Friday
Last week I singled out Maine senator Susan Collins as one of the so-called Republican moderates that Dante might have consigned to Limbo if he were writing today. With the sudden retirement of swing justice Anthony Kennedy, there’s a real chance that a Trump-appointed successor will join the four conservatives and repeal the Roe v. Wade abortion decision. This has put a spotlight on Collins.
While she says she would vote down justices that would reverse the Roe v. Wade, she also voted for the anti-abortion Neil Gorsuch. Having done so undermines her argument that Democrats shouldn’t use the hardball tactics against Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement that the Republicans used against Obama-nominated Merrick Garland. In other words, she won’t stand up to her own party’s scorched-earth politics but lectures Democrats who contemplate doing the same.
While I’ve critiqued Yeats’s famous generalization that “the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”—it’s possible for politicos to be simultaneously passionate and thoughtful–I do feel that it applies at the moment to Republican members of Congress. They appear to be comprised of either loud Trump enthusiasts (the worst) or silent Trump critics (the best). Those thoughtful Republicans who openly stand up to Trump get drummed out of the party.
Since I brought up Dante’s Limbo, let me now turn to a 20th century author who used the episode in “The Hollow Men” and “The Waste Land” to characterize modern man. The passages accurately describe these GOP politicians:
The “hollow men” are those who blow whichever way the wind blows, which for the GOP is currently in a Trump direction:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Like the lost souls in Dante’s Limbo, they dare not meet accusatory eyes:
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us–if at all–not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men,
The stuffed men.
As I wrote in last week’s post,
Dante’s guide would rather move on to other topics than spend a moment more on such people. Dante says of them that “they never were alive,” and the gadflies and hornets that cause them to cry incessantly may stand in for their incessant regrets. Naked, they can no longer hide between Collins-like equivocation.
“The Hollow Men” describes the split that damns them. While Collins may well have good intentions, that’s not enough. Like the souls in Limbo, she will be welcomed neither in heaven nor in hell for her refusal to make a courageous stand:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Perhaps Collins will prove us wrong and work hard for what she says she believes. But if not, she will join Jeff Flake, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham, Bob Corker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, all of whom have spoken boldly about standing up to Trump at one time or other, only to collapse in the end.
Eliot’s Waste Land also borrows images from the Limbo episode. As in “Hollow Men,” one encounters people too ashamed to raise their eyes:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Washington, D.C. is our own unreal city at the moment. And just as Eliot predicts that our world will end, “not with a bang, but a whimper,” one wonders whether the same fate awaits our democratic republic. Trump has people like me thinking in apocalyptic terms for the first time in our political lives.
Added note: Speaking of eye contact, here’s a response that journalist Sahil Kapur got from a West Virginia senator:
GOP Senators Flake (Arizona), Fischer (Nebraska) and Capito (West Virginia) all decline to answer when I ask if SCOTUS should overturn Roe.
(Capito swiftly broke eye contact upon hearing the question and looked away as her senators-only elevator closed.)