Bad Dads: Cannibals

There are many ways of eating your child, but only a handful of reasons one might do so. In this edition of PODRE: Bad Dads, Chris & Brad search for answers in the literature of the Italian Middle Ages and in the 9th circle of hell of our own current politics. As ever, we bring you the baddest dads of yesterday, today, and tomorrow here on PODRE. Don't be one of them! 

Brad Franco's book on Siena is here.

The Count Ugalino episode of Dante's Inferno, along with excellent commentary and some fun images, is here on Columbia U's frankly badass Digital Dante resource.

Dante & an Egg, by friend of the pod John Harvey, can be found here.

Get ready for more Monday bonus drops this fall, and make sure you're subscribing to PODRE so you never miss an episode.

Transcript

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning. But what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Chris: We're back from Italy. Siamo tornati a casa. L'Italia è finita. We had nearly a month over there, writing and exploring and coming to know the European mind. That overlay of the ancient world with the medieval, with the ultra modern, that can be dizzying and profound. But mostly you just stand there, take a picture with your phone and go, Whoa, that's weird. There's a Prada store next door to the building where the Inquisition used to be headquartered, which is a short walk from the Pantheon, which is a building that the Emperor Augustus told them to build. And you can just sit there having a gelato in front of. Dumbly licking your ******* fantastic third gelato of the day. Huh, Augustus. Guy who this month is named after. Americans in Europe. We just aren't ready to process these things. I swam in the Mediterranean for the first time in my life. About as warm as the Gulf of Mexico, which I grew up swimming in. But the water felt more expensive. Jesus fished in that water. Or no, he walked on it and got everyone to quit fishing and follow him on a pretty wild ride. We stayed in the Tuscan towns of Castel del Piano and Montagiovi. We visited Pienza, Montepulciano, Montalcino, all the Montas. Where else? San Chirico d'Orcia, Bagno Vignoni, Arcidosso. If it had a castle, we were there. Artisanal gelato? We ate that, no matter the hour. Playgrounds? We found them. Though I have to say, if there is one aspect of the Italian lifestyle that is markedly inferior to the United States, and there's probably just this one, plus also the quality and texture of napkins. Weirdly enough for a society that centers their spectacular food and drink. Yeah. Anyway, there could be more playgrounds, and they could be a little more attended to. Does that infamous EU bureaucracy just not extend to making sure the slide is still screwed in to the top of the thing? Y'all got some wobbly *** slides. Italy in your gorgeous and otherwise perfect country. What else? Julian met a cat he wanted to adopt, a Tuscan street cat named Mimi, but he had to settle for a stuffed toy cat, which he named Sienna and outfitted with a very flashy necklace and carried with him everywhere, just petting her. The kids were great. They adapted pretty quickly to late nights and deadly hot afternoons. They even picked up some Italian. Posso avere gelato? Posso avere questo giocattolo, papa? Our kids are very lucky that they got to experience this as hard as it is sometimes, to have them out of their element, out of their routines. And we're going to do a whole episode in season two on traveling internationally with children. With some experts in the field, there's a lot there to get into. What else do I want to tell you? We went to a little town called Florence, saw a little sculpture called the David. Another thing you're just not ready for until you're there. I mean, I don't want to ruin it for you. Don't google it, okay? Don't ever look at a picture of the David again. Go to Florence, to the Accademia, pay the exorbitant price for the ticket, and walk into that building. It is far more spectacular than you're probably thinking it is if you haven't seen it. It's really something. We didn't see too much outside in Florence because it was 107 degrees that day. It's a beautiful city, though. We saw Dante's house on what's now the Via Dante Alighieri. It's kind of a ****** house, to be honest, but that's really the only way to know you made it as a poet. When 700 years later, they still haven't knocked down your house and they named the street after you. That's really literally the most we can hope for. We poets. Chanelle's favorite place, I think, and maybe mine, too, was Siena, namesake of Julian's new cat. It's a gem of a city, the Duomo, which is just a stupendously, magnificent cathedral inside and outside this place. You look up and just think, wow, you really are trying to prove something to God by making this. And I think you did. Brad Franco, friend of PODRE, of course, wrote the book on Siena. He is our resident expert and an actual important scholar of the Italian Middle Ages. While we were in Italy, unbeknownst to us, Brad was at home going through a very scary and difficult personal matter. And I won't go into any detail except to say it was the real deal. And he's doing okay now. He's going to be just fine. And we are so relieved and grateful for that. Brad is not just an essential part of this show, but an old and dear friend and a wonderful father and a beautiful person, and we just can't do without him. So, Brad, we love you, and we're excited to get you back in the PODRE studios soon. In honor of Brad, and in honor of the unspeakably violent legacy of medieval Italy, I'm going to share with you an episode of Bad Dads we recorded some time back. This was Brad's choice for the ultimate matchup of historic bad dads. It's a fun one. I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned afterwards so I can tell you what's ahead for PODRE and so we can say goodbye to each other properly. Here we go.

