While working on my last post, I remembered that, during the 2006 Senate campaign in Virginia, Democrat Jim Webb was attacked by George Allen, the Republican incumbent, for having written novels meant for adult readers. I've now tracked down some of the details. Read all about it here.
The criticism leveled at Webb for the realistic manner in which he depicts, in his fiction, the deeds performed by men in a combat zone is of a piece with the ban on cameras at Dover Air Force Base, where the coffins of the war dead are unloaded. There is a beautiful mythology surrounding war. It envelopes in a misty halo Our Troops, their devotion and sacrifice and manifold gallantries. Nothing is permitted to intrude upon the fantasy. That it occurs to President Bush to connect his absence from the golf links to the experience of the men and women he has sent to war must be attributed mainly to his callow self. But the unreality that has been ceaselessly promoted by his closest advisors plays its part.
Lynne Cheney, too, seems unaware of how ridiculous she sounds. "His novels are full of sexually explicit references to incest," she says, holding her nose, of Webb's books. Apparently George Allen is to be preferred not only to Jim Webb but also to Sophocles. These are the grown-ups? Is she pandering to dopes or is she one herself? Lynne Cheney is fortunate that her scribblings about lesbian love are out of print. They wouldn't look like much next to the world according to Jim Webb.
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