History and literature help me understand perplexities like moving on from Donald Trump
I wrote this piece on Nov 27, 2020, after the Presidential election and before January 6th. It is more relevant today.
The fall of Donald Trump is not some unique American triumph where democracy overcomes the forces of darkness. It is, after all, barely a triumph, and a contingent one at that. Yes, we have wrested control of the executive branch from a leader who would use its powers to establish the principle of minority rule. But great damage has been done, and the political pathogen has, to borrow language from our other heath crisis, large reservoirs in the general population.
How should we understand it? How should we heal?
As Donald Trump is not a new kind of character, I looked to literature for a better understanding.
Where else to start but The Inferno? Approaching the lowest regions of hell, Dante hides behind his guide for protection from a treacherous wind. Ahead, buried to his neck in ice, is Satan. It is dark and windy. Satan is immense and ugly, with three heads of different colors, each chewing a traitor. A pair of enormous bat-like wings under each chin provides the wind that so frightened Dante.
Dante’s Satan does not speak. Instead, he chews silently as tears rain down from his six eyes. The wind from six wings freezes those tears into the ice that traps him. It reminds me of Pharoah when, in Exodus 9:12, the Lord hardens his heart and takes away his free will. We are past the opportunity of repentance. Satan is now forced to behave in a way that contributes to his own imprisonment and torture. Dante climbs out of hell by scaling towards Satan’s feet. He had been cast head-down into hell, so Jerusalem is now above the devil’s feet.
How well this describes the Trump endgame. He and his followers are frozen in a narrative that they seem to have no will power to overcome no matter how damaging that narrative is now to their own interests. Moreover, when compared to reality, that narrative is upside down. Dante reserves this lowest region of hell for those engaged in treason against order, reason, and God. The punishment is to trap the offenders in their own wind, the worst chewing the slightly less bad.
I imagine Donald Trump and three of his biggest enablers stuck together forever in a gold golf cart as an icy rain suddenly traps them just yards from a beautiful eighteenth tee that they will never get to. Trump will not stop raging against imaginary slights, his tears of self-pity freezing in the wind of his lies. The others writhe. All of them are enormous. All of this is upside down: I imagine climbing through the hole under the flag on the green, and out into the light.
It takes a lot of faith to be comforted that Satan will never find the strength to end his own imprisonment. It takes a similar faith to imagine Mr. Trump and his antidemocratic allies trapped forever in a golf cart. I do not have Dante’s faith, so I move on to Milton.
Paradise Lost was, for many years, the most taught poem in the English language. Now it is barely read. Until recently, I had never read it. Milton’s Satan is all rage and humiliation and self-importance. Once you get used to the language it is all painfully familiar. After losing the battle with God, and now trapped in a miserable place as far from heaven as can be, Satan turns to Beelzebub and begins,
What thought the field by lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power,
Who from the terror of this arm so late
Doubted his empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since by fate the strength of gods
And this empyreal substance cannot fail,
Since through experience of this great event
In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war
Irreconcilable, to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.
Contemporary English is more compact that Milton’s:
Rage, ego, the willingness to use force and guile to get revenge on everyone and everything. (This is as far as the comparison goes. Milton’s Stan is by far the larger character.)
Dante and Milton feel spot on psychologically and emotionally. Their words are full of profound insight. Our justice system does require a kind of faith. Traitors, usurpers, and frauds undermine that faith. But I am not comforted that faith alone is the way out of this nihilism. I turn the ancient Greeks, who, unlike Dante and Milton, actually knew something about democracies, and offered a more practical, if bloody, path forward.
Homer begins the Iliad, “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος” The first word, “μῆνιν” is wrath, sometimes translated as baneful- or hated- or destructive wrath. So begins western literature. (Language is always revealing… the world μῆνιν is a feminine noun.)
The Iliad is set on the plains of Troy (Ilium) during the epic battle between east and west, the central conflict in that ancient world. In the case of Achilles, whose story this is, wrath is kindled by a personal slight. Agamemnon, the king leading the expedition against Troy, publicly disrespects Achilles. Achilles responds by raging against the king and refusing to fight the Trojans. With their greatest soldier on the sidelines, the Greeks suffer tremendous losses. To stave off complete destruction, Achilles’ lover, Patroclus, puts on the hero’s armor and enters the battle hoping to scare the Trojans back behind their walls. Instead, he is killed. A different rage now eats at Achilles. He returns to the battlefield and slaughters the Trojans, including Hector, the prince of Troy. The trite phrase in English “he bit the dust,” gets its start in Homer as Achilles in his rage returns to battle leaves so many heroes face down in the bloody earth.