Chris: Welcome to Bad Dads with Brad!

Brad: Hi, Chris. How are you?

Chris: It's good to have you on another episode of PODRE and another segment of Bad Dads. And, you know, I thought this time I wanted to see what you would come up with if I just gave this to you and said, Brad, who are the two worst dads you can find out there? And let's get into it together. I know that you are a medievalist. You're a historian. You spend a lot of time with books that I don't spend a lot of time. Although we have so many shared interests.

Brad: So many, Chris.

Chris: Whether it's pretending to be Italian or pretending to be a good basketball player or pretending to be an expert in various kinds of popular music or.

Brad: Being actual legends in our own minds.

Chris: I wanted to make sure that we were getting the full benefit of your expertise and your obsessions on this. Who is our matchup today? What are we talking about?

Brad: Well, if we're really trying to figure out from a historical standpoint who are the worst fathers of all time, the fact that we have not mentioned Ugalino della Gheradesca, the 13th century Italian politician who Dante writes about and actually sort of uses as his epitome of evil. He betrays everybody he can in his life before finally, if you take Dante at his word, which of course we do, eating his children, but making it their fault, blaming his children for his decision to eat them. Okay, so that's Ugalino. We can go into that story in more detail.

Chris: But Ugalino so he's an Italian prince or politician? Obviously not at all an obscure figure. Every schoolboy in Texas learns about Ugalino at some point. We used to call each other Ugalino all the time when I was growing up, when we were just guys in the know, we'd be like, hey, Ugalito, over here. ******* guy. Look at Ugalino. He looks like Ugalino today. Look at him. Look at his ******* head. Yeah, so that guy, right, but he eats. So he's a traitor, he's a turncoat. He's a rat *******, and he gets thrown in jail with his, I did my research.

Brad: Two sons and two grandsons. How did you do your research if you wanted me to pick and you didn't know who we were picking?

Chris: I went into the into. I went to Florence. I opened up the archives. I went to Pisa.

Brad: You visited the tower in which he... 

Chris: Ugalino pilgrimage, man. No, you tipped me off. You said we're looking at Ugalino. And I said, all right. So I did my research. So he's in prison with his sons and his grandsons, and he resorts to cannibalism because they're not feeding him while they're in there? He doesn't get his three squares a day? They're just like, you're in there with your kids.

Brad: And eventually they fed him for a while, but at some point, they decided, I mean, honestly, they'd already freed him twice, and he'd already turn coated again and again, backstabbed again and again. Listen, when it comes to trying to find somebody to compare to Ugalino, I look far and wide. Who, oh, who could possibly hold a candle to somebody willing to eat your own children and blame them for it?

Chris: Okay, Ugalino.

Brad: Ugalino. Donald Trump might be as bad a dad as Ugalino.

Chris: Donald J. Trump. Yeah, son of Fred Trump, father of five.

Brad: That you know of.

Chris: Don Jr. Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, and Barron. Yeah, don't forget Barron.

