George W. Bush, go to hell

I suppose historians will come up with their answer to the question, where does George W. Bush lie in the presidential rankings - above or below Warren G. Harding? James Buchanan? Franklin Pierce? Somehow Wikipedia has him at #22, between Clinton and Van Buren and above his own father - I can't see how that's even possible. What this country desperately needs is a more objective metric for judging our presidents. Fortunately most of the work was done for us 700 years ago by Dante Alighieri. Let's rephrase the question then: in which circles of hell do our former presidents currently languish, and where will G.W. find himself when he meets his maker?

Let's start with Bush's predecessor and move backwards. Clinton's main sin, lust, is easily identified, and places him in the second circle of hell. His punishment:

You have come to a place mute of all light, where the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain.

G.H.W. Bush is a tougher one to pigeon-hole. Well-meaning for the most part and fairly competent. But I'd fault him most for his engagement in gutter politics through the likes of Lee Atwater and his cuddling up with the most reactionary elements of his party in order to get elected. I'm tempted to put him in the eighth circle as a Panderer, but I think the idea there is that the Panderer gets others to serve his own evil ends; by contrast, Bush served others' evil ends in order to gain power for fairly benign ends. His sin, I think, is Opportunism. As such he escapes the circles of hell, stopping at the Vestibule. There his fate is to chase a wavering banner over maggot-covered ground while swarms of hornets sting him.

Now Reagan is responsible for much worse. He has the blood of the victims of war and genocide in Central America on his hands, and so he goes to the seventh circle for the Violent:

Guarded by the Minotaur, who snarls in fury, and encircled within the river Phlegethon, filled with boiling blood, is the Seventh Level of Hell. The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their punishment. The stench here is overpowering.

Carter and Ford are guilty of nothing but haplessness. I think I can put them in Purgatory - their sins minor, some effort made in their lifetimes to atone for their presidential incompetence.
Nixon - where do you begin? He can surely join Reagan in the seventh circle (Christmas bombings, Pinochet), but there was so much more to the man. Can we punish him additionally for paranoia, vindictiveness, conspiracy? Surely he deserves to spend some time in the fifth level for the Wrathful and Gloomy:

The river Styx runs through this level of Hell, and in it are punished the wrathful and the gloomy. The former are forever lashing out at each other in anger, furious and naked, tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth. The latter are gurgling in the black mud, slothful and sullen, withdrawn from the world. Their lamentations bubble to the surface as they try to repeat a doleful hymn, though with unbroken words they cannot say it. Because you lived a cruel, vindictive and hateful life, you meet your fate in the Styx.

Now Johnson is a tough case. Blood on his hands, sure, so perhaps he joins Nixon and Reagan in the seventh circle. But I think his private statements about the Vietnam War and his decision not to run in 1968 may have been a form of repentance. And doesn't he get some credit for the Civil Rights Act (the signing of which was a selfless act on his part, as he acknowledged that doing so would give the South to the Republicans for a generation), his anti-poverty programs, Medicare, and so on? Maybe he gets to spend some time in Purgatory with Carter and Ford.

All right, now for the task at hand. What are George W. Bush's sins? Surely violence is one of them, but I don't think he went into Iraq with the same level of maliciousness that Nixon took to Indochina or Reagan to Central America. He may have really believed that our troops would be greeted as liberators and we'd be out in 60 days with little bloodshed. If intent matters, he does not deserve the seventh circle. He's certainly not guilty of lust or gluttony. He certainly doesn't go to the City of Dis with the heretics and unbelievers. Incompetence by the buttload, to be sure, but is that his worst flaw? Hardly. I think the Malebolge (eighth circle) may be appropriate:

Many and varied sinners suffer eternally in the multi-leveled Malebolge, an ampitheatre-shaped pit of despair wholly of stone and of an iron colour: Those guilty of fraudulence and malice; the seducers and pimps, who are whipped by horned demons; the hypocrites, who struggle to walk in lead-lined cloaks; the barraters, who are ducked in boiling pitch by demons known as the Malebranche. The simonists, wedged into stone holes, and whose feet are licked by flames, kick and writhe desperately. The magicians, diviners, fortune tellers, and panderers are all here, as are the thieves. Some wallow in human excrement. Serpents writhe and wrap around men, sometimes fusing into each other. Bodies are torn apart. When you arrive, you will want to put your hands over your ears because of the lamentations of the sinners here, who are afflicted with scabs like leprosy, and lay sick on the ground, furiously scratching their skin off with their nails. Indeed, justice divine doth smite them with its hammer.

Surely fraudulence, hypocrisy and pandering are the hallmarks of this administration. By "barratry" Dante probably meant the "sale or purchase of positions in church or state," but an alternative definition is "an unlawful breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew resulting in injury to the ship's owner" - can't argue with that one.

But the case could be made that Bush's sins are worse even than those. Never before has a president made such an effort to subvert the Constitution - by making extravagant claims of executive power, including the right to suspend habeas corpus and to torture prisoners, by refusing to acknowledge any constraints on that power from Congress or the Courts, by enveloping the entire government in a cult of secrecy, by politicizing government agencies from the EPA to the Justice Department. One could argue that in doing these things he has violated his oath of office, betrayed our Constitution and indeed our country. This sin would place him with Judas, Brutus, and Cassius in Cocytus, the innermost circle of hell:

This is the deepest level of hell, where the fallen angel Satan himself resides. His wings flap eternally, producing chilling cold winds that freeze the thick ice found in Cocytus. The three faces of Satan, black, red, and yellow, can be seen with mouths gushing bloody foam and eyes forever weeping, as they chew on the three traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. This place is furthest removed from the source of all light and warmth. Sinners here are frozen deep in the ice, faces out, eyes and mouths frozen shut. Traitors against God, country, family, and benefactors lament their sins in this frigid pit of despair.



I'm sorry, am I being shrill?