by Steve Almond
Canto I
This is the story of my descent into a modern inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood. I’m schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free e-mail.
I open my account and find a message protesting Boston College’s decision to have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speak at commencement. The Rice invitation has been public knowledge for several weeks, but it’s news to me, because I’m just an adjunct professor at BC and because I’m on a book tour this term and because I’m in the midst of trying to buy my first home for my pregnant wife while on a book tour.
My initial reaction is your basic spasm of ick. How could my school do such a thing? This is a rhetorical question. I know exactly why Condi got the nod: It makes BC appear enlightened—Look at us honoring a woman of color!—while also generating the kind of prestige PR that helps pump dough out of the wealthy alumni. Before I can think better of it, I do something I have pledged never (ever) to do: I hit reply all.
Guys—
I’m astonished to hear BC has selected Rice as a commencement speaker. It is the sort of decision that leads me to reconsider whether I want to teach at the school.
Rice has been an integral part of a political machine whose values run contrary to virtually every humane tenet expressed in the New Testament and Catholic doctrine…
It’s finally come home to BC. Are we going to respond?
Canto II
If I were another sort of person—a reasonable person, for example—I’d have stopped here. I’d rattled my saber. I’d done my best lefty kvetch. Now it was time for a soothing latte. But I am not a reasonable person.
The more I thought about the Rice invite, the less reasonable I became. I was having trouble letting it go, as the therapists say. I was having trouble letting it go because I had grown up in a family where a certain brand of cruelty had been tolerated, and I had never gotten over that injustice, and when the same cruelty played out in the political world, it afforded me the chance to return to the delicious misery of my childhood.
I had spent the months after the 2000 election, for instance, thinking (quite a lot, actually) about how best to murder James Baker. Then I remembered that shooting zombies never really kills them, it just makes them stronger. And now, six years, one stolen election, and two failed crusades later, Bush’s office wife—a classically trained pianist and war criminal—had been invited to serve as a role model at my very own school. What was I supposed to do with that?
Canto III
In the Inferno, Virgil is the one who shows Dante the way into hell. I myself did not have the ghost of a dead, world-famous poet close at hand in Portland. (They are hard to track down on short notice.) But I did have a nondead, sort of famous poet named Julianna Baggott. Julianna and I were on a book tour together, because we had co-written a novel.
When I told Julianna about the Rice invite, that I was considering resigning in protest, her expression was not one of surprise or dismay. On the contrary, she knew me as someone deeply attached to my outrage. And so she was happy to give me a good hard nudge through the Gates of Hell. “If you’re really that upset,” she said, “why don’t you send your letter of resignation to the Boston Globe?”
Canto IV
I didn’t do this immediately, because I was in the midst of this long-distance house buying nightmare, one complicated by the fact that, unbeknownst to anyone but my wife and my lawyer, I had put offers down on two homes, which, as my attorney had sternly informed me earlier in the day, was against the law, but I was doing it anyway because the second home was an insane bargain and I myself had fallen so deeply into a temporary real estate psychosis that a little jail time didn’t really faze me anymore, just so long as we got the house. I was making 173 phone calls per day, mostly on my obnoxious cell phone, mostly in transit, and thus kept misplacing my outrage about Rice.
Our hotel in Portland was one of the fancy downtown places that dress their doormen up like Beefeaters, in the errant belief that this is somehow not humiliating to everyone involved. I headed upstairs, fully intending to draft a letter, but my lawyer called to remind me that I was in legal jeopardy, then one of the seven or so real estate agents now parasitically affixed to my life called, then Julianna called and began speaking in the hysterical fashion that signals a writer has located free food.
As it should happen, we had landed in Portland on the day our hotel threw its annual Client Appreciation Buffet. The spread was obscene: a raw bar featuring the entire edible population of Puget Sound, plus tuna sashimi, crab cakes, chicken skewers, a mountain of malodorous cheeses, petits fours, strawberries the size of small fists, and, shinily displayed in the Lord of the Flies banquet room, an entire snout-to-tail suckling pig. Julianna and I ate to excess, then continued eating. All around us, consultants and salesmen were devouring fish and fowl, belching ecstatically, dabbing at their greasy lips.
In the Inferno, before Dante enters hell proper, he sees a swarm of figures referred to as the opportunists. These are people who led morally unconsidered lives, who took no side between good and evil. And as silly as it might seem to say so, this is what I saw as I stood in that bloated lobby: my fellow Americans (and me) lapping at the trough, gulping down what we could, not for a moment questioning our fortune, or whether such fortune lay on the side of good or evil.
That night, after our reading, I returned to my room and called my wife. I meant to give her a real estate update, but the first words out of my mouth were these: “BC is inviting Condi Rice to speak at graduation, and I’m fucking quitting.”