Brad: I did, actually. Yeah, but definitely didn't forget Tiffany. I mean, Trump has, but I did not forget about Tiffany. You know Trump quite well. But I also know that despite what you've read Wikipedia, you're a bit of a neophyte when it comes to Ugalino.

Chris: You're suggesting that I haven't read my Dante? You're suggesting that I don't know the Inferno like...
 
Brad: I'm suggesting that the one time you taught Inferno, you literally got to this Canto and said, OOH, look, people eating each other. That's weird.

Chris: And you think I won't recite all 33 Cantos right now in Italian? 

Brad: Ugolino. Okay, so can we turn to...

Chris: We're living the Inferno, Brad!

Brad: We are living. Oh, my goodness.

Chris: The Inferno is here. The Inferno is now, listen, the only thing missing is an overwhelming sense of cosmic justice and the radiant splendor of God. But other than that, how is this not the Inferno? I mean, it's 108 degrees in Memphis, Tennessee, today.

Brad: Well, it's only about 65 in Portland, Oregon, today, so not terrible. But listen, I want to tell you Ugalino's story, okay? And then we'll talk about it. Can I do that? Is that so? I have I have my Inferno here. And the story actually begins like this. Lifting his mouth from his horrendous meal, the sinner first wiped off his messy lips and the hair remaining of his chewed up skull then spoke. Okay, so you get a picture of this guy who's in the middle of eating another human, in this case his political enemy, a guy named who's? The archbishop Ruggieri.

Chris: Okay, but the dispute is between the Guelphs and the Ghibilines, right?

Brad: Okay, these are two political parties. You're right, people don't just I shouldn't assume a knowledge of the Guelphs and Ghibilines, the two political parties, the Republicans and Democrats of the 13th century. Now, what was different about Tuscan politics is that when your political party lost, you are all exiled from your town, which is insane and leads to regular coup violence, street fighting of coups and civil wars and all the rest.

Chris: Okay, can I add one thing about that, Brad, actually, that you sort of left out?

Brad: Go on.

Chris: When you're a Guelph, you're a Guelph all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day! Continue.

Brad: So the first thing to notice about Ugalino is how good he is at making us pity him. Okay, tell me if this reminds you of any other politician of today. You want me to renew the grief so desperate that just the thought of it, much less the pain, grips my heart. But if my words can be the seed to bear the fruit of infamy for this betrayer who feeds my hunger, then I shall I shall speak in tears. I do not know your name, nor do I know how you came down here, but Florentine you surely are, to hear you speak. So he butters up the pilgrim. He acknowledges, hey, you speak very dignified, you're like me. But he tells us why he's there, leaving out entirely that he betrayed his own political party twice, then was responsible for his own children being imprisoned with him and his grandchildren. But he says, now, listen, then decide if he has been wronged by the archbishop. And he goes on to tell us this sad, terrible story, Chris, of how he and his sons were starved to death. My favorite part of this is he's well into the story when he mentions, I awoke before the light of dawn and I heard my children sobbing in their sleep. You see, they too were there asking for bread. It takes him 39 lines to mention, oh, by the way, my sons were there with me, too. Why, Chris?

Chris: I don't know why?

Brad: Because he's a selfish *******. Because it's all about him. Okay, we then from there, hear that? He bites his hand. Why? Because he's so sad about what's happening to his sons. His sons say, Daddy, are you hungry? Are you biting your finger because you're hungry? And they cuddle in close to him and say, if it would help, you feed on us, you took us into this world. But he stays strong for them until finally they fall dead around him, and he tells us that hunger proved more powerful than grief. So what you're getting from all this, Chris? I hope you're looking at me very.

Chris: I mean, I gotta say, I think he's got kind of an ironclad case. They begged. They were like, Papa, you know? You look hungry. You're an old man. I'm dead. Any minute now, my life's going to be over with. You do what you got to do, man.

Brad: And so what this suggests is that his children exist for his own benefit.

