To what shall I compare this my native land, as I draw near the latter end of my seventh decade on earth?
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Evening has fallen upon the mountain of Purgatory, as Dante and his guide Virgil, still climbing, have not yet arrived at the entrance to that great infirmary and exercise ground of purgation and spiritual recovery, wondering which way to take to make the quickest progress up the mountain. For it is no smooth and well-worn slope they are climbing. It is rocky, riven with fissures, and studded with overhangs, without a road to go by. That will change once they enter Purgatory proper; then the mountain will, like many such in Italy, be scaled by a road winding about it like a corkscrew. But for now, the two must rely on the position of the sun, on their own wits, and on what others they meet there tell them.
And in fact, Dante catches sight of a soul nearby who turns his head like a lion, watching them and betraying no emotion. He and Virgil approach him, and Virgil asks for directions, whereupon the soul asks them where they come from. Virgil cannot even finish his sentence, because as soon as he utters the name of Mantua, his native city, the soul leaps up and cries out, “O Mantovano! I am Sordello, from your country!”—and the two embrace.
Sordello, a poet and courtier of the generation before Dante’s, does not even know yet that the greatest light ever to shine forth from Mantua, the poet Virgil, is standing before him. All he knows for the moment is that they share the same native city. It is a stunning moment, which Dante has set up on purpose for that reversal of expectations, because the soul who had just now seemed aloof and solitary is an embodiment of patriotic warmth and faithfulness. As for which way they should go, Sordello tells them that once the sun sets, it is impossible to proceed even a single step higher. But in the meantime, he says, they might be interested in meeting a certain group of men he would like to show them. When they agree, he takes them back into a hidden valley, covered with rich green grass and flowers. In that valley are seated a great number of men who were tasked with high secular and civic responsibility on earth—kings and princes mainly, and among them an old friend of Dante’s, judge Nino Visconti, of Sardinia. All these men are on the mountain because they repented of their sins only just before they died; they are waiting the length of their lives before they can be admitted to the purgative region of the mountain higher up, because they delayed that repentance till they were no longer physically capable of sinning. The cares of state had crowded out the spiritual life. Most of them—not all—were just and capable rulers.
All this is by way of contrast with Dante’s own city, Florence. For as soon as Sordello and Virgil embrace, Dante—I am speaking of the poet—does something unique in the Divine Comedy. He suspends the narrative and devotes the entire rest of the canto to a long invective against Florence for her fickleness in always changing her laws and even her official citizenry, her short-sightedness, her people all too ready to pretend to shoulder the burdens of state responsibility, her injustice and folly and treachery. Dante ends the canto by comparing Florence to a sick old woman on a bed, who tosses and turns and can never get any rest.
And now, my nation.
The heads of the Women’s National Basketball Association recently met for an entire day to determine what, for their purposes, a “woman” is and came to no decision. The WNBA lost $40 million last year and has been a losing concern from its inception, as it is bankrolled by the NBA, whose name no “M” need be added, because the best basketball players are going to be men. In fact, the best of the women would be outgunned by the taller, faster, and stronger boys of any of hundreds of high-school teams, especially since they would be forced to use the larger basketball the boys use.
But sexual reality is nowhere to be honored. What kind of college course are you more likely to find, one in which John Milton is studied for his poetic genius and for his subtle thoughts on matters theological, philosophical, and political, or one in which he is studied or chicken-pecked to pieces for his thoughts on “gender”? And if the latter is what you want, why go to the difficult Milton to get it? Modern feminist novels are a lot nearer and easier. In the meantime, the colleges are bleeding enrollment, and great areas of human study are abandoned, mostly in the humanities (including Italian, alas), not because the students are philistines who do not understand why Dante or Milton is immortal, but because their professors are such and have been such for a long time now. It’s anything but Milton, even when the course is on Milton.
