Tangled Webb
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Tangled Webb Cognitive dissonance in Virginia By Andrew Ferguson The culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck [is] the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and...
...Those monuments that permeated the nation's capital, and the lofty words that washed over the Congress every day, inundating its activities, became in a way artificial...
...She said she was a Quaker...
...She shook her head and kneaded her hands...
...Yet this step toward "economic fairness" is not available to a Democratic candidate these days (or to many Republicans either...
...The devil is in the details," Tejada said...
...Webb's views of immigration, like many of his positions on questions of domestic policy, are unformed...
...He says he was moved to run for the Senate when he saw "the breakdown in our society along economic lines...
...Walter Tejada, Arlington's leading Hispanic politician and the man responsible for making Democrats of the county's growing immigrant population, arranged for Webb to attend a small rally with what Tejada calls "the community...
...When I asked another neighbor what she thought of Webb's experience working in the Reagan administration—he served as secretary of the Navy late in Reagan's second term—she waved me off...
...One "Webb for Senate" brochure shows what happens when the Mommy party tries to thump the hairy chest it doesn't have...
...she said...
...Here George Allen—former governor, favorite of the conservative movement, and one-term Republican senator of no particular distinction—is being challenged by the most sophisticated right-wing reactionary to run on a Democratic ticket since Grover Cleveland...
...This is Webb's second ingenious bit of jujitsu: By his logic, the war in Iraq isn't an assertion of American power, but another disastrous symptom of a country gone soft, the feckless gesture of a superpower brought low by wusses...
...I come from West Virginia," she said, "and I discovered last time that my entire family back home voted for Bush...
...At the same time, though, he says he supports a cut in the capital gains tax, in case a redneck wants to sell his stocks...
...My culture needs to rediscover itself, and in doing so to regain its power to shape the direction of America...
...He really likes the Confederacy...
...Langley's neighbors told me...
...Would Webb favor tough economic sanctions against businesses that employ illegals, as a way of drying up the tide of immigrants...
...a reporter asked...
...He built a career from the revulsion he felt at the left wing's failure to appreciate the Vietnam war or the men who fought it...
...And it explains the entire national convention of 2004, in which desperate Democrats nominated an undistinguished career politician for no other reason than that he was a decorated war hero and then launched his campaign with ceremonies so martial they might have been borrowed from a Latin American coup: phalanxes of saluting veterans, crisscrossing color guards, brass bands pumping Sousa tunes—everything short of a firing squad to liquidate the opposition...
...ists who constitute society's decadent elite and who have made their home in the Democratic party ever since their treacherous betrayal of our fighting men in Vietnam...
...They reminded Doc [a veteran congressman suddenly stirred to idealism] and the others that either the past was false, or the present was a disappointing mockery of what once was greatness...
...It's not hard to imagine where his populism and ethnic allegiance would lead him, though...
...George W. Bush "has no feel for military culture," Webb says...
...Do you think I'm kidding...
...I have friends who say they'll vote for him, but reluctantly," she said...
...Aren't they supposed to do the protecting...
...At the party she told me that many of her acquaintances had expressed reservations about her candidate...
...He is vaguer on the subject of how to fix this unhappy state of affairs...
...He's incredibly pro-gun...
...A quick way to raise those wages would be to cut off the future flow of unskilled immigration...
...Webb's trick is to adapt this history of white folk to the categories of contemporary multiculturalism...
...Webb hates Washington as only someone who works here can...
...And the Confederacy...
...And they worry—about other things...
...Something's not right with this picture, obviously, but then so many pictures seem out of whack this election year, and nowhere more so than in Virginia...
...That point of view appears most plainly in Born Fighting, his only popular work of nonfiction...
...It turned out that not many people at Mrs...
...We've had no corporate enforcement for six years...
...Hey thanks, Mom...
...One thing that all economists agree on—those who favor the present influx of immigrants and those who don't—is that mass immigration lowers the wages of unskilled, uneducated native-born workers...
...Out in the real world, military men "soldier on for the children still at home," knowing that "such a motivation seems medieval in modern America...
...I cried all night...
...He hunted...
...This warrior romance has led them into numberless absurdities...