Chris: I mean, don't you think it's a little strange that he's telling this story, but there's no way to sort of check yeah. There's no way to confirm that this is how it actually went down. I mean, do you think Dante is actually expecting us to be skeptical of his version of events here?

Brad: It's a metaphor brother.

Chris: Hold on. Before we get all metaphorical. Is there supposed to be dramatic irony here in that we're supposed to know that Ugalino has rationalized his self? If we take your version of events in which he sort of brutally, like he essentially murdered and cannibalized his own children.

Brad: He doesn't talk about murder. He may have just waited for them to patiently die.

Chris: Well, why would the kids die before the old man? That doesn't really make biological sense, right?

Brad: He does say that they die just as you see me here, which, of course, is while he's eating somebody else. So that's another suggestion that maybe he did have something to do with it.

Chris: But, I mean, is Dante trying to get us to be, hmm. Maybe you've lied to yourself about what really happened here, and now you're lying to us?

Brad: The whole story of Dante is about how good we are at rationalizing that whatever we do isn't actually that bad, how we make ourselves the victim.

Chris: That certainly reminds me of somebody in his yeah, right.

Brad: He's always the victim.

Chris: He's always the victim. It's always unfair.

Brad: Who's the he in this? What's his name?

Chris: I don't like saying his name.

Brad: DJT. 

Chris: The disgraced former president. 

Brad: And here's the other thing. Yes, cannibalism seems a little beyond the pale, but if you sort of think of that as just taking from the next generation for yourself, that also fits.

Chris: Or like taking from your children's charitable foundation for yourself, taking from your children's companies.

Brad: I was actually looking at this for the New York Attorney General. He paid $2 million for not paying charities. This is through the Trump Foundation funds where he had to give money because he said he was going to inhabit. It was like the most amazing list of charities, everything from the United Way to the United Negro College Fund, the US. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and numerous others. This is not his money. This is people donated money to his charity that he then used to buy a painting of himself, is my favorite detail of that. And if that's not sort of to.

Chris: Hang in his ******* golf course.

Brad: Yeah, and if that's not Ugalino.

Chris: But, like the way he had sent Ivanka and, you know, like the two semi competent or at least semi functional children. The way he'd sort of send them out on these projects that were riddled with fraud and corruption and Azerbaijan and all these really shady deals that he kind of sent them out on that got him all wrapped up with the ******* Russian mafia and all that **** that we were learning during the Mueller years. It is kind of organized crime family behavior, right, where the boss 100% sort of makes sure that his kids are as dirty as he is and everyone's.

Brad: It's ultimately about him.

Chris: Yeah. But the psychodrama inside that is what you don't often see in kind of like mob films, right? Which is that's the one thing that The Sopranos did that nothing else had ever done before, which is to show you the kind of the way that that plays out emotionally and psychologically within a family when there's that level of kind of organized crime determining the family's conditions. And totally you do wonder if there is a sense in which Trump has cannibalized his children, which in a way kind of lets them off the hook. And I think that's why we don't normally think of it that way. You do see that kind of like sympathy, a kind of modified sympathy for even Don and Eric for being so pathetic and pitiful.

Brad: Definitely loveless.

Chris: But look at Don Jr. Right now. I mean, have you seen any of these clips of him selling steaks or whatever the **** he's doing? Or just, like, selling participating in the grift.

Brad: There's an Eddie Munster vibe.

Chris: He looks like he's got a serious, serious drug problem. I mean, looks like there's something really disturbing about his kind of lack of self awareness and the brio with which he's, like, pouring that out into the world.

Brad: But I would also one one way in which Trump is definitively worse than Ugalino is that Ugalino never expresses any interest in ******* any of his children.

Chris: That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, it's a low bar to clear, but it's one that you got to clear. You got to clear that bar.

Brad: And the other example of absolute evil besides cannibalism that Dante uses is, in fact, incest. Back in Cantos 30 and 31, there's Mira, who ***** her dad incognito, but Trump's whole stated love of his daughter, and, like, look how hot she is. And she actually looks like him. Sort of the type of narcissism that leads someone to put themselves before everything else.