I see echoes of Achilles’ rage in Trump’s. In one instant, rage drives Achilles not to fight. Then it spurs him to battle. Just so, Trump’s constant flip flops on what battles to fight, what enemies are real. In both cases, personal slight matters more than the fate of the world.
The Trojan War is just the beginning of an entire generation of tragedy. After the war, Agamemnon goes home only to be murdered in his bath by his long-suffering wife. Peace only comes twenty years after the start of the war when Odysseus, after suffering and fighting and wandering, walks an oar so far away from the sea that the farmers he meets do not know what it is. It is meant as a tribute and a peace offering to the sea god Poseidon, but it is surely also an act of teaching and connecting, making isolated farmers part of a larger world.
I imagine thousands of college students joining Breitbart chat rooms and Parler threads, identifying themselves as children of the most outraged, and conversing about facts until the anger subsides. Meanwhile, there is clean up to be done.
Homer is not squeamish about this. Odysseus has slaughtered the suitors who had defiled his home. He now directs his trusted old nurse to round up the household staff who had conspired with them. As she does this, he gives direction to his son and his trusted herdsman.
Now we must start
to clear the corpses out. The girls must help.
then clean my stately chairs and handsome tables
with sponges fine as honeycomb, and water.
When the whole house is set in proper order,
Restore my halls to health: take out the girls between the courtyard wall and the rotunda.
Hack them with long swords, eradicate all life from them.
-Odyssey, Book 22 Emily Wilson translation
“With malice towards none,” was not a Greek idea. Clear eyed, the Greeks understood that peace itself was insufficient. When Odysseus says, “restore my halls to health,” he poses the problem of all new beginnings- balancing a fresh start with the requirements of prosecuting the crimes of the old regime. One suspects that Nancy Pelosi’s comment about taking Clorox to the oval office was about more than COVID. Homer’s difficult prescription requires connecting the disconnected, restoring order, and punishing the conspirators.
Later, Athenian democracy protected itself from would-be usurpers by using the ostracon (a vote to banish a citizen deemed dangerous to the democracy). Thankfully, we have more robust protections in our modern democracy than the ancients did, and we need neither ostracons nor long swords. Instead, we need to restore our justice system, fix the cracks in our election law, charge and convict the conspirators, and it would be helpful to regulate social media just a bit to limit the risk posed by mass hysteria.
Mass hysteria itself, not just the man at its center, is also worth considering. Back in 1841 Charles Mackay wrote Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The author says the popular delusions are so common that his book is less a history than “a miscellany of delusions.” He writes about financial bubbles, scientific fallacies, religious movements, witch hunts, and the like. Mackay is a charming storyteller and does not judge his subjects even as he laments the damage done by each delusion.
Reading the stories, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a scholar on a rooftop in Jerusalem’s old city. We were talking about Shabbetai Tzevi. During the 1600s, Jews from across the diaspora were convinced he was the Messiah. Nathan of Gaza went to Jerusalem to proclaim his coming and to announce the imminent restoration of Israel, which was at the time under Turkish rule. Shabbetai Tzevi was not the Messiah. Under pressure from the Sultan, he converted to Islam and took a job in the Sultan’s palace. The scholar told me that it took a generation for the trauma of the false prophet to work its way through the Jewish world.
I was also reminded of the tour guide at Buchenwald whom I met only a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. She wept as she talked about the history of the camp. Initially, I assumed the tears were for the tragedies that happened there during the war. I was wrong. She told me that she was shaken and angry because she had unknowingly been lying to visitors for many years. She said that after the reunification, she was finally allowed to see the documents that revealed the true purpose of the camp. Until then, she had been telling visitors the lies that the communists had authorized- that the camp existed primarily to punish communist partisans. Her tears were a combination of relief and reconciliation as she worked through the shame and the anger she now felt.
Mackay, the Israeli scholar, and the concentration camp guide all tell us that good people believe terrible and erroneous things. They tell us that overcoming these false beliefs is painful and time consuming.
Those who did not fall into Trump mania will need to stand firm on ground still shaking under our feet. We must, like Odysseus, have no tolerance for the plotters while we also bring reality and connection to those in his thrall. But we must also be patient and understanding with those who would undertake the difficult walk from delusion back into reality.