From: guymacon@deltanet.com (Guy Macon)
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [soc.religion.quaker] Dante, Clinton & Starr
Date: 21 Sep 1998 11:37:48 GMT

Subject: Dante, Clinton & Starr
From: chuckfager@aol.com (CHUCKFAGER)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.quaker

Starr, Clinton & Dante: No Divine Comedy

Chuck Fager

        While trying to make sense of the spectacle now unfolding in Washington, I've
been drawn, or rather drawn back, to an unexpected source: Dante's "Divine
Comedy," and in particular Part One, "The Inferno," which is the only part of
that italian epic I ever made it through.  Reviewing passages from it, I find
the Tuscan poet from six hundred years ago has plenty of light to shed upon our
current state.
        A bit of background for the classically-challenged: The Divine Comedy is the
saga of a thirteenth century failed politician-turned poet's mid-life crisis.
But instead of a therapist, the distressed Dante runs into the ghost of his
idol, the Latin poet Virgil, who agrees to straighten him out by taking him on
a tour of the universe.  The journey begins, in The Inferno, with a visit to
Hell.  Throughout this section, Virgil has to run interference for Dante
against a succession of hideous monsters.
        Dante's Hell is drawn as a nearly bottomless abyss in the pit of the universe;
in the pit's interior there are nine levels, or circles, each with a range of
inventively gruesome punishments.  The more evil a damned sinner had been, the
lower down their souls sink into these circles.  At the very nadir, where hell
is in fact cold rather than hot, Lucifer lies, forever chewing on the likes of
Judas and Brutus.
        However, the First Circle of this abyss is not really hell at all, but Limbo,
which every good Catholic-raised kid like me knows is where good people who
were not properly baptized into the true Roman faith end up--including the
pagan poet Virgil, who is Dante's guide on this tour to end all tours.
        It was the Second Circle, then, to which memory drew me: There a strong wind
blows endlessly, and on it float and mourn the spirits of those damned for sins
of the flesh.  If I might cite a few lines, from John Ciardi's excellent
translation:

I came to a place stripped bare of every light
and roaring on the naked dark like seas
wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight

of storm and counterstorm through time forgone,
sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.
Whirling and battering it drives them on....

And this, I learned, was the never ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty
who betrayed reason to their appetite.

        Among these, he notices a pair of spirits who fly closely and eternally twined
together, and Dante calls them over.  They turn out to be Francesca da Rimini
and her lover Paolo, who were caught in flagrante and killed by Francesca's
husband, Paolo's brother.   They tell their story in Canto V: it's a tale of
friendship leading inexorably, fatally to something more, which while from the
twelfth century, could have happened in Washington just yesterday.  This is
part of  Francesca's testimony:

On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had mastered him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.

Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew

our caution and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead

breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further."

        That's a great last line, at once demure and shameless.  Further, the pattern
of repeated eye contact, shared reading, the kiss, and then... all could have
come straight out of the Starr Report; substituting, of course, "Vox" for
Lancelot, and the fateful slice of pizza for the catalytic courtly text.
("That day we read no further"; this is how the Starr Report could have
sounded, and been just as convincing, had the Independent Counsel been a poet
rather than a lawyer, and had something beyond impeachment on his mind.)
        Conscious that they deserve their fate, and asking no sympathy for their
wrongdoing, the couple's narrative just blows Dante away:

And when I had heard those world-offended lovers
I bowed my head. At last the poet spoke:
"What painful thoughts are these your lowered brow covers?"

When at length I answered, I began: "Alas!
What sweetest thoughts, what green and young desire
led these two lovers to this sorry pass."

Then turning to those spirits once again,
I said: "Francesca, what you suffer here
melts me to tears of pity and of pain."

        And when they finish, he's simply overcome:

                        As she said this,

the other spirit, who stood by her, wept
so piteously, I felt my senses reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept

by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell

        Spoken like a guy who clearly would have argued for censure rather than
impeachment.




       Dante's stanzas about the otherwise unknown Francesca da Rimini have
become a seedbed of much romantic art, from operas to paintings to -- dare one
suggest it? -- "The Bridges of Madison County."  Recalling this, I can't help
but wonder what kind of literary progeny might yet spring from the fertile
compost of Starr's 18 volumes.  The mind boggles.
        But I digress.  What brought this up for me was not only the quality of
Dante's verse, but also the set of values expressed in his poetic vision. The
adulterous couple is on the topmost, outer fringe of hell; condemned yes, but
just barely, and tugging at the heartstrings across the centuries.  Could there
be a lesson here for our contemporary cultural critics?
        By contrast, Dante is strictly law-and-order when it comes to hypocrites and
panders,  plunging them almost to the bottom, in the eighth and ninth circles.
There, he finds one group moving with snail-like pace across a dismal
landscape, almost crushed under the weight of monklike habits that shine like
gold on the outside, but underneath are made of solid lead.  Here I must cite
the much less appealing Longfellow translation from Canto XXXII, because
Ciardi's version of it does not seem to be online:

A painted people there below we found,
  Who went about with footsteps very slow,
  Weeping and in their semblance tired and vanquished.

They had on mantles with the hoods low down
  Before their eyes, and fashioned of the cut
  That in Cologne they for the monks are made.

Without, they gilded are so that it dazzles;
  But inwardly all leaden and so heavy
  That Frederick used to put them on of straw.

O everlastingly fatiguing mantle!

        This, in the next to deepest layer of hell, is

                        the college
  Of miserable hypocrites...

        To be sure, I know my post-modern basics, and understand that the way these
allusions refract onto current events for me depends largely on other personal
biases.  I can't deny, for instance, that the blood lust stirred up by
Clinton's admission of adultery seems to me way overblown.  The patent
hypocrisy of so many in the congressional chorus that is baying for his head
seems to me far worse, and more dangerous to the republic, than whatever
happened with that damned cigar.  I agree fully with the editors of Salon
Magazine when they disclosed the tawdry details of Henry Hyde's own
marriage-busting five-year affair in the 1960s:

        "Starr's investigation is the true scandal, a political lynching party that,
finding nothing of legal import in Whitewater, quick-changed into the most
expensive and tawdry sex probe in American history, sullying the presidency and
the nation's world standing in the process."

        Yet, could I be so blatantly partisan as to refuse Hyde equal treatment with
the 1990s presidential philanderer he is pursuing?
        Let it not be!  So I can imagine a 21st century sequel/remake of the Inferno
(with --forget Schwarzenegger, it's gotta be Harrison Ford as Virgil), in which
a latter-day Dante (maybe Maya Angelou) could find, soaring along in the
infernal gales, two counterpart couples -- Bill and Monica, along with Henry
Hyde and Cherie Snodgrass.  I'm sure it would be a classic.
        But all bets are off if  Hyde insists on pushing the impeachment process the
way he has been this week, to some calamitous crisis.
        Then the scenario changes; get ready for the Eighth Circle, guys. If they
insist on going over the brink, I'd say we're talking real deep doo-doo here.
But that's only because I'm not much of a poet.