...Of course, that was in rural Illinois...
...We must first define our borders," he said...
...Tangled Webb Cognitive dissonance in Virginia By Andrew Ferguson The culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck [is] the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether...
...Webb's complaints about modern politics are much sterner, and much more plausible, than the milk-and-water cliches of "anti-Washington" candidates out in flyover country...
...The human tools of American politics...
...And guns," I said...
...Both of these inversions—the use of multicultural-ism to advance the ethnic interests of white people, and the use of warrior rhetoric to discredit the Bush administration's war—might be extremely valuable to Democrats, if they knew what they were doing...
...The decadence of this nation of pussies shows itself most clearly in the relationship between the military and its civilian leadership...
...Does Webb really want to punish employers who hire members of the community...
...His service as a Reagan administration official, that bothers some people...
...We especially don't hear such rude talk during Sunday afternoon house parties like the one Pat Langley hosted two weeks ago...
...She'd invited friends, fellow activists, and neighbors over for punch and coffee and finger food...
...And so he did—but only when Reagan ordered cuts in the military budget that threatened the Reaganite goal of a 600-ship Navy...
...We have got to get a handle on this...
...my people," as Webb calls them...
...They call him Chicken Hawk because he didn't have the guts to serve when there was a war on and now every time there's a crisis he wants to send them in...
...Today my son is 24, and the average CEO earns 200 times what the average wage-earner does...
...Among those Arlingtonians who do know more about Webb, enthusiasm is often muted...
...And for the last fifty years the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth...
...And they know he's a Vietnam veteran whose two Purple Hearts, Silver Star, and Navy Cross testify to unimpeachable heroism...
...Later reporters asked Webb to clarify his position...
...Tejada glanced at the ceiling...
...If Cheney and the theorists had some military experience, he says, they would never have tried "putting a Judeo-Christian military system in the cradle of Muslim culture...
...That tells you something right there about the kind of man he is...
...Maybe I should read one...
...There can be reasonable differences Democrats can have," she said...
...Tejada nodded solemnly...
...But wouldn't punishing employers reduce the opportunities for workers coming across the border...
...We don't often hear rude talk like that up here in Arlington, Virginia, straight across the river from Washington, D.C...
...He turns liberalism's assumptions of ethnic grievance and victimization to the service of people who, in more conventional accounts, have themselves been seen as the victimizers...
...Soldiers are atavists, grounded in reality, connected by blood to the soil of a place, and the farther one travels from the military life the more unreal America gets...
...She wanted them to watch a campaign video and listen to a conference call over a speaker phone, and then give as much money as they could to her favorite candidate, James Webb...
...she asked...
...I say, He'll listen...
...from Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by James Webb (2004) Yowie...
...Ask yourself why we won every war before 1947, and we haven't won one since...
...Langley's knew much about Webb...
...Punishing employers who hire illegals is not, needless to say, part of the game plan for the community, or for Arlington Democrats...
...Other things they think they know about him, however, aren't quite so...
...Jim Webb has the courage to change Washington," says the headline, over paragraphs that jump with words like "fight" and "threat" and "leadership" and "tough...
...He supports a higher minimum wage and an end to "corporate tax breaks which cost American jobs...
...He'll learn...
...Here the leafy, winding streets are lined with Priuses and Volvos and the bumper stickers say "Visualize World Peace" and "Goddess Power...
...There's got to be employer sanctions, otherwise you're going to keep wages down...
...But that's never a safe bet...
...The vagueness doesn't bother his supporters, because the war is the true rationale for his campaign...
...What has made Webb acceptable to the Democrats of Arlington, however unevenly, is his furious opposition to the war in Iraq, which he declared early, before there was even a war to oppose, in an op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2002...
...Webb, by contrast, has a long history of right-wingery...
...Democrats are so sick of being labeled the peace party—mostly because they are the peace party—that they grow faint at the first flash of a battle ribbon, in hopes of proving they too are just as recklessly bloodthirsty as their opponents...
...Invariably in Webb's novels the soldiers erupt in frustration against the civilian leaders...
...It explains why, for example, they stuck that Snoopy helmet on poor Michael Dukakis and forced him to ride around in a tank...
