This is William Blake's "The Red Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun". It figures prominently in a novel by Thomas Harris, entitled The Red Dragon, concerning retired FBI profiler Will Graham (although at the time neither VICAP, nor psychological profiling of serial killers was as systematized as it would become later) and his hunt for "The Tooth Fairy", Francis Dolarhyde. The central conflict of the novel is Graham's seeming ability to think like a serial killer (a device exploited by Chris Carter in his short-lived TV series Millennium). This is a conflict because Graham is a moral agent who, through some quirk, or trick, or intuitive sense, is able to think like an immoral monster. The toll taken upon him, especially his near death at the hands of Hannibal Lecter, pushed him out of the business. Dolarhyde's murders draw him back in, and they take a similar physical and psychic toll.
When I first read this novel, in 1999 (long after having read both Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal), I wondered about the nature of this conflict. It seemed to me at the time that one should be able to separate out the self from the other, as it were. Yet, it seems that I was thinking - at the time I was reading this - as if there were something real about "identity", something permanent upon which an individual could fix in order to hold fast in the face of the very real psychic challenge posed by entering in to the thoughts of a psychopath.
While not calling folks on the right psychopaths, my refusal to engage them has made me realize the reality of the struggle described by Harris in his book. The lines between who we think we are, and what we could be should we cut ourselves adrift from the world in which we live (in a psychological sense), are microscopically thin. Reading dreck and drivel from the right, whether it be a leading light such as Newt Gingrich insisting that repeating old mistakes as repackaged "New Ideas" is the best way for the Republicans to save themselves; or some lesser light who defends torture, extraordinary rendition, and engages in an almost complete denial of facts on any number of issues in order to make a political stand, one can become convinced, at some point, that it must be possible to operate as they do and still function. In order to engage them, one must think like them at some point.
Doing that can take a toll, let me tell you.
I got thinking about this because I'm concerned that all the Republicans have left as a loyal base are people who are so vested in an image of the country; its current state, its potential; the world in which the United States exists as a co-equal nation-state among two hundred or so; and the desires of the American people; all of which is easily demonstrated as false, and most of which is a mix of fantasy and denial of facts that are perfectly clear to most of the rest of us - how can they possibly recover?
As the US begins to recover economically - and it will, in six months or a year, maybe two, but it will happen - and the benefits of the kind of society the Democratic Party and the American people envision begins to take shape, benefiting the entire country, what will happen to these people? Will it be possible to scream "socialism" without receiving gales of laughter? Will the imminent demise of the US as a world power, our entire country about to be overrun by Chinese bringing swine flu across the border from Mexico (or whatever the fantasy du jour may be) still be heard in various corners of the land? Will Rush Limbaugh still have an audience?
Part of the problem lies with the American political culture. Rather than a group of smaller parties, we have always tended toward coalitions of various interest groups gathered around a cluster of centrally important issues. Opposition in such cases has usually amounted to tinkering with trivia around the edges rather than substantive disagreements, because all parties involved understood that the country and its governing system don't work that way. Yet, that is all the Republicans seems capable of now and in the foreseeable future, precisely because they have become a rump part of the hard right. While many of Obama's policies could certainly be described as "liberal" in a traditional American sense, the "middle" as it exists right now is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
Trying to fathom the mind of those who are convinced that if we just did things like we did under George W. Bush, only moreso, in all likelihood, would leave one like Will Graham, in Harris' novel - looking for nothing more than to get your boat fixed so you can go fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