Chris: I never really saw that as truly incestuous or sexual. I mean, I know it's sort of everyone else does, and it's sort of gross, but also funny to point out. But I think it's pure narcissism, actually. It's his narcissism funneled through his misogyny. That the only way he can he sees Ivanka as in some way like a replica of himself. But because she's a woman, her invincibility has to be cast in sexualized terms. Because it can't just be that she's as brilliant and formidable and imposing as he is. She has to be hot and beautiful. You know what I mean?

Brad: Even if she's not. Yeah.

Chris: That's how he translates positive attributes toward women.

Brad: Yeah.

Chris: Toward women. And she's the only woman who he even has any real admiration for. And he only has admiration for her because he thinks that she is.

Brad: Yep. Yeah.

Chris: Whereas his male children, he has no ******* respect or regard for. And he barely even notices that they're there. Right. He's never paid Don Junior and Eric a compliment because he sees them as defective heirs. Right. They're like, of course they could never be him.

Brad: Yeah.

Chris: And they're men. So it's like, what's there to see and what's there to look at? I mean, there's that great video of Eric at a rally on the phone with his dad. This was in a British paper a while back. And he's like, Listen to how much they love you. We love you. I love you. And the phone's on speaker, right? And he's holding it up to the microphone, and his dad says, well, thank you. I hope everyone has a great time. It's like he's saying goodbye to people at one of his hotels. Right. He's just like, well, thanks. Have a good time, enjoy yourselves to his son saying I love you in front of this crowd right. Who were just waiting to hear. So he doesn't really see them even as his children. No, I don't think. But Ivanka is also 

Brad: They're both perfect examples of being incapable of learning, being incapable of changing, because they see themselves as sort of beyond reproach. There's no way they can learn from anything they did in the past, because they can never see it as anything but perfect.

Chris: The similarities, they abound, right. Between these two figures. And I think the only way to really decide this question is to put Donald Trump in the hazard of Dante's terms, which would be this would he, given the need, eat his children? And if so, which ones would he eat first?

Brad: Tiffany and Eric I think he'd probably mix up to make some kind of a stew, like the two of them. I think Don Jr. would be sacrificed third. I think Barron would be fourth. Okay. Even though Barron's younger, and then Ivanka would be last. That would be my order, I think.

Chris: I don't see it that way. I think he would only eat Ivanka. Yeah. I think the other ones would repulse him. I think he would see that they're not fit to take back into his body.

Brad: He likes his meat, though.

Chris: He does. He likes a well done steak with ketchup.

Brad: He likes his burgers. Yeah. Eric with a little ketchup.

Chris: I think he'd deep-fry Ivanka, and I think 

Brad: That's terrible. 

Chris: She's the only one who he would see as worthy of consumption.

Brad: I think you're giving him too much credit.

Chris: Maybe so. Maybe the first time I've ever done that.

Brad: Think he just devours everything in his path. Like a hurricane. Like Hurricane Ugalino.

Chris: Ugalino!

Brad: Yeah.

Chris: All right, so you call it Brad. Who's worse?

Brad: I mean, honestly?

Chris: Trump, of course.

Brad: Ugalino might be at the bottom of hell. Trump's a more destructive force, and I think he's actually a worse father.

Chris: There was that moment in the 2016 campaign where, god, we thought those debates were, like, vicious and horrifying, but they were nothing compared to 2020. But there was that moment where whoever was moderating said to Hillary and Trump, can you say something nice about the other candidate? And everyone laughed because it was such an absurd idea. And it went to Hillary first. All of America was thinking, how the **** could she possibly answer this? But she was good. It was one of the only times on the campaign she had good instincts. Right. And she goes, he loves his children. From everything I can see, he's a good father. And I thought in that moment, like, God ****, that was a good answer. But it's also bullshit, and she knows it's bullshit. He's not a good ******* father. He doesn't love his children.

