Birthright citizenship opposition puts the lie to 'illegal'

Haters pretend they have no problem with legal immigrants, when of course they do.

     Thursday morning, when I was having coffee in the kitchen and talking with my sons and daughters-in-law, with regular pauses to make sputtering noises at the baby, I was really, really glad I took the day off. Good for me, bad for you: no column in the Sun-Times today. Though I do have thoughts on one of the nine big stories of the week.   

     Bullies are cowards. They rarely are willing to face consequences for holding and expressing their stunted souls. They rarely come out, anymore, and say, "I need to hurt people to feel good about myself,: or "I have to hate ..." and then add whatever group has stuck in their craw.
     So they speak in code.
     For example, D.E.I., the effort to break the lock on society that white culture had, by including marginalized groups, was turned into a negative buzzword, almost a slur. You aren't against Blacks, or women, or gay people. Oh no! You are anti-DEI — against Blacks, women or gay people being admitted into universities, or included in histories, or partaking in society in almost any way other than subservience. The same trick that turned fighting fascists such as our president  into the scary imaginary group "antifa."
     Consider "illegal." People who hate immigrants often take pains to explain they are against illegal immigration. Ignoring a) their concern for illegality stops at immigrants. It certainly doesn't extend to our president and his administration of corruption and crime.
     And second, that they're really against all immigrants, illegal or not, as illustrated by ICE yanking law-abiding immigrants off the street, people who came here legally and were, in some cases, attending their hearings in courts of law, or trying to. "Illegal" is a figleaf, like calling Jews Communists and international cosmopoles. Ya hate 'em anyway, yer just fishing around for reasons, as a dumb show of rationality. 
     The easiest way to illustrate the lie of waving illegality is birthright citizenship. Children born in this country are citizens, thanks for the 14th amendment, put in place to make sure that children of freed slaves would became citizens, just as their parents were. That's both the law and good social policy. Among the many good effects of birthright citizenships is it prevents the legal limbo that immigrants find themselves in from being extended into perpetuity, as it is in other countries.
     So while the children of non-citizens became citizens, legally, for 160 years by being born in this country, the Donald Trump tried to scrap it anyway by declaring, basically, the law is wrong, he's right. It's been misinterpreted by everybody, he suggests. Good thing he came along...
     Opening arguments were heard Wednesday in the Supreme Court, and shockingly — a word worn down to a nubbin at this point —Trump showed up, in person. The first president ever to do so. I was reminded of when he hovered menacingly behind Hilary Clinton during a presidential debate in 2016. (If only she had spun around and snarled, "Back off creep!" The election might have turned out very differently. Alas, she wasn't the sort. That eight second delay of hers).
      Anyway, Trump's presence did not have its desired effect. The justices picked apart the government's argument that what worked for the children of slaves somehow doesn't work for the children of immigrants. Another what I consider "ruby slipper moment" with Trump. So many people submit to him, out of a mix of misguided self-promotion, fear, star-struck wonder, whatever. Only later do they find the advantage momentary, the harm permanent, as they are chewed up and spat out, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, being the latest to take the Walk of Shame. They could have refused. The power was in their hands all along. 
     Expect the ruling in June. But every legal mind worthy of the term is certain Trump will lose because the notion is ludicrous, the Constitution, clear. Trump is losing a lot in courts of law, lately. Which is good and bad. Good because every ounce of power taken from him is returned to the American people, where it belongs. And bad because a beast is most dangerous when it is wounded.

Passover 2026 — remembering one difficult time in another difficult time

     This ran in the paper Wednesday, while here I deployed the mandatory April Fool's post which, I'm pleased to report, did catch some readers napping. Running a day late — or a year, or 10 — alas won't undercut the topicality of today's column.

