Tuesday
When Congress passed the $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Plan, it attempted to shield it from graft by declaring that businesses owned by Donald Trump and members of Congress were not eligible. Right on cue, Trump disagreed with this provision of the bill and fired the inspector general responsible for oversight. Don’t expect Senate Republicans to hold him accountable.
Dante, who was well familiar with graft, would have consigned him to Circle 8, Ditch #5. Actually, I’d argue that Trump is eligible for seven of the nine circles, escaping only Circle I (lost souls that cannot pick a side) and Circle VI (heretics). For day’s post, I considered Circle 8, Ditch #3, which is where the “simoniacs” or sellers of ecclesiastic favors and offices are sent. In our secular society, the comparable favors at the moment are medical protective gear and ventilators, which Trump doles out to his friends in red states and withholds from his critics in blue states. But put that aside today and look at how Trump, with his sticky fingers, hopes to get his hooks into the $2 Trillion.
I mix my metaphor because the tortures doled out to grafters involve both stickiness and hooks. But first, an explanatory note on Dante’s system of tortures.
Dante uses the word “contrapasso” for them—which is to say, they are symbolic versions of what the sin is already doing to us. (The punishment fits the crime, as the Lord High Executioner puts it in The Mikado.) In other words, by committing the sin, we have already constructed an internal version of what Dante describes. As Scholar William Franke explains it,
God gives each soul only what it has freely chosen. The punishments are not just externally imposed: they are rather manifestations and intensifications of the state chosen by those who sin. This state flows from each soul’s free interpretation of itself and of the sense of its existence.
The souls are damned eternally because, once one has defined oneself by the sin, one reaches “a point of no return, the point at which their will is no longer capable of reversing itself”:
Through persistent sin, free will is eventually lost…Free indulgence becomes habit and eventually results in loss of the ability not to sin. What we once chose freely becomes addiction, compulsion, necessity: we become it. Eventually we no longer know how to understand ourselves otherwise than in terms of the sin–or more precisely, of the self-interpretation that a certain sin entails. We die morally, and at that point it is too late to change.
Graft for Trump long ago reached a point of no return. There once was a time when he freely chose it, but now it has become “addiction, compulsion, necessity,” defining who he is. Because graft has emptied out his soul, he is already living a hellish existence.
If Trump found himself in Dante’s hell, the poet says that, like the other souls, he would choose of his own accord the circle and ditch that best suits him.
Circle 8, Ditch 5 is unlike anything else in Inferno because it features black humor, with comically named devils wielding grappling hooks. Grafters are thrown into a black, sticky substance like the pitch used to plug the seams of ships:
As in the Venetian arsenal, the winter through there boils the sticky pitch to caulk the seams of the sea-battered bottoms… … so, but by Art Divine and not by fire, a viscid pitch boiled in the fosse below and coated all the bank with gluey mire. (trans. John Ciardi)
Because graft occurs behind the scenes, Dante at first doesn’t see anything:
I saw the pitch, but I saw nothing in it except the enormous bubbles of its boiling, which swelled and sank, like breathing, through all the pit.
It so happens, however, that the pitch is filled with grafters, and they are still playing games. First of all, any who emerge, even for a moment, are hooked by Malacoda, Snatcher, Grizzly, Hellken, Deaddog, Curlybeard, Grafter, Dragontooth, Pigtusk, Catclaw, Cramper or Crazyred, the demons who patrol the shore. Here’s how they treat a new arrival who has just been thrown in:
Down plunged the sinner and sank to reappear
with his backside arched and his face and both his feet
glued to the pitch, almost as if in prayer.
But the Demons under the bridge, who guard that place
and the sinners who are thrown to them, bawled out:
You’re out of bounds here for the Sacred Face:
this is no dip in the Serchio: take your look
and then get down in the pitch. And stay below
unless you want a taste of a grappling hook.”
Then they raked him with more than a hundred hooks
bellowing: “Here you dance below the covers.
Graft all you can there: no one checks your books.”
Grafters, as we have seen with former Trump cohorts like Michael Cohen or Robert Gates, have no compunction about turning in fellow grafters to escape the hooks. After hearing the story of a grafter from Navarre, Dante asks whether there are any Italians in the stew and gets this answer:
“If either of you would like to see and hear
Tuscans or Lombards,” the pale sinner said,
“I can lure them out of hiding if you’ll stand clear
and let me sit here at the edge of the ditch,
and get all these Blacktalons out of sight:
for while they’re here, no one will leave the pitch.
In exchange for myself, I can fish you up as pretty
a mess of souls as you like. I have only to whistle
the way we do when one of us gets free.
A somewhat comic scene follows. The Navarrese does in fact escape back into the pitch, and two of the devils, fighting over who is to blame, tumble in themselves and have to be rescued. Graft’s sticky pitch gets on everyone. Dante, who is feeling somewhat vulnerable himself (his native Florence accused him of graft—probably for political reasons—and sentenced him to death should he return), sneaks off in the turmoil.
Scholars aren’t sure what to make of Dante’s apparent use of slapstick, but thinking of Trump gives me some insight into it. While a serious matter, Trump’s graft has an entertainment side, whether it involves Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump hotels, Atlantic City casinos, bankruptcy law, or tax dodges. Dismantling oversight of the $2 Trillion while declaring that he himself will oversee the funds draws incredulous guffaws from even the most jaded of Trump watchers. Maybe grafter in Dante’s Italy were seen in comparable ways.
That being said, graft had—and has—grave consequences. It sabotaged the future for Dante’s beloved Florence, and it is wreaking havoc in the United States, with the Trump administration proving to be the most corrupt in our history. Maybe Dante’s has figured out the best way to depict it: use black comedy, even while you show it to be a soul-destroying practice.