Delay's Inferno

I’ve spent days trying to decide which circle of Dante’s Hell would be the most suitable place for former House majority leader Tom DeLay to spend eternity, figuratively speaking at least, now that it seems he has reached the twilight of his life in politics.

I thought first of the circle of Hell where the Panderers and Seducers are goaded by horned demons with whips, just as in earthly life they had goaded others for their own selfish purposes. This seemed an appropriate place for Mr. DeLay, since in life he has so often sought to advance his personal agenda by appealing to our lowest sentiments, to our most petty prejudices and most irrational fears, such as in his frequent assaults on alleged enemies of God and country ranging from the Arabs and the French to environmentalists to working mothers. In this circle of Hell he could walk for time unending among the great pimps and smut-peddlers and hate-mongers of history, a proud pantheon indeed.

But then I thought of the circle a little lower down the terraces of Hell where the Flatterers sit sunk in excrement, the smelly equivalent of their false flattery on earth, since while pandering to our prejudices and fears as a nation Mr. DeLay has also sought advancement by appealing to our vanity, assuring us that we Americans—at least those of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant variety—really are a new Chosen People, divinely destined to rule the world. This circle of Hell, too, seemed a fitting, perhaps even comfortable eternal wallow for the silver-tongued exterminator from Texas.

Then I recalled the circle of Hell a little lower still where the Simoniacs, those guilty of trading religious favors for personal gain, are turned upside-down in baptismal fonts with their feet in flames. As much as any corrupt cleric of Dante’s time, Mr. DeLay has exploited the religious passions of his constituents to his own political and financial ends, equating faith with an ideology of extreme conservatism that is anything but compassionate, an ideology of chauvinism and hate, masking his own corrupt soul behind a pious façade while collecting votes, dollars, and prayers from a misguided congregation of followers in numbers beyond count. In this circle of Hell the congressman would certainly be among friends, not to mention an enemy or two.

Lower still I contemplated the circles of Hell where the Grafters sit in boiling hot pitch as sticky as their fingers in earthly life, where the Hypocrites walk around in circles weighed down by heavy monastic robes of solid lead, where the Evil Counselors are wrapped in lashing tongues of fire like those with which they whispered into the ears of earthly kings and presidents, and where the Sowers of Discord are hacked apart by demons with swords, made to drag themselves about on the hot ground while their wounds heal and then hacked apart again, ad infinitum, just as in earthly life they divided others against themselves in pursuit of selfish ends. Any of these would do just as well, since Mr. DeLay has built a remarkably successful Washington career on equal measures of graft, hypocrisy, evil counsel, and sowing of discord, and since in none would he be lacking for earthly friends. Surely even the Hammer shouldn’t have to go to Hell alone.

All things considered, however, I think my vote would be for placing him among the Sowers of Discord, if only because this is the lowest circle of all those in Dante’s Hell for which Mr. DeLay seems most qualified, the closest to Old Scratch himself, and therefore that from which the congressman seems least likely ever to re-emerge. This is only a tentative choice, however, and Mr. DeLay’s final placement among the Damned remains open to debate.

What do you think?