Damned if You Don't . . .

. . . throw in some sordid sex scenes when you're writing a tough-guy war novel. The conventions of the genre, the market, and the publisher demand it. It's called an Obligatory Scene: "one that is expected by the audience relative to the genre." We who haven't been to the darkest places read such novels to glimpse Reality in all its seamy glory.

But like everything else -- tales of cheating on college exams, old lovers and drug buddies popping up like river-dumped corpses -- it can come back to bite you in the ass if you ever run for office.

George Allen's campaign had the bright, if rather childish, idea of going through James Webb's Vietnam war novels for the dirty parts, as if such scenes revealed anything about the mind of a particular writer and not just about the well-established conventions of the genre. Indeed, these scenes often seem borrowed, prefabricated, ordered wholesale from some potboiler factory and slotted in at prescribed intervals -- precisely not like they've boiled up from the writer's own secret obsessions.

That's how Webb's "sex scenes" read to me, with one exception: the scene in Lost Soldiers where the narrator witnesses a Vietnamese man lift his baby son into the air and put the boy's penis in his mouth. Like some commenters at Althouse, I used Amazon's "Search Inside This Book" feature to find the passage (on page 405) and had the impression that it probably depicted a strange and disturbing incident Webb had actually witnessed in Vietnam, as opposed to being a figment of his prurient imagination.

If you didn't know anything about books, writing, or fiction, you might naïvely believe that those passages reflect badly on Webb as anything other than a writer. Do the Republicans really think their constituents are that ignorant? What's more elitist than assuming and cynically trying to exploit such naïveté?

And don't you wonder how many excellent potential candidates avoid running for office because they've got some perfectly ordinary human secret(s) they're afraid will be dragged out and turned into their downfall?

Comments

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Hey, watch where you point that thing --- you don't mean "Republicans", you mean "idiots".

Not that there's no crossover.

[Pastor_Jeff]

If you didn't know anything about books, writing, or fiction, you might naïvely believe that those passages reflect badly on Webb as anything other than a writer.

What's the saying, Amba? "Judge the audience, not the writer" -- something like that.

Now, blogging, that's different...

[PatHMV]

I think the problem for Webb with these passages is that their treatment of fictional women tie in very neatly with the allegations about his general attitude towards real women.

Why is it that this guy, who speaks so passionately in favor of the "warrior culture", is suddenly a hero of the Democratic Party which is, for the moment at least, the anti-war, anti-military-industrial-complex party?

[amba]

I'm not up on Webb's treatment of real women -- would you fill us in?

The passages themselves look pretty much standard hard-boiled guy fiction to me.

You know the answer to your second question -- politicians will do anything to win. The gay-friendly Democrats found themselves strange bedfellows with gay-bashers over Foley, eh? And the Republicans were suddenly allowing how gayness wasn't so bad when it was one of their own. (This entirely aside from the very legitimate exploitation-of-minors issue, which is the real issue.) The Dems are schizo about the military. (More than) half of them want to pull out of Iraq immediately, damn the consequences. The other (smaller) half want to show they're really tough enough to run the country.

[amba]

Oops, sorry. You already filled us in on Webb and women -- I should just follow your "allegations" link.

[amba]

Ah, come on. Case in point! The very Republicans who are suddenly sounding so politically-correct and raking Webb over the coals for his "Women Can't Fight" article were saying EXACTLY the same thing back then. Pure political expediency. I will go so far as to say that some of what Webb said remains true. And some of it has proven overcome-able by women's determination and men's sullen gallantry.

That is so mixed up on that website with instances of Webb's macho callousness towards women ("thunder thighs," etc.) that I can't separate the breast and thigh meat from the propaganda bone.

Seems to me he was just a product of old-fashioned macho military culture. It cracks me up (and pleases me too) to see Republicans maneuvered into being the straight-faced defenders of feminism. Don't they want us to go back home and make babies so Western civilization won't die out?

[Alan S C]

Down here in Texas, we have a race for State Comptroller where the Republican candidate (a woman) wrote a romance novel a number of years ago. The Democrat (a man) has been going on an on about how the Repub is a pornographer and unfit for office -- although the book is your standard romance plot found in any Borders outlet.

Idiocy does indeed cross party lines. I'll be voting for the Repub simply because the Dem is obviously a damn fool.

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

"Do the Republicans really think their constituents are that ignorant?" -- Amba

"No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby." -- Mencken

[Tully]

Just as with Lynne Cheney's lesbian Western romance novel, I promise I will not hold Webb's fiction writing against him if I never ever EVER have to read any of that awful prose again.

[PatHMV]

Amba, I don't suggest that there's no hypocrisy here by Allen's camp. Certainly his supporters are more likely to share Webb's view on military culture and military service.

But realistically, this election is all about turnout at this point. Just as the Democrats leaped to attack Foley precisely to weaken the GOP base's enthusiasm to get out and vote, Allen is trying to dampen the enthusiasm of the Democrat's base to turn out.

At any rate, my point was not to engage in competitive political demonology, but to directly respond to your suggestion that fiction writers ought not be held responsible for sharing the views of everything they write. Certainly in regards to particular episodes and stories that is true. But in a larger picture, many if not most writers write to share a worldview that they have. Does anybody doubt that Tom Clancy strongly supports the military and special forces people?

To do one of those pernicious hypotheticals, suppose Allen was a novelist who wrote genre romances set in the antebellum South, and as such frequently used the n-word and other slurs. I think it would be legitimate to use that as another piece of evidence, along with "macaca" and all the other charges brought against Allen, to suggest that he harbored racist tendencies.

Webb's book passages, standing alone, don't necessarily indicate his worldview. But combine the passages with his non-fiction stances on the role of women in the military and fairly credible allegations of inappropriate or unwise treatment of individual women, and I think the passages and the charges reinforce each other.