Canto V
The next day, on a plane headed to Seattle, I wrote this letter to William Leahy, S.J., the president of Boston College:
Dear Father Leahy,
I am writing to resign my post as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College.
I am doing so—after five years at BC, and with tremendous regret—as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.
As you well know, many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing—reasonably, in my view—that Rice’s actions as Secretary of State are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university, and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.
But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental.
Simply put: Ms. Rice is a liar.
She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy.
The public record of her deceits is extensive. During the ramp-up to the Iraq War, she made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform….
Like the President whom she serves so faithfully, she refuses to recognize her errors, or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power….
I am not questioning her intellectual gifts or academic accomplishments. Nor her potentially inspiring role as a powerful woman of color. But these, after all, are not the factors by which a commencement speaker should be judged. It is the content of one’s character that matters here—the reverence for truth and knowledge that Boston College purports to champion.
Secretary Rice does not personify these values; she repudiates them. Whatever inspiring rhetoric she might present to the graduating class, her actions as a citizen and politician tell a different story.
Honestl
y, Father Leahy, what lessons do you expect her to impart to impressionable seniors? That hard work in the corporate sector might gain them a spot on the board of Chevron? That they, too, might someday have an oil tanker named after them? That it is acceptable to lie to the American people for political gain?
…I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.
I would like to apologize to my students, and prospective students. I would also urge them to investigate the words and actions of Secretary Rice, and to exercise their own First Amendment rights at her speech.
Respectfully,
Steve Almond
Ex–Adjunct Professor
Canto VI
To my mind, the letter showed considerable restraint. I did not mention, for instance, that Rice was working her AmEx at a Manhattan shoe boutique while thousands of poor people were trying to avoid drowning after Hurricane Katrina. I simply said my piece and zapped the letter off to some editor at the Globe, who I assumed would be too distracted to read the thing and/or too wimpy to run it.
I was more concerned with getting back to Boston so I could slap a down payment on the house we had decided to buy. But my flight, almost predictably, was canceled due to windstorms in Chicago, and I spent six hours trying to rebook. In the end (by which I mean there was some begging involved) I secured the last seat on a flight from Seattle to Charlotte to Hartford. At some point in the midst off all this, the Globe called to say they were going to run my letter. I believe my exact words were: “Fine.”
Canto VII
I arrived in Boston at four in the morning and didn’t bother to unpack my bags, because as soon as I handed over the down payment, I was flying to Toronto for another reading. The phone began ringing before 8 A.M. I assumed I had overslept (I had) and that my realtor was calling to wake me up. But it was someone named Brett, or perhaps Brent, calling from a local TV affiliate. He had read my letter in the Globe and wanted to know if I’d be willing to come on the air and talk about what he referred to, in that unctuous, caffeinated tone favored by TV producers the world over, as “my brave decision.”
I told him I was heading out of town.
“Where to?” he said. “We might have an affiliate.”
Now my cell phone began ringing. It showed a New York number I didn’t recognize. I explained to Brent/Brett that I had to go. I answered the cell and a woman from CNN began speaking with great vehemence. I asked her to call back later and hung up. There was a moment of silence. Then, as if by some previous arrangement, both phones began ringing at the same time.
I was now—though I didn’t quite realize it yet—in the midst of an official media feeding frenzy. It was a Friday morning in May, what the pros call a slow news day, and all over the nation, media underlings were scouring the major newspapers to figure out who and what constituted “news” and how to turn these people and events into telegenic brawls that might goose their own careers.
The Boston Globe had made me easy to find. Though I didn’t know this either, the editors had run my letter at the top of the editorial page, under the thoughtful banner headline Condoleezza Rice at Boston College? I Quit.
My attack on Bush, Inc., was especially enticing to all those newsmakers because it seemed to reflect what pundits enjoy calling the national mood. Yes, it was finally dawning on Americans that their emperor had no clue. His approval ratings—90 percent when he stood atop the rubble, 75 percent when he declared mission accomplished, 60 percent when Saddam Hussein was captured—had just dipped below 30 percent.
A responsible Fourth Estate might take this as an invitation to investigate the integrity of his words and policies. But that was awfully complicated stuff. It was much easier, really, to focus on some wacky part-time prof who—get this—actually quit his job in an effort to question those words and policies.
Canto VIII
Dante wrote the Inferno as a warning. He was exhorting his countrymen not to drift into moral torpitude, to find salvation in the performance of righteous acts. But the poem is also a political allegory. Dante was bitter about his exile from Florence at the hands of the black Guelphs, so he wrote his enemies into hell and subjected them to various colorful degradations.
I would love to report that my resignation was a purely righteous act. Unfortunately, it also involved a revenge fantasy, one I’ve inflicted on friends and family with increasing vigor over the past few years: to become a Demagogue of the Left.
