunkard, who has a black mistress and mixed-race children, points to the learning curve that awaits him:

He jerked his head at Dill: “Things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being—not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.”

“Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?” Dill’s maleness was beginning to asset itself.

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.”

In his summary statement, Atticus Finch observes that Tom Robinson’s case puts the court system itself on trial. Likewise, we could say that these impeachment hearings put the U.S. Senate on trial. Imagine the senators are hearing the closing argument of American literature’s most beloved lawyer:

Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

Atticus’s eloquence falls on deaf ears. When the jury in the novel unanimously delivers a guilty verdict, Jem can’t believe what he has just witnessed:

“Atticus—” said Jem bleakly.

He turned in the doorway. “What, son?”

“How could they do it, how could they?”

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep. Good night.”

Will we weep when that Senate delivers its verdict? Or have we become so numbed that the tears will no longer flow?

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Hughes Taught King to Dream a World

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2020
Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes

Monday–Martin Luther King’s Birthday

Of the many influences on Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, perhaps none looms so large as Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.” Check out the comparison:

King:

I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream … I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today… I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made palin, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.

Hughes:

I Dream A World

I dream a world where man
 No other man will scorn,
 Where love will bless the earth
 And peace its paths adorn
 I dream a world where all
 Will know sweet freedom’s way,
 Where greed no longer saps the soul
 Nor avarice blights our day.
 A world I dream where black or white,
 Whatever race you be,
 Will share the bounties of the earth
 And every man is free,
 Where wretchedness will hang its head
 And joy, like a pearl,
 Attends the needs of all mankind-
 Of such I dream, my world!

Hughes wrote many dream poems, often focusing on “the dream deferred,” and King grew up reading them. Sometimes, as in “Harlem,” Hughes looks at what can happen to a people when the dream is too long deferred. But in “I Dream a World,” like King, he focuses purely on a visionary future.

We don’t live in that world yet, but we are closer to it than we were when I was growing up in the segregated south. Just because we have a long way to go doesn’t mean that we should ignore the progress we have made.

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The Herbert Poem that Converted Weil

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2020
Simone Weil

Spiritual Sunday

In a conversation with colleague and friend John Gatta, I learned that my favorite George Herbert poem had a profound impact on French mystic Simone Weil. She encountered it at a time when she was grappling with doubts and also migraine headaches.

Although raised an agnostic Jew and frequently engaged in political activism (including the Spanish Civil War), in her late twenties Weil began exploring Christianity. While suffering from crippling migraines, she encountered first choral singing and then Herbert’s “Love (3).” At that point, as she writes in her spiritual autobiography, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me”:

In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following all the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all.

There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance — for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence — made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called “Love”. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me…Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

In the poem, Christ bestows his love despite the speaker’s intense feelings of unworthiness:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
         Guilty of dust and sin.
 But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
 Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
           If I lacked any thing.
 
 A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
           Love said, You shall be he.
 I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
            I cannot look on thee.
 
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
             Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
              Go where it doth deserve.
 And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
               My dear, then I will serve.
 You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                So I did sit and eat.

The idea that Christ will come to us in our affliction spoke deeply to Weil, and she sent the poem to her imprisoned brother and to the paralyzed poet Joe Bosquet. As Diogenese Allen writes in an article on Herbert and Weil,

It was a poem which uses the imagination that enabled Weil to break through to a domain above the intellect. The experience gave her the incentive…to assemble material to develop an epistemology [a theory of belief] which related beauty, truth, pain and supernatural good, and thus to achieve full conviction. She then can write such things as “The true mysteries of the Faith are themselves absurd but their absurdity is such as to illumine the mind and cause it to produce in abundance truths which are clear to the intelligence.”

Literature and religion have a lot in common in that respect.

