When I started this entry, I thought it was about work. Instead, it turns out it’s about the audio book I’m listening to on the commute. It isn’t very cheerful. Here it is:

I think The Hub might just want to move down into the basement for a couple of days, the poor man. I have PMS and Kendi is molting. K-bird has a pin feather, still in it’s sheath, right in the middle of the back of her neck, where she can’t reach it. Actually, I think it may be more than one pin feather. I can feel the sharp keratin covering if I get my finger near it, but it’s still too sensitive for her for me to touch it. It’s like she wants me to scratch it, but then she doesn’t. She’s also lost two large wing feathers, a tail feather, and a couple smaller ones from beneath her wings. She probably feels like she wants to jump out of her skin, and I know exactly how she feels....

Well, except I’m all hopped up on caffeine and chocolate and have been listening to the latest Thomas Harris novel on CD in the car on the way to work: let me tell you, there’s nothing like listening to Hannibal Lector getting worse and worse revenge on the men who ate his sister during the second world war. It’s enough to give almost anybody a challenge to their moral values, (because you find yourself rooting for Hannibal, even as Hannibal is rooting for Mephistopheles at the opera) to say nothing about being a great motivator for a vegetarian life style.

The theme of this story, called Hannibal Rising (what great marketing genius thought “Oh, here’s a great release just in time for the holidays!”?) is revenge. Specifically, when is enough enough? When does the person who has been bullied become a bully himself? What’s the difference between the justice dispensed through civilized means, like the Nuremberg trials, and the wronged party taking the opportunity to avenge himself – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – when the party that harmed him before shows up intent on harming him again? Who’s the bad guy? There’s a lot of literature – not that I’m sure that this is exactly “literature” – written like this these days…and you see it a lot in films. For years we’ve had the anti-hero, but this is something else. This is the rise of the guy-whose-motivation-for-his-actions you understand, and that’s his whole shining qualification.

I was darn creeped out when Hannibal held out a cherry to the toddler daughter of a war criminal who had committed unspeakable acts. My stomach landed somewhere near the gearshift as Hannibal said calmly to his companion, “She’s wearing [my sister’s] baby jewelry.” But I was certain that the child wasn’t in any danger, and she wasn’t. Is that the difference? Making sure you only do unto him who did it to you? Age? Time? What about remorse, or lack of remorse? Feeling, or lack of feeling? Empathy? The Hub buys into the “evil is the complete lack of empathy” theory – and that theory has a lot going for it. But I’m not sure. If one guy killed a hundred people in a gas chamber during the war, and felt bad about it for the rest of his life, and went to church and all of that….and another guy did the same thing, but then finished out his life carefree on the beach in Argentina…well, aren’t 200 people just as dead? Didn’t they all die just as horribly? Aren’t all of their contributions to our world gone forever?

And if one can be redeemed than why not the other? We don’t want the second one in our midst – that’s the real answer – they’re like snakes, you never know what they’re liable to do. They don’t know, or can’t be told the difference between right and wrong – that’s a sociopath. Okay. But what about the guy with all the feeling? Isn’t he really WORSE? Because he had the empathy, then overcame it enough to do the gassing….or the killing of the enemy, or the shooting of the criminal before the firing squad, or whatever socially sanctioned – however briefly, however wrongly, for however short a period of time such things ARE socially sanctioned- act of violence….and then he can go no further, he can do no more, shell shock, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, depression, nightmares – and he’s suddenly in the same situation as the guy whose whole family he gassed, or the small child who somehow slipped out.

Meanwhile, our sociopath walks blithely on. After all, it’s all in the past. It’s a sobering thought.

We didn’t have the word “sociopath” until the 1952, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was first published. Did such people always exist, or are they a particular gift of the “Greatest Generation” like television, anti-biotics, and the A-Bomb?