The New Republic has started a series of VP articles after an initial article on why HCR's not gonna happen. The first is on often controversial and seldom understood Jim Webb. The Washington Post article during the Virgina senate race on the paradox he is has been one of the better articles but never captured the essence of Webb as we have come to know him. As proud of being a white man as Obama is of being a black man, Webb is prone to hyperbole that makes people think he is more aggressive than he is.
A scholar and an outspoken intellectual and writer, Webb felt just as uneasy around elite types in college who looked down on poor whites, as Obama did around priviledged whites and both went into serious studying of where they had come from.
And the specific trajectory of Webb's political anger--he's a former Republican now raging against a "Republican Party that continually seeks to politicize military service" and CEOs "openly consumed by self-justifying greed"--is powerfully appealing, too. He embodies the liberal fantasy laid out by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter With Kansas?: that blue-collar whites will stop being mad at liberals for frowning at their guns and start being mad at conservatives for raping their pocketbooks. His emotional journey is the same one liberals want lower-class whites to undergo en masse.
Webb was an author before he was a senator; and, more than anything else--more than his conduct as Navy secretary or the occasional heated quote--his literary oeuvre is probably the source of his hotheaded reputation. Consider the Scots-Irish heritage--"whose blood still courses in [his] veins"--that Webb traces in his pop-history book Born Fighting. The modern-day Scots-Irish now living in Appalachia and the American South are, he explains, cut from the same mold as the "large-limbed, tattooed, red-haired madmen" of medieval Scotland who struck fear into the hearts of the more genteel Romans. These tribes were fiercely suspicious of authority, and their signature unwillingness to kiss anybody else's ass persisted through generations of depressing migrations and poverty. Their hero was William Wallace, who "learned early to hate--and to fight--the local English authorities." In the sixteenth century, writes Webb, the Scots-Irish could be found taking part in "unending blood feuds" in Scotland; by the seventeenth century, they were writing "no surrender" in their own blood during the siege of Londonderry in Ireland; by the eighteenth, they had become "daring moonshine runners" in the colonies; in the nineteenth, they were peopling the "frequently impatient, always outnumbered ... wildly and recklessly Celtic" Confederate army against the "plodding" Union force; and, by the twentieth, they were mounting KKK rallies out of "bitterness at being dominated."
Webb obviously finds this sort of wild, brawling nature seductive. At times, Born Fighting describes the Scots-Irish fighting spirit with almost pornographic delight: These men were "bellicose and often warlike," "unapologetically, even devilishly hedonistic," "often impossible to control," men of "infinite stubbornness" who "dressed provocatively, acted with a volatile belligerence, drank to excess," and "came to accept the fight as birthright, even as some kind of proof of life." Their modern heirs were people like Webb's father's friend Bud, whom Webb worshipped as a child and who once punched somebody so hard his eyeball fell out when he sneezed.
The article goes on however, to say that contrary to expectations, Webb has become a congenial member of the Senate and has earned the admiration of his GOP counterpart John Warner for accepting Warner's reversal of support for Webb bills gracefully.
The comments on the article are especially good.
Full article:
http://tnr.com/...