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Turgenev’s Stories Helped Free the Serfs

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2020
Ilya Repin, portrait of Turgenev

Friday

The blog “Literary Hub” has alerted me to an essay asserting that the short stories of Turgenev played a role in emancipating the Russian serfs in 1861. According to Pakistani-American author Daniyal Mueenuddin, the Russian nobility were so oblivious to the humanity of the serfs that they couldn’t imagine what emancipation would look like. A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852) helped change that.

Born into a prominent landowning family, Turgenev saw up close the brutality enacted against the serfs. Both his grandmother and mother were despotic women, with the former once having beaten a page-boy to death, while Turgenev witnessed his mother abusing one of his own illegitimate daughters. (He would go on to free her and set her up independently.)

In his introduction to the recently reissued collection, Mueenuddin notes,

These stories are as much informed by his mother’s despotism as by the larger despotism of the Russian state. His personal revolt ran parallel to a larger national political revolt. Through his childhood and later as a man, Turgenev sought out the company of the serfs in the kennels and kitchens of Spasskoye because among them he found kindness.

As to how the stories contributed to the emancipation, Mueenuddin writes,

Unusually, for a work of fiction—for any work of art—the Notebook  played an important political role in the history of Russia. In the middle of the 19th century, the necessity of liberating the serfs, who were virtually slaves, had become pressing upon an increasingly westernized nobility. The necessity of their liberation, and then the means and outlines of that emancipation, puzzled the nobles and most importantly, the czar—Alexander II.

This constituency found it difficult to reconcile itself to the loss of their revenues and powers flowing from this emancipation in part because they knew very little about their serfs, had never paid much attention to them. They commanded obedience with banishments and the knout, and otherwise indulged themselves with serf orchestras on their estates and desperate feats of gambling and spoke French among themselves. If they gave it any thought, they would have considered it an impertinence for their serfs to have private lives. 

Turgenev’s stories imposed the humanity of these men and women upon their owners, showed them in all their complexity. The stories came as a revelation to their readership. Any man who’s ever killed a chicken knows that it’s best not to look it in the eye. Turgenev forced his fellow landowners to do that, look the serfs in the eye. Alexander II acknowledged the role these stories played in guiding him to issue the Emancipation Edict that freed the serfs in 1861. 

This past year I read for the first time Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and was impressed by its humanity and vitality. Apparently, such a vision had the power to influence a czar. Literature can’t change history by itself, but it can play a vital role.

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Jigsaw Order Out of Chaos

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2020
Frank Lloyd Wright, Hoffman House rug design

Thursday

It’s not often that I do jigsaw puzzles, but I just completed a particularly challenging Frank Lloyd Wright rug design (challenging at least for me) and am feeling proud of myself. Perhaps it appeals to the side of me that has specialized in 18th century literature.

Many in that century were obsessed with finding order in chaos. Buoyed by the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and others, the deists saw God as a clockmaker who wound up the universe and then stepped back, having given humans the intellectual capacity to penetrate those secrets. Alexander Pope, for instance, extolled Newton with a perfectly balanced heroic couplet.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

To be sure, the moment that classicism and notions of divine order discoverable by science took hold, authors spoofed them. Through his satire of a figure modeled on Leibniz, Voltaire famously takes shots at the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that a divine plan can be found underlying even the most disastrous of events. In “Upon a Lady’s Dressing Room,” Jonathan Swift has a voyeuristic lover rummaging in his mistress’s dressing room (including her chamber pot) to understand her beauty. While he emerges disgusted and disillusioned, the poem’s speaker says he’s just not looking at things the right way:

If Strephon would but stop his nose

(Who now so impiously blasphemes

Her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,

Her washes, slops, and every clout,

With which he makes so foul a rout)

He soon would learn to think like me,

And bless his ravished sight to see

Such order from confusion sprung,

Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.

In the past I have put together jigsaw puzzles featuring flowers—from tiny cardboard shapes, not from dung—and I long ago realized that I do so whenever the world feels particularly chaotic. When I first entered the job market, I obsessively put together jigsaw puzzles while waiting for employers to respond to my resumes, which I had scattered in a 20-mile radius around our house in Braham, Minnesota. As soon as I landed a job, I lost all interest in the puzzles.