     Passover and April Fool's. On the same day! The possibilities are endless. I feel compelled to greet our guests at Wednesday night's Seder with a hearty, "Welcome! Let's eat!"
     Not laughing? As with all jokes, it's only funny if you know the set-up: Seder means "order" in Hebrew, and the meal only comes after a protracted span of praying and storytelling. Some years we don't eat until 9 p.m.
     Makes no sense, right? Then you're probably not Jewish, like 97.5% of Americans. Jews are a shrinking shard. Rather than control the world, we can't even control our own children, who wander off, as kids will.
     My wife, in her infinite wisdom, introduced a new Seder tradition: preliminary soup. We say a few throat-clearing prayers, and then her excellent, cannonball-dense, matzo ball soup is served, to fortify participants for the hour or two until the festive meal proper begins, the exact time being a tug-of-war between grey-bearded traditionalists and the younger generation, who want to eat and race back to their real lives.
     I suppose the strictly religious might view early broth as the kind of canonical slippage that leads to Christmas trees and, eventually, even fewer Jews. I consider it kindness toward hungry relatives who have consented — heck, some traveled long distances — to endure this dusty rigmarole in return for a hearty meal, eventually, and all the wine they can hold.
     My late colleague Roger Ebert once said that his entire political view can be summed up by "kindness." I'd like to extend that to religious orientation — if your religion doesn't prompt you to be kind, first and foremost, then it's just another tool for oppression, like the others. All religions are the same in that regard, or as I've said before: religion is a hammer: you can use it to build a house, or to hit somebody in the head. Same hammer.
     Focusing on cosmetic differences seems so strange to me. "Oh, you've got an Estwing? Well, MY hammer is a Stanley. I believe the wooden handle absorbs shock better..."
     Thus fortified, antisemitism rolls off me. All bigotry is ignorance married to fear. How much mental energy should be spent getting upset that the person viewing life through a keyhole caught sight of you? Someone who has lapped up the vile poison trickling through gutters for a thousand years now wants to upchuck a bit on my shoes. How hurt am I supposed to be? "Oh boo, frickin' hoo. The knee-jerk hater who bought a load of idiotic bilge doesn't like me..."
     Maybe I'm hardened, as a newspaper columnist who hears from haters daily. I don't want to underestimate the scary turn the country has taken after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, and the current war in Iran, in lockstep with our good buddy, Israel. The latest twist on antisemitism — that Israel is a monstrous evil that should have never existed in the first place and must be stamped out by force — is certainly frightening, for its popularity, though it's really just a new set of steps to a very old dance, the classic Jews Don't Belong Here Polka. Don't know the words? You can hum along: "Life ... would be great ... but we've got these Jews here ... infesting ... INSERT LOCATION ... where they don't belong ... and we'd all ... be so much happier... if only they'd go live in ... INSERT SOME SPOT FAR AWAY.... " 

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Dante on EGD: 100 Days, 100 Cantos

 

               Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
               mi ritovai per una selva oscura
               che la diritta via era smarrita.

    Lately, with work becoming more and more demanding ... well, not really. Just the same three columns a week, though it feels harder. Anyway, with the news so grim... No, that isn't it. As grim as usual. Maybe it's just the author, so old and tired. That sounds more on point. Plus having to then migrate the columns here, and also think of something to dispatch the remaining four days, the whole process began to seem an intolerable burden, for me, and probably you too.

     So I've been thinking, lately, "How can I perk up EGD? Make it more, you know, fun." For me and, it would follow, you as well. Happy host, happy guest.

     Which led me, as always, back to Dante. As longtime readers know, I am a fan of the dour Florentine, and drop references to his epic Commedia now and then. I know how much readers love him. 

     Okay, maybe not. I know what you're thinking: what's fun about Dante? C'mon, his famous book (he does have others) is Commedia — "The Comedy." Something that begins in crisis but ends happily. (And, to be thorough, because he wrote it in Italian, instead of Latin, which at the time was seen as truckling to the masses. It can be argued that Dante invented modern Italian).

     Mostly now and then. A little Dante, I assumed, goes a long way.

     But what if I'm mistaken? It occurred to me: why limit myself? Self-restraint is so 2016. It's bad enough the Sun-Times expects me to march grimly from topic to topic, never spending much time on anything, assembling 795 words on some ephemeral news development that came out of nowhere and is forgotten just as quickly. Then 48 hours later, do it again, turning a spotlight on a puff of fluff.

