Again Behold the Stars

I've been thinking about hell a lot lately.

One of the wildest things about Dante's Inferno is that it kicks off while Dante is simply out and about, tromping through the woods, when the poet Virgil arrives to give him a tour of hell. Just a casual Saturday morning in Italy, belly full of Bomboloni or Biscotti or those Italian pastries that are basically cream-filled croissants that've been chopped up to look like potato chips. Sfogliatella? The point is that Dante is just doing a little hike when Virgil shows up to let him know that the mouth of hell happens to be right there in the forest where they're standing. How convenient! 

The reason it's wild to me is because Dante has an uncanny imagination. His hell is jam packed with sins and micro-sins, spiraling out in layers upon layers (much like a Sfogliatella, actually), and every single sin features its own grotesque torture. You've got your bugs, your six-legged crocodiles, your lizard-men, your flapping prong-mouthed pterodactyls, your various boiling pits (blood, tar, plain water), your demons who flay their prey in increasingly creative ways. And at the bottom of it all: a half-frozen, three-headed, multi-winged, face-eating devil. And yet, hell is filled top to bottom with people Dante personally knows. 

When I was growing up, the haunted houses du jour, in my small Georgia town, were called Judgement Houses. They weren't full of vampires and zombies and Jasons and Freddie Kruegers. No, Judgement Houses were a kind of live-action, interactive community theater where you entered into a regular old house and watched some teens say what they planned to do for the night. A couple of them were going to church to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, but most of them had plans to go sinning. Some of them were going to drink alcohol, some of them were going to do premarital sex, and always there was at least one teen who was going to sit on a park bench and simply think about being gay. 

Well, and all the teens died. Car crash usually. 

That was the first act of Judgement House. And then you were shepherded into a tiny bathroom, where the heat was cranked up to about a billion degrees, and the lights were off, and wailing and teeth-gnashing was playing on a boom box somewhere in the darkness. Finally, someone with one of those demonic voice modulators would be like, "Welcome to hell, Gay Jerry from the Park Bench! Burn! Burn!" And Gay Jerry would scream and say, "Oh, if only I had gone to church instead of to the park to think about being gay!" And then Satan's voice would throw in the names of the group on the Judgement House tour. "I sense some other Gay Jerrys in this room! Is there someone here not going to church, and instead thinking about same-sex marriage? Is it Carrie? Is it John? Is it Heather Hogan?" 

After you were pretty much dehydrated from the heater going full blast, and from standing around soaking in the body heat of a whole group of people in a ventless bathroom while the Devil threatened you with eternal damnation, the Judgement House tour guide would take you to the living room, which was heaven, and also where the dead church teens got to go. The heater was off in heaven, and everyone got a nice glass of lemonade or a cold soda, while someone played a keyboard and sang about God being an awesome God, reigning from right here in Coca-Cola heaven, with wisdom, power, and love. 

Judgment Houses were the 1990s versions of the theatrical hells that started in the Middle Ages and have been refashioned by the church over and over across the centuries. The hells of the doom paintings that populate churches all over Europe are full of whoever the church was angry at when they commissioned the art. Ale wives, for example, are burning in the pits of the underworld more than literally any other profession. Because nothing freaked out the church more than a woman who could make her own money and therefore her own way in the world. The hells of the morality plays that toured across Europe were swift to throw their political adversaries into the steaming soup of souls where Satan bathed. Venetians tossed Sicilians into hell, Saxons tossed Germans into hell, the Scots and the English tossed each other back and forth into hell. Dante's hell was full of Italian political figures and his own personal neighbors; the fictional Genoans Dante peeped in his fictional hell had him advocating for the entire republic to be razed to the ground, in real life. Again: how convenient! 

I've been thinking about hell a lot lately. 

When Donald Trump was elected the first time, I was devastated and furious and desperate to understand why and how and JUST WHY, especially because people I know and love voted for him. I asked someone who was like a mother to me for much of my life what in the world she was thinking, voting for a man who proudly proclaimed that he grabbed women by the pussy. This is a woman who would close out this newsletter faster than double-struck lightning just reading the word "pussy." She wouldn't be able to stomach me saying it. And so why? Why would she vote for a president who bragged about it?

I will never forget, for as long as I live, the way her voice went dark and her eyes iced over and she said, "I voted for Donald Trump because the Stone Mountain people can go to hell. To literal hell." 

I agreed with her that the Stone Mountain people could burn in hell, because there are a LOT of reprehensibly racist motherfuckers to choose from when you shake down that place's history. Some of the most vile people to ever exist. They could make up their very own circle of hell, in fact. 