Politicians are held in general contempt, and why not when the trade in our time is moral rather than financial? In old times, a politician might buy your vote by a promise to favor your business enterprise or your union, as the case might be, and the arrangement might be socially wise or pernicious, depending on the object and the circumstances. In any case, railroads were laid, billions of pounds of ore went into the mills and came out as steel, Chicago became the “hog-butcher to the world,” canals and locks made it so that New Orleans could communicate by inland water with Chicago and Buffalo and New York City, and the nation flexed its considerable muscles. In our times, the politician buys your vote by confirming you in your immorality or shielding you from the consequences of your moral weakness. We could use state-of-the-art nuclear reactors. Shall scientists from Harvard catch up with the French and their nuclear technology? Instead we get a ghoulish celebration of immorality and bullying by the weak against the weakest of all, as the governor of Massachusetts signs into law a measure guaranteeing the green light for abortion up to the last tick of the clock of birth itself, while women surround her, smiling and applauding, and somewhere in the pit of hell Moloch, not quite as pretty, curls his lip in an appreciative sneer.
So it is generally with boys persuaded by teachers, counselors, and often their own mothers, with surgeons and drug manufacturers waiting in the wings, that they are really girls, enticing them into massive self-harm, and holding the rest of us hostage with threats of suicide if they are not permitted to mutilate themselves instanter and ruin any prospect of a normal life. Healthy boys can go hang, for all that anyone cares about them, unless they are champion athletes or they belong to a favored sub-class. Some of those sub-classes have been suckered into the self-destructive trade—easy money, but not enough to lift the people out of poverty, and soft-hearted approval of the poverty-making and poverty-miring vices, in exchange for the vote. This is what is known as compassion. It is as sensitive as an inch-thick callus, or dead bark on a dead tree.
I have seen, in the last week, at least a dozen clips of someone, usually a young woman, arguing—if shouting obscenities and nonsense can be called arguing—that the fetus in the womb is a parasite. Where are the scientists when you need them? Or even the occasional person who can use words properly? Suppose you take your dog Suzette to the vet because she’s been a little sluggish, and the vet discovers that Suzette is carrying a litter. Will the vet say she’s got parasites? Puppies are not tapeworms. But if a parasite feeds off its host in an unnatural way, keeping it alive but not well enough to drive out the parasite, then I think they qualify as parasites who favor the poor by injecting them with vices that keep them weak and dependent. The last thing the affluent and ambitious parasites want is that the boys in that population will develop into strong and confident husbands and fathers. They may not pose the matter in those words, but their actions speak for them.
Dante had his reasons to inveigh against his native town, which exiled him in 1302, the adverse party seizing his goods and declaring him banished on pain of death. He never returned. If you were looking for ease and gentility, Florence was not your place to go. Yet when Dante died in 1321, Petrarch was a young fellow beginning to write poetry, and Boccaccio, who would become the first professor to lecture on Dante, was a boy with a sharp eye for all the characters high and low in that energetic city. Not since Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote their plays at the height of Athenian glory has one city of such modest size given birth to three such literary giants. Yet even so, Florence’s star was still rising. Giotto was Dante’s contemporary, and the roll call of artists and poets, philosophers, and statesmen to be born in Florence or to do their finest work there is tremendous. Think of Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio, Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Michelangelo, just to name some of the artists alone.
Is my nation in such fine fettle? Not one of our social, political, artistic, or intellectual institutions is healthy. Entire artistic traditions are either dead or moribund, nor have they been replaced. We do not have enough children to survive. Churches are closing everywhere, and if secularists, in their callousness or their secret envy, express satisfaction over it, let them consider also how many other benevolent societies are dying or have been dead for a long time now. If they think it is good that people no longer come together to sing to God hymns of praise, gratitude, petition, and repentance, let them consider that they do not come together to sing anything at all, nor could they if they so desired, because the songs themselves have faded from our general knowledge.
Dante saw that the symptom of a diseased society is restlessness—not the restlessness of longing, but that of discomfort and disgruntlement and reckless disregard. In our case, it is disregard of everything noble in our own history, disregard of the goodness of the sexes, male and female, disregard of human nature, and disregard of the author of that nature, God himself. We are not pioneers selling all that we own to finance a trek into a wild and fresh and uncharted land. We are sickly gamblers, requiring the dreadful chances, the drink, the debauchery, and the tang of evil to get our sluggish hearts to skip a beat now and then. Those who put basic human realities up for grabs are shocked, shocked to find that everything else is now up for grabs too. If a baby is not safe in his mother’s womb, why should anything merely political or social be held sacred? I am to be set “free” from obedience to God and to the laws he has established in nature, so that I may be servile indeed and truckle to the likes of the governor of Massachusetts?
I think not.