     What if, instead of doing that, I settled in and really deep dived into something significant, timeless and eternal? Something that has held the thinking world in rapt attention for more than 700 years. Something like the Commedia. The perfect subject for a blog, when I am unconstrained by space considerations, or the need to either generate money or hold readers' interest. It's my hobby blog — shouldn't I be able to do as I please? To have fun?

     The Commedia offers so much. Demons and angels. Popes and Muslims. Satan and God. As you should know, it takes place over 100 cantos — chapters, basically, from cantus, Latin for "song" —  over three books. Inferno — the most famous one, with the pitchfork-wielding devils  — Purgatorio, or Purgatory's mountain, no font of fascination, true, but not without its merits. And Paradiso, aka heaven. Lots of light and swirling glory.

     Why not devote a day to each canto? Sure, news and current events and whatever piffle I put in the paper will be overlooked. But think of what is to be gained. By a careful, line-by-line analysis of the text, including the original Italian, as seen above, the famous opening lines.

     What could be more enjoyable Nothing that I can think of, that's for sure. So let's get to it.

     Nel mezzo del camnin — poet Robert Pinsky translates that as "Midway on our life's journey." Me, I would be more literal — "In the middle of the journey of our life." That more closely tracks the original. (Someday I have to assemble clunky translations of Dante, staring with Henry Francis Cary's, "In the midway of this our mortal life," though "midway" does allude to the carnival aspect of existence).

     Be honest. That "our" sticks out for you, in each translation, does it not? Me too — I was hoping you would notice. Is Dante being grandiose? One one hand, that would suit him. Full of himself, he is. Speaking in the first person plural does drip of regality, Queen Victoria's "We are not amused."

     Particularly when Dante immediately shifts into first person: "I found myself in a dark woods."

     Why the inconsistency? A mere mistake? Wouldn't a good copy editor leap to correct that? Impose parallelism. What are we to make of that shift? Luckily, like Dante, we are not alone (sigh, because he's soon joined by Virgil, who acts as his guide. One way of viewing the Commedia, perhaps unique to me, is as the original buddy adventure). 

By Gustave Dore

     Francesco Mazzoni's devotes 12, count 'em, 12 pages to analyzing this very couplet, in his essential Saggio di un nuovo commento alla “Divina Commedia”: “Inferno” –Canti I-III (Sansoni, 1967). 

     Summarizing mightily, Mazzoni says the shift is done to direct the reader from a universal human condition — feeling lost in middle age — to a specific personal experience of being dragged through hell by a dead Roman poet.

    Prue Shaw, whose new book I wrote about recently, puts it well: "But it is our life as well as his (nostra vita); we are implicated in the story. This double focus is present from the beginning. Dante stands for all of us, as a representative of humanity, an everyman figure."
     Dante is us. Okay, me anyway. And, admit it, probably you too. Sure, we don't all have our property confiscated while being banished form our hometowns, by the pope no less, after seeing the love of our lives marry someone else and then die at 24. But we all have our disappointments. 

     Dante returns to this shift later — in the opening Canto of Paradiso, for instance, when he says, basically, he's not smart enough to convey what he's seen: nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,/che dietro la memoria non può ire. or "our intellect sinks into an abyss /so deep that memory fails to follow it" before shifting back to the first person. The idea of sinking into an abyss is very 2026, is it not? Another reason I love Dante — always relevant. 

     But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Not jumping ahead is going to be a challenge. Patience. Returning to the opening tercet. To be fair, since I've previously commented on the general unreadability of John Took's Dante, I feel duty-bound to observe that he agrees with Shaw, assembling a moment of coherence when he points out, "Dante registers the journeying character of his own humanity and, as the understands it, the journeying character of humanity as a whole." Given the slim odds of many readers struggling over the 322 pages Took needed to get to this point, I feel I'm doing a service by sharing this with you now.

     Since some of you, hard as it may be to believe, are perhaps new to the Commedia, I should probably mention the terza rima rhyme scheme, which Dante invented, being a fan of rhyme, calling it concatenatio pulcra — "beautiful linkage."  The cantos are divided into stanzas of three lines — each line having 11 syllables, though only of course in the original Italian. 