Perhaps anxieties over a new course explain why I poured myself into the Wright puzzle. Now that the course is underway and the syllabi are completed, I have once again become indifferent. Nor, to cite an activity that provides similar reassurance, do I feel the need to read any new detective mysteries. Since I’m deep into Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone, I’ll probably complete it, even though I’m not terribly interested in who stole the gem. The novel has a great narrator in house steward Gabriel Betteridge, however.

For the most part, I’m now comfortable enough with the familiar day-to-day chaos of everyday life. Yesterday I declined my mother’s suggestion that I open another puzzle.

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To Fight Climate Change, Plant Gardens

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2020
Renoir, Woman with a Parasol in a Garden

Wednesday

Because the dangers of climate change should never be far from our thoughts, here’s Wendell Berry’s “Speech to the Garden Club of America,” written ten years ago. Rather than burn up our world, he tells us, we should be planting gardens, which “burn no hotter than the summer day.” Unlike the “anti-life of radiance and fume,” which “burns as power and remains as doom,” a garden “delves no deeper than its roots/ And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.”

The poem proceeds through a series of rhyming, iambic pentameter couplets, which suggests a longing for the order of a decorous garden. But forces are at work to disrupt that order, which Berry captures by turning many of the rhymes into half-rhymes and by making certain lines hard to scan. Order and chaos wrestle for ascendency.

So even as Berry longs for Candide’s concluding vision that each of us should cultivate his or her own garden, he acknowledges that, by flying to the conference, he was carried by “a sustained explosion through the air,” adding to carbon emissions. There are many ways that all of us falsify the land and falsify “the body’s health and pleasure.” We must change, at a foundational level, the way we think.

“Burning the world to live in it is wrong,” is as succinct a condemnation of fossil fuels as one will find.

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add I’m sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied—our world! We
speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges,
poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify

The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.
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Knives Out and the American Dream

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2020
Armas, Craig in Knives Out

Tuesday

Julia, my mother and I went to see the thoroughly enjoyable Knives Out on Sunday, but because I applied Samuel Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes and Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” to the ending, I left slightly dissatisfied.

Did I just let literature mess up a pleasurable film experience, I ask myself. Is this better living? I think my reservations are warranted, however. There are spoilers ahead but nothing regarding the crime.

In the movie a very wealthy mystery writer disappoints his execrable family, who have been mooching off of him for years, by leaving all that he owns (this after a death that may or may not be suicide) to his deserving and very likable home nurse. The film sticks it to the entitled rich (think of the Trump family, or Trump himself) and lets us know that the American Dream is alive and well for deserving immigrants like Marta. We are assured that one really can come to America with nothing, work hard, be virtuous, and end up with millions.

My reservation about the film is not the one voiced by the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones:

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding’s observation doesn’t keep him from rewarding virtue in his own novel, and we pretty much expect it from Knives Out as well. Virtue rewarded is an integral part of the genre so we make allowances.

Given how central to the film is the theme of wealth’s corrupting power, however, one worries about Marta. Will she remain a good person? While she is too nice to taunt the racist family members who have been ejected from the house, the inscription on her coffee cup inadvertently does so as she looks down at them from a balcony: it reads “my house.”

Perhaps we enjoy the moment because they are privileged bigots who thought they were entitled to wealth they have not earned. It’s Trump’s nightmare of people south of the border taking over. But will she make better use of wealth than the family has?

Samuel Johnson is pessimistic. In his exploration of “the vanity of human wishes,” he poses a question: How do you make a needy but carefree traveler unhappy? His answer: Make him rich:

The needy
traveler, serene and gay,

Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away.

Does envy seize thee? crush th’ upbraiding joy,

Increase his riches and his peace destroy,

New fears in dire vicissitude invade,

The rustling brake alarms, and quiv’ring shade,

Nor light nor darkness bring his pain relief.