This would involve me getting a radio show, which would start local, but, owing to my astonishing eloquence, would quickly earn a national following and allow me to expose the sadistic hypocrisies of the Hateocracy, as well as the abject cowardice of their media enablers, and would culminate in a televised debate with Ann Coulter during which she would admit that she, like Adolf Hitler, has only one testicle.
I am suggesting, in other words, that I was not merely a noble liberal knight hoping to slay the dragons of the right, but a willing accomplice in the descent that followed.
Canto IX
The first interview I gave was to a local National Public Radio show. I was at the airport by now, about to fly off to Toronto. It was a perfectly reasonable conversation. No one shouted. Nonetheless, it marked the beginning of my formal descent into the inferno.
I know this will upset those of you who view NPR as a counter-weight to the Hateocracy. But surely I can’t be the only one to notice that NPR (in its own reasonable way) has no moral compass whatsoever. That it dependably dances to whatever tune Karl Rove calls out—immigration, gay marriage, flag burning, all the Goebbelsish spew invoked to distract citizens from more substantive and failed policies.
I can’t remember the last time I heard an investigative report on NPR. Like about, say, the sitting president launching a war based on bogus intelligence, or the vice president inviting lobbyists to rewrite our environmental laws, or the Speaker of the House turning Capitol Hill into a gold brick factory. Instead, NPR waits until these scandals have become conventional wisdom, then calls in Terry Gross for mop-up.
I used to spend a lot of time at WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate. The staffers I met there were intelligent and hardworking. They were also tragically demoralized. That’s what happens when your job is to cover the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history, and every day you churn out timid drivel.
Canto X
So let’s assign NPR to the first circle of hell, where virtuous pagans hang out and bitch about dental deductibles. And let’s put John DePetro in the second circle.
Who is John DePetro?
DePetro is a short, weasel-faced man with a Rhode Island accent. In another era, he’d be the guy who hangs out with the reputed mobsters and laughs at all their jokes and occasionally gets punched in the face for trying to be clever. As it is, DePetro is the former morning guy on WRKO, Boston’s official AM Hateocracy outlet. He bills himself as “The Independent Man,” an independence he recently affirmed by calling a public official a fag on the air.
I’m not sure how many of you have been a guest on a right-wing talk radio program, but I can tell you exactly what it’s like. It’s like throwing a book at a monkey.
I spoke to DePetro for thirty minutes, during which his central rhetorical strategy was to read various portions of my letter in a sneering voice. I would then say something like, “That’s very good, John. Your reading skills are excellent!” And he would screech like a monkey. A number of his listeners called in to screech, too. The consensus was that I was an elitist, which is a right-wing term for someone smarter than you. One guy was so incensed he yelled for five minutes straight while I said things like That’s right, let it out…It’s good for you to let it out. I was on the jetway by now and other passengers could hear him ranting through my earpiece. I’m pretty sure they thought I was a social worker.
DePetro asked me (sneeringly) what I thought of Cindy Sheehan.
I told him Sheehan was a grief-stricken mother whose son died in a war she didn’t understand. I wanted to ask DePetro if he had any kids and how he might feel if one of them died in a war he didn’t understand. Could he bring himself to that sort of humility? But I had just found my seat and the woman next to me was a nun, so I hung up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was on a radio program.”
I felt a sudden urge to ask the nun if she could take confession from a Jew, if that was in any way allowed, because I had obviously sinned, I had conversed with men of unclean intentions, wantonly, on the public airwaves. But she was immersed in her magazine.
DePetro spent the rest of the week begging me to come back on the show. His appeals were deeply fraudulent and invariably tender. Listening to him plead filled me with reluctant pity. Is there nothing sadder than a wannabe demagogue, trapped in the outer circles of the inferno, dreaming of a way in?
(Fun fact: A few months after my appearance, DePetro referred to Massachusetts’ Green Party gubernatorial candidate as a “fat lesbian” and got the shitcan.)
Canto XI
In Toronto, I turned off my cell phone and slept for six hours. Then I did that stupid thing I so often do: I checked my e-mail.
I had 359 new messages, among them these:
You are the enemy of my country just as much as bin Laden and Zarqawi. I see no difference. Good. Now fucking drop dead.
Fuck you pansy asshole
It is people like you who get our soldiers killed in Iraq.
I can tell you really don’t like darkies, do you….
I’m a Roman Catholic too and I suport Condoleca Rice as a brave and magnificent princess who is trying to save the world…
Your family should probably disown you.
I love to hear you liberals
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllll like pigs.
Canto XII
Well.
How is everybody doing? Anybody need a drink?
I probably should have mentioned that the trip down was going to be a little rough in spots. Always is. There’s any number of circles where we could put these fellas; the Seventh Circle, which houses the violent, makes the most sense. But there’s also a certain touching purity to these notes. They are a distillate of the modern conservative movement, which, contrary to popular myth, is not a political philosophy at all but an emotional appeal to the primal negative feeling states of childhood: rage, grievance, fear.