In my first three books,* I retold the story of Dante's Divine Comedy as if it were happening to me in 1980s America instead of the Florence of seven hundred years ago that Dante had written about. I had encountered Dante's great work in my late teens, and had fallen in love with it immediately. Most people think of the Divine Comedy, if they think of it at all, as a huge ancient probably unreadable poem about hell and heaven and medieval Catholic dogma. But central to Dante's concerns, as to his life, were the dual problems of being a politically active person in a society at least half-rotten with evil, and of being anybody with authenticity and integrity in such a society. I was coming of age during a time, like his, of great public events and agonies, the nineteen sixties and seventies, at the tail end of what we now remember as the Civil Rights Movement and all through the horrid crucible of the Vietnam War. Dante's total immersion in the great public events and agonies of his own time resonated with me. It had demanded of him, and he had demanded of himself, that he examine the gap between who he was and who he wanted to be, and that he determine what he was willing to risk and how far he was willing to go to build a causeway across that gulf. I faced similar demands. After some three decades or so of wrestling with them, I began writing in earnest about them, using Dante as my model.
Now, here we are again, rapidly approaching one of those moments that unavoidably "try our souls" (as Tom Paine might have put it if gender-neutral language had been a thing in 1763). It would be bad enough if, in three months, the Trump Cult somehow manages to retain its grip on power in Washington by legitimate democratic means. That would ensure an indefinite continuation and likely vast intensification of the horrors already besetting us. How would you respond to that disaster? How would you make it into the coming years of this regime, having been denied all but the faintest hope of nonviolent change? I don't know, either.
But that is the lesser of the evils the next four or five months may bring. Two voices recently have sounded the alarm of something unimaginably worse. They have described with clarity and force what many of us have sensed may lie in the offing. In a chilling essay in The New Republic, retired federal court of appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig described in detail the legalistic machinations the congressional Republicans may use in January to refuse to seat Democrats elected to Congress. Judge Luttig also described the record of statements and actions that indicates the real possibility that they may actually try to do so. If such an attempt is successful, this nation's experiment in constitutional democracy will come to a final, abrupt end.
Widespread civil unrest would be the immediate result. Which brings me to the second voice. Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall recently was interviewed on the radio program On Point. The transcript is worth reading. In that interview, as in other platforms, Secretary Kendall said that the egregious Pete Hegseth has created a climate of fear at the Pentagon, firing senior officers for no stated reason or for openly political reasons and elevating others whose main qualification appears to be loyalty not to the Constitution that they had sworn an oath to preserve and protect, but rather to the Trump regime, to which they owe no legal obligation of allegiance. The result has been politicization of the command echelons, to such an extent that Kendall thinks there may be no order so illegal or unconstitutional that they would not execute it. He said, "I think the American people have made a very fundamental mistake in giving Donald Trump another opportunity to react to an election he doesn't like and we're gonna find out how that goes in just a few weeks, I'm afraid, and I'm very worried about what role the military may play in all that. What we've seen already is the willingness of our military to carry out orders to do extrajudicial killings." He could also have mentioned, but did not, their willingness to conduct a blatantly unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran.
When voices like these give warnings like these, they must be taken seriously. But how is one to prepare for the awful possibilities they suggest? Even if worst comes to worst, you can't know what exact form it will take, or how you'll be situated in relation to it. You can't decide in advance how to meet an emergency that may come at you in any form, from any direction. I think that the best you can do is what Dante did. You can ask yourself, who am I? Who do I want to be? What am I willing to risk to be more like that person? What am I willing to do? Don't expect easy answers. In fact, don't expect any clear answers at all. The best way to prepare is simply to honestly and searchingly ask the questions. If final answers are going to be demanded of you, living through them is the way that you will know them. Having already contemplated the questions, you will be more likely to recognize the answer when the need for it arises, and you may already have moved some distance to meet it.
*Collectively titled In Dante's Wake, the trilogy consists of To Join The Lost, Among The Lost, and Once Was Lost.