Brad: No. And he hasn't raised good children who are capable of doing the right thing and thinking beyond themselves.

Chris: He didn't raise them at all, right? Like, he gave them jobs when they turned 25.

Brad: He never changed a diaper. He said that was one of his claims to fame.

Chris: They all went to boarding school. There's three different mothers. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but Tiffany grew up on the other side of the country. But the three kids who are really his ******* kids, that he identifies with himself and with the family business, they grew up in boarding school and didn't really come into his sphere until he was ready to bring them into the family business, which was essentially to turn them into criminals.

Brad: Precisely.

Chris: Criminals with bottomless appetites and zero accountability.

Brad: Just like him, which is Dante's definition of absolute evil, really. It's misuse of the will. It's endless appetites and it's misuse of the know. It's sort of like when your will can't be controlled and when, to an irrational degree, you can never have enough. And so, yeah, I see him. Actually, if Dante were writing this today, I think he'd probably sub out ugly enough for Trump.

Chris: I mean, the sort of political cartoonists very often like to draw Trump either with a very tiny mouth to accentuate his kind of like the lip thing, but other times he's like just a giant maw, right? Just like a know just like this bottomless ******* hole of a thing that just chews and is never full and is never *******.

Brad: I think I've convinced you. I think I've convinced you.

Chris: The answer, as usual, is Trump.

Brad: He wins. And by winning so often, he is the biggest loser.

Chris: And that's where we are.

Brad: Yeah. As I tell my students, don't be Ugalino and don't be Trump. 

Chris: Thanks, Brad.

Brad: Hey, this was fun.

Chris: This was clarifying. See you soon.

Chris: Cannibalism! People eating people. Are you listening, John Harvey? No one loves a good cannibalism deep dive discussion more than our friend John. Also a big Inferno guy, John Harvey. He writes a blog on Dante and cooking and art called Dante and an Egg at magicfishbones.com that also runs on his Instagram feed. I'll link those in the show notes. Look, the whole point behind Bad Dads beyond, you know, hanging out in PODRE world, having a good time, is that in these extreme cases, whether they're super influential like the Bible or somewhat obscure like 13th century Italian political figures or just super visible, like ******* Donald Trump in the extremity and often grotesque awfulness of these dads, we might be able to discern some things more easily about the relationship of parents to their children. Things that don't change all that much over time geography, culture and language. And here, I think it's something Brad said about what links these two characters. How good we are at rationalizing our selfishness, how we make ourselves the victim, how in the telling of our own story, we might find ways to absolve ourselves of the harm we've done and then even come to believe that story. That probably everybody does this to some degree, and that if you do too much of it, that can become who you are, how you're remembered. But okay, what would Dante have us do? Point the finger at Ugalino? Have a good time wondering which of Trump's children he'd eat first and then bounce? Sadly, no. The Inferno has 33 Cantos for a reason. It has two sequels for a reason. And he makes himself the central character, a pilgrim journeying through hell, and meeting all of these wretched sinners, hearing their tales, for a reason. Parenting requires moral imagination. Poetry, or a good, honest conversation with a friend, someone like Virgil or Brad Franco, or maybe you, can help us on that journey. It's easy enough not to physically eat our children. There are so many other good things to eat. For instance, spezzatino di cinghiale, the traditional wild boar stew of the Tuscan mountain country. But it might be a little more difficult to remain vigilant over our imperatives as individuals, our desires and our appetites, and our ambitions. To remain vigilant and critical in how we tell our own story, especially about the lives we share with our children. Okay, there's more Bad Dads bonus episodes on deck, as well as our next miniseries, The PODRE Review, featuring guests like Kaveh Akbar, Mary Karr, some really great writers and critics who are going to talk with me about some of their favorite and my favorite works of literature. Season two of PODRE, with some big time guests, is just around the corner. You can subscribe to the show at Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. And if you're enjoying us, please leave a review on those sites so more people can discover the podcast and join the conversation. See you next time. 

Chris: PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad Franco and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.

Julian: This episode is now over.