Do you know Stone Mountain? It's, well, a stone mountain poking up into the sky in east Atlanta. There's a park surrounding it with mountain bike trails and horse trails and hiking trails, a huge campsite, a little railroad, and lots of historical stuff like watermills and gristmills. In the summer, every night, there's the Laser Show, where music blares and lasers make a movie on the side of the mountain. At the end: so many fireworks!

But that's not the point of Stone Mountain. The "screen" where the Laser Show takes place is a giant carving of three Confederate leaders: Jefferson Davis (president of the Confederacy), Robert E. Lee (general of the Confederacy), and Stonewall Jackson (also a general of the Confederacy). Below the carving, until very recently, was a "replica plantation" complete with "slave cabins." The park at Stone Mountain opened on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and the modern iteration of the Ku Klux Klan was launched at the summit on Thanksgiving the same year that The Birth of a Nation was released. Stone Mountain is, according to historian-sociologist James W. Loewen, "the sacred site of the KKK." 

But those hooded fucks aren't who my mom-figure meant by the "Stone Mountain people." She meant the "woke mob" that wanted to "destroy the memories" she had of her kids and grandkids playing in the shadow of that mountain by "making her feel guilty" for something she "had nothing to do with." She believed, she really believed, that the people who were going to split hell wide open were the people who wanted us to reckon with the violent, racist history of Stone Mountain, not the people who have used it as a base of operations to advocate for the enslavement of their fellow humans. 

Donald Trump, she said, was not trying to make her feel guilty. Donald Trump, she said, was not ripping her family away from her like the "woke mob" was trying to do. The "woke mob" wanted to reshape the whole world, but she liked the world the way it was, back when her kids and grandkids were having carefree picnics and cheering together at the light show projected onto the faces of some of the worst men to ever live. 

“Is Donald Trump going to hell?” I asked her. 

She said, “Absolutely not." 

"Why?" I asked. "His whole life is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus." 

She said, "Donald Trump wants Christian culture to prevail. He wants to take us back to simpler, happier times." 

"Happier for who?" I asked. 

"Happier," she said, "for me." 

"And anyone who wants to reshape the world to be happier for everyone?" 

She shrugged. She said, "To hell with them." 

She died of COVID during Trump's presidency, right around the time he went into the hospital with it, actually. He lied about COVID being airborne; he sent masks and tests and other supplies to Russia while telling Americans masking was more dangerous than not masking; he had access to treatments she never could have gotten her hands on. She said goodbye to her kids hooked up to a ventilator, over a Zoom call on an iPad held by a nurse who didn't have a single piece of PPE. She would have voted for Trump a second time, and a third time too. She died gasping for breath, choking on her own blood, still thinking her enemies were the people who didn't want to spend the rest of their lives driving past a mountain monument to slave owners in the middle of Atlanta. 

The best depiction of hell, to me, is in the adult animated musical comedy Hazbin Hotel. It's the story of Satan's daughter, a lesbian do-gooder named Charlie Morningstar, who believes the people in hell can be redeemed. Before she figures out the specifics of that, though, she's got to convince the angels in heaven to stop flying to the underworld to slaughter her people. The main angel is the first man, Adam himself, and it's not enough for him to sit in heaven and feel superior to the people in hell. He leads an army once a year to annihilate the tormented souls in hell, to wipe them completely from existence. Adam simply loves to punish sinners. He loves it so much he decides he's going to start purging hell twice a year, actually. He doesn't care that the people in hell are so often victims of circumstance, of poverty, of addiction, of abuse, of depression, of — oh, all the terrible things earth has to offer. All he cares about is that they're different from him, and he wants them to suffer. 

When Charlie asks him to reconsider his murderous rampages, he sings, "Just try to chillax, babe, you're wasting your breath. Did I hear you imply that they don't deserve death? Are they Winners? Are they Sinners? 'Cause it's cut and dry. Fair is fair, an eye for an eye! And when all's said and done, there's the question of fun — and for those of us with Divine Ordainment, extermination is entertainment!" 

Adam ends by telling Charlie he can't wait to come back in six months and "slaughter those little cunts." 

That's the hell I know. It's not a desire for justice, or to see the will of a holy and compassionate god done for all eternity. Nah, hell is a Judgment House built, brick by brick, from our own hate. Hell is our desire to punish people who don't conform to our own beliefs, the place we condemn people who challenge us, and make us insecure by simply living authentic lives, the people who question our often-stolen power, the scapegoats who allow us to sleep at night, who keep us from lying awake "feeling guilty about things we had nothing to do with." 

I can’t stop hearing it.

Donald Trump wants Christian culture to prevail. He wants to take us back to simpler, happier times.

Happier for who?

Happier for me.

Dante's version of hell, like all versions of hell, is so very parochial. The portal is always in our own backyards, filled with people we know, people we fear, like we invented it, because we did.