     The first and third lines — ending vita and smaritta — rhyme, obviously, while the end of the second line, oscura, introduces a new final syllable that rhymes with the opening line of the second stanza, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura," which in turn rhymes with the end of the third line, paura, while the second line introduces a new sound, forte, which links to the opening line of the third verse, morte. 

    Locking the whole thing together and giving it strong propulsive force.  Think ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on, for you diagramming at home.

    While we're giving backstory, I need to elaborate on mezzo — middle. The Commedia, while fiction, (it might seem odd to point this out, but otherwise you find yourself slipping into thinking that Dante actually did go to hell and report back what he found there) takes place over a specific period of time, Easter Week, 1300. So Dante, born around June, 1265 (he doesn't specify a day, but does say he's a Gemini, as am I, which I find very cool) was 35 years old, meaning that if we take the biblical lifespan of three score and 10, he was precisely halfway through his life (precision, as we will see, being a central value in Dante's writing). 

     Looking ahead, the opening line is the first of 575 biblical citations that Peter S. Hawkins counts in the Commedia.  Or as Hawkins explains:

    "A case in point is the very first line of the Commedia, coming immediately before Dante tells the reader of his terrifying experience in the dark wood and of his resolve to recall it, 'because of the good that I found there'. . . he also echoes King Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:10, whose song of thanksgiving is written down in the prophet's book to commemorate a rescue from mortal illness: 'I said: in the middle of my days I shall go to the gates of hell'."

    Indeed, as Hawkins continues: "the opening line of the Commedia reveals in miniature the biblical matrix of Dante's imagination. He assumes the Psalm's estimation of our lifespan, draws not only upon a single sentence, but upon a narrative moment in the book of Isaiah, and then adapts for his own purposes an ancient exegetical tradition on what it means to face Hell in the middle of one's days."

    Moving on to the second line, mi ritovai per una selva oscura, which Pinsky translates as, "I found myself/In dark woods." Charles Ross has it, "I found myself within a shadowed forest," which makes it seem like he's wandered into the Cook County Forest Preserve. (Cary's must be remembered; there is a mesmeric power to a bad translation: "I found me in a gloomy wood astray.").    

      Much thought has been expended on those trees.

     "Here the forest precedes the journey through Hell," Charles Ross and Allen Mandelbaum write in Lectura Dantis. "It is the dark wood of life on earth when lived in sin; it is Dante's interior wood; and it is the wood of political darkness, of Florence, of Italy, of papal corruption, of the absences of imperial authority."

     Reminding us that it isn't really a forest at all. The trees are, for want of a better word, notional.

     "We find ourselves in a forest that is not a forest, we see a hill that is not a hill, we look up toward a sun that is not a sun." Benedetto Croce writes in his La poesia di Dante (Bari: 1920).

     Hmmm ... it occurs to me, just now, that we've been going at this for quite a while, and not only have we not dispatched Canto 1, as planned, but we've only discussed the first line and started in on the second. There are 134 more to go, not to forget the 14,097 lines waiting beyond Canto 1 in the rest of  the Commedia. 

     Plus I'm not done with everything I have to say about that second line — I'm looking at nine more pages of notes.

     At this pace, well ... okay, let's be frank: 100 days are not going to do it. We'll try to be briefer tomorrow when we pick up with line four, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cost dura. 

    Daunting? Not at all. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes, "Above all, the reading of Dante is an endless labor, for the more we succeed, the further we are from our goal. If the first reading brings on only shortness of breath and healthy fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss hobnailed boots. In all seriousness the question arises: how many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat paths of Italy."  

     In that spirit, strap on your stoutest footwear, your Redwing boots, lace 'em up good and tight, and let's join Dante wandering around the back alleys of Ravenna. Thank you for embarking upon this adventure with me, this massive undertaking. I'd feel stupid doing it alone, and knowing that my EGD readership is right there with me, eagerly awaiting each new installment, is a great comfort. Truly, I'm blessed that you would agree to accompany me on such a massive undertaking. I'm sure when we are finished, some months or, heck, to be honest, years from now, we will find the effort well worth it.  Until then: onward!

     Oh, and to encourage brevity, I've kept my footnotes and sources separate, but if you want to read them — only another six pages — you can find them here. 

Tomorrow: Lines 4, 5 and 6.