IRAQ: A REAL ISSUE
I found this in an Ocala FL newspaper:
So now it's come down to this: Candidates for public office will be deemed qualified based on the literary qualities of novels they have written.
The author's conclusion:
As for his qualifications for the United States Senate . . . Jim Webb graduated first in his class from Quantico. He's a highly decorated Vietnam vet. He served as President Reagan's secretary of the Navy. And he was commissioned to teach literature at the Naval Academy.It that doesn't qualify you for the Senate, I don't know what does. Webb is certainly better qualified than a chicken hawk who wore a Confederate flag in his lapel, kept a noose in his law office, and, according to college football teammates, used the "N" word and stuffed a dead deer's head in a black family's mailbox.
Unfortunately, those scenes aren't from a novel.
Witness the flap in Virginia over novels penned by Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb. Embarrassed by a comical series of missteps, which converted him overnight from a frontrunner to an also-ran, incumbent Republican George Allen tried to fight back. He hired someone to wade through six novels written by Webb and pick out all the salacious passages. Which Allen's campaign immediately leaked to the right-wing Drudge Report. Anybody who writes trash like this, sniffed Allen, isn't fit to be a United States senator.Now, some of Webb's prose is nasty stuff. The most-quoted passage describes a scene Webb himself witnessed in Vietnam: "A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy's penis in his mouth."
Make you squirm? Sure. But here's the point: It's one small scene, two sentences, from a novel about the horrors of war. A novel that Jim Webb wrote, by the way, when he was still a Republican. And one of six novels lauded by conservatives, prior to Webb's Senate campaign, for their realistic portrayal of the challenges faced by U.S. troops in combat.
The National Review praised Webb's "Fields of Fire" as "the finest novel yet written about Vietnam." The conservative Weekly Standard called Webb's "Lost Soldiers" "an affecting and taut tale." Is the author of this highly praised war literature now to be condemned solely because he happens to be running against a Republican incumbent?
If Webb does lace his war stories with occasional steamy sex scenes, he's hardly the only one. In fact, among Republicans, he has a lot of company.
Thanks to Slate magazine for surveying the salacious, if not pornographic, contributions by today's leading Republicans.
Who wrote: "Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress. She rolled onto him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. 'Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things,' she hissed." That was former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, now a likely candidate for president in 2008, in his novel "1945."
Author? "But as he lay and later groaned with writhing and release, he brought the full force of his mind to transmuted, voluptuarian elation in this physical union with the very woman . . . who had touched down her scepter on him, Nathaniel, igniting his mind, and his own scepter, which paid, now, devoted service." None other than the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr., in "Getting It Right."
And this, from the novel "The Apprentice"? "He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger . . . . One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he know not how best to touch her." That was written by Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, before he began outing undercover CIA agents.
Libby may have been inspired by Dick's wife, Lynne, who sang of lesbian love, way back in 1981, in her novel "Sisters": "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral state - no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were."
Clearly, George Allen doesn't know much about the body of Republican "smut." But he also doesn't understand the difference between literature and reality. No passages in Jim Webb's novels are as obscene as the policies of George W. Bush, which Allen, as senator, gleefully supports.
As for his qualifications for the United States Senate . . . Jim Webb graduated first in his class from Quantico. He's a highly decorated Vietnam vet. He served as President Reagan's secretary of the Navy. And he was commissioned to teach literature at the Naval Academy.
It that doesn't qualify you for the Senate, I don't know what does. Webb is certainly better qualified than a chicken hawk who wore a Confederate flag in his lapel, kept a noose in his law office, and, according to college football teammates, used the "N" word and stuffed a dead deer's head in a black family's mailbox.
Unfortunately, those scenes aren't from a novel.
Bill Press writes for Tribune Media Services.