Jim Webb is a writer
You will remember that Lynne Cheney wrote a historical novel about the Wyoming frontier that… well… explored Lesbian sexuality. She neglects to include this on her biographical page along with her other books, but Sisters has become a cult classic of sorts. It’s difficult to know what to do with this piece of information. Even without a homosexual daughter, it’s impossible for me to believe that Dick and Lynne could care a rip about homosexuality and the degenerate effects it’s supposedly having on society at large — (you know… Nancy Pelosi and her “San Francisco values” pushing the radical homosexual agenda of Barney Frank — or so goes an Indiana Congressman’s advertisement) — ala Goddam and Sammorah.
More to the point is Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass. From what I have read and heard, you cannot slice this novel up without seeing Bill O’Reilly creating two alter-egos for the novel — the heroic hard boiled detective and the villian of the book. Both receive ample sexual gratification that eerily echoes the sexual harrassment lawsuit of his phone sex transcripts. Thus, this is surely O’Reilly’s id at work.
Now we get the strange twist that strange Senate race in Virginia has taken. Apparently George Allen dumped a whole mass of excerpts from Jim Webb’s novels on Matt Drudge — after legitimate news sources never carried on with them. I will say for the record that I am ambivalent about Jim Webb in general — he possesses some cultural attitudes that I cannot abide by (he railed against Jimmy Carter for granting amnesty to Vietnam draft-dodgers, he expressed negatives views on the issue of women in combat — that being grist for this campaign, and so forth). I have read Born Fighting, which gives me an appropriately mixed opinion of him — but ends up pointing to “positive” on balance in terms of what he can do for the Democratic Party, the state of Virginia (that’s up for them to decide) and so forth.
In terms of authorship, and I’ll go with the (oh so blue state of me here) New Yorker article just published: you see his rage against rich Ivy Students dodging the draft in his novels. I suggest some elements of misogyny probably come through as well. But I propose another thing: you cannot write about war without writing about horrible attitudes displayed all around you, and you cannot write authentically without drawing out a mixed — and that includes dark — view from characters in the novel.
Now we can create a list of writers who can never be in elected office by the rules dictated against Jim Webb. It’ll be a list of every good writer, and probably most of the bad writers as well.