The Two Faces of Linda Tripp

Linda Tripp and Dante's Inferno

Linda Tripp, for the benefit of the readers, who have not been bored to death by the parochial obsession of the American major media with this subject for the past six months, is the middle-aged woman who secretly taped her young protégé, Monica Lewinsky, babbling about alleged sexual assignations in the White House with Bill Clinton.  Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Tripp managed to turn up everywhere -- even outside the Oval Office door as then-volunteer Kathleen Willey lurched forth with blouse reportedly disarranged and lipstick smeared.

Linda Tripp is damned.  That much is clear.  But where and how ?  Dante neglected to
specify which circle of hell a soul is consigned to after betraying her friend for the sake of a book deal.

Traitors are of course consigned to the innermost circles, ranging from traitors to their kin, lords, country and benefactors.  No space appears to have been left for traitors to their friends.

The thought struck us that hell is long overdue for a make-over.  The business of sin has changed substantially since Dante's day.  Not only are many of the sins archaic (it seems doubtful at this point that Protestants are damned as schismatics) but as in the Tripp case Dante has failed to keep up with the times.  What is the punishment for TV evangelists - or for that matter for people who leave a cell phone on in a recital?

Whatever Tripp's concern about gathering hard evidence to protect herself legally, anyone who betrays a friend in that calculating manner deserves the fate that Dante would assign her:  being trapped in ice up to the neck in the deepest pit of the Inferno, where treachery against basic human bonds is punished and where Satan himself, once the brightest of the rebel angels, beats his bat's wings.

On the other hand, whistle-blowers in general are not always likable people. It may take zealotry and fanaticism to expose institutionalized business-as-usual when things become as slack and corrupt as they appear to have in many areas of the Clinton administration, uncorrected by a vainglorious and self-righteous first lady who sees moral error everywhere but in her stinking backyard. Tripp is the anti-Hillary, stalking the White House as its ghoulish bad conscience. Like the gangrenous picture of Dorian Gray, Tripp's tense, hooded, iron-jawed face is like a festering archive of unexpiated sins.

As a persona, Tripp reminds me of Barbara Stanwyck at her most withering and implacable.
With her big-shouldered trench coats, Tripp could sub as a pro football linebacker. As she dashes from house to car past the cameras, her magnified vulture eyes (glasses curtained by those blond Afghan bangs) and blocky, bullish body language remind me of a whole, florid series of talented but one-sided, narrowly focused, rather terrifying women: Bella Abzug, Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Madeleine Albright and yes, Mrs. Rodham, Hillary's mother, whom I saw in person at the 1996 Democratic Convention and mistook for a prison matron.

The Tripp tapes themselves contain little but titillating hearsay that proved of limited legal use.  At this point, most Americans prefer being governed by a charming, oafish philanderer than by a simpering, shilly-shallying, fascist milquetoast like Special Prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, who has a face like creamed corn and the brains to go with it.

Dante's choice of victims has also worn less well than it might.  How many of his damned souls would be remembered at all if it was not for Dante's verse?

We invite you, our readers to nominate persons and punishments to add to the damned of hell.  For obvious reasons candidates should be public figures whose names will be recognized by most readers.