One shews the plunder, and one hides the thief.

And then there’s Sexton’s cynical take on the American Dream, captured in her reflections on the Cinderella story:

You always read about it:

the plumber with the twelve children

who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.

From toilets to riches.

That story.



Or the nursemaid,

some luscious sweet from Denmark

who captures the oldest son's heart.

from diapers to Dior.

That story.



Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,

eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,

the white truck like an ambulance

who goes into real estate

and makes a pile.

From homogenized to martinis at lunch.



Or the charwoman

who is on the bus when it cracks up

and collects enough from the insurance.

From mops to Bonwit Teller.

That story.

In her revised Cinderella, Sexton expresses doubts about happily-ever-after:

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting a middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story.

We the viewers want to believe in “that story” for Marta. History cautions us, however, that the great American Fantasy is invariably followed by the Great Disillusion. To be American is to ceaselessly dream and to ceaselessly wake up.

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Dante on Income Inequality

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2020
Gustave Doré, Dante’s hoarders and wasters

Monday

Rereading Dante’s Inferno in preparation for my course on Representative Masterpieces, my attention was caught by Dante’s description of the hoarders and the wasters, who are to be found in the fourth circle of Hell. That’s because I have been reading about Donald Trump’s “historically unprecedented action[s] to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution.” CSNBC reports that, according to Harvard Law School’s rollback tracker, the administration is targeting 85 or so environmental rules:

Existing environment regulations are meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect land and animals from oil and gas drilling and development, as well as limit pollution and toxic waste runoff into the country’s water. The administration views many of them as onerous to fossil fuel companies and other major industries.

Dante doesn’t distinguish between the wasters and the hoarders, seeing them all in the grip of the same materialist mania. The heavy weights they roll against each other symbolize the dead weight of gold, with which they are obsessed:

Here too, I saw a nation of lost souls,

   far more than were above: they
strained their chests
   against enormous weights, and with mad howls

rolled them at one another. Then in haste
   they rolled them back, one party shouting out:
   “Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why
do you waste?”

So back around that ring they puff and blow,
   each faction to its course, until they reach
   opposite sides, and screams as they go

the madmen turn and start their weights again
   to crash against the maniacs.

Not only are our own hoarders and maniacs indistinguishable, but often they are the same people. I think of those who champion huge tax cuts for the wealthy (wasting) but moan about the cost of food stamps and medicare expansion (hoarding).   Or the way the billionaire recipients of those tax cuts refuse to invest the money in more jobs or higher wages, instead rewarding their stockholders with stock buybacks that make them even wealthier. Whining incessantly about regulations, they perfectly fit Virgil’s description of them:

Not all the gold that is or ever was
   under the sky could buy for one of these
   exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.

Although Dante encounters many recognizable figures in Hell, those who give their lives over to money are so empty as to be unrecognizable. History, which honors many who served humankind, will not remember these exhausted souls. Virgil explains,

In their sordid lives they labored to be blind,
and now their souls have dimmed past recognition.

And further on:

Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light
   and brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths.
   You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.

Now may you see the fleeing vanity
   of the goods of Fortune for which men
tear down all that they are, to build a mockery.

As Dante describes them, the damned are eager to get to the circle of Hell that awaits them. Since they desired this empty existence on earth, why should they want anything different after death?

"My son," the courteous Master said to me,
   "all who die in the shadow of God's wrath
   converge to this from every clime and country.

"And all pass over eagerly, for here
   Divine Justice transforms and spurs them so
   their dread turns wish: they yearn for what they fear."

Sacrificing all that is honorable and sacred for wealth is hell on earth, yet people eagerly take this path. Also self-condemned are those who believe that happiness can only be achieved through incessant purchases. Dante’s genius lies in finding memorable metaphors, poetically expressed, for how we violate our higher selves.

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