...Yes," Webb said, "there needs to be corporate enforcement...
...One friend tells me she just won't feel right voting for him," Mrs...
...Langley is a Democratic party activist in this most liberal of suburbs in this most conservative of states...
...Jim is a very complex thinker...
...Are they violent...
...I asked her whether she'd read any of Webb's war novels...
...Bozman said...
...The same Jim Webb whose war novels bristle with contempt for the professional liberals, mollycoddlers, and antimilitary cultural MarxAndrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard...
...The crowd seemed puzzled...
...One of his first public disputes, in 1981, involved his opposition to the minimalist design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he called an insult to veterans...
...And here too he has worked an amazing inversion—one that also could have been predicted from his books, particularly the impressive string of military novels that have made him well known...
...It also underlies the economic populism that allows Webb to slide edgewise into the mainstream of today's Democratic party...
...Dreema Fisk, an Arlington poet and retired schoolteacher, told me she'd heard that Webb had once been a member of the Republican party—a group with which, she said, she was tragically familiar...
...Touch pat shake smile...
...And then we must ensure corporate responsibility, because a lot of this is going to come down to the employers...
...In a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation...
...Webb rails against "the wielders of cultural power such as Hollywood, academia, and major media [who] chip away at the core principles that have defined the traditions and history of [Scots-Irish] people...
...He refuses to exploit it...
...Together the books form a long, eloquent protest against the wussification of America, exemplified in the Washington world of slick pols, butt-covering bureaucrats, and the panty-waist, nancy-boy journalists who serve as their stenographers...
...Educate him...
...As committed activists, they were just happy he's a Democrat who's been running even in the polls with Allen and has a fair chance at an upset...
...I said...
...The book traces the history of Scots-Irish immigrants—the Southern rednecks referred to in the quotation at the beginning of this arti-cle—from their violent origins in the old country to their violent arrival in America and on through their violent progress across the Eastern seaboard into the rural South and mid-Atlantic, where they have at last learned to channel their propensity for violence into activities both admirable (the military) and stupid (NASCAR...
...Webb's right-wing populism and the liberalism of today's Democratic party make for an abrasive fit, and hints of it showed the other morning at Cecilia's, a Latin restaurant on Columbia Pike, in Arlington...
...Lang-ley played the campaign video, which offered a parade of old combat pictures of Webb and a series of testimonials from his war buddies...
...After Webb was gone, I asked Tejada about this...
...And all his ideas are reactionary...
...He resigned in protest...
...And now his people are fighting back...
...Like affirmative action...
...Webb asks himself the question in nearly every novel, and he has a ready answer: The country is run by people like "Chicken Hawk," the secretary of defense in Something to Die For...
...We will consult with him, advise him going forward...
...With Tejada next to him, he said he favored some path to legalization and citizenship for the illegals already here...
...From the perspective of the activist Left, [rednecks] are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness...
...I said...
...He has come to rescue his people —the poor whites who (along with poor blacks) have been the chief victims of globalized turbocapitalism...
...You can figure it out for yourself," says one fed-up military man in Something to Die For...
...The legislation after World War Two that created the Department of Defense and supposedly ensured civilian control over the military has been a disaster...
...But what about the future...
...There are concerns here and there," she said...
...Instead the president is surrounded by "theorists who have never been on a battlefield, who have never put a uniform on, and who are looking at this thing in a totally different way from people who have had to worry about their troops...
...When I was 24, the average CEO earned 20 times what the average wage-earner did...
...Webb seldom misses a chance to point out the military record, or lack of it, of Dick Cheney...
...Webb makes the same case in arguing against the Iraq war...
...Civilians live in a world of appearances and insincerity and false emotions, "going off to business school or playing Nintendo" while their betters take up arms to save their candy-butts...
...Jim understands how to protect our men and women in uniform...
...Webb is not only a gifted novelist but something rarer: a novelist of ideas...
...In a brief and uncomfortable stump speech, Webb told the Hispanic crowd that he was against a guest-worker program...
...The neighbor didn't flinch when Mrs...
...It's hard for anyone in these days of the Reagan Afterglow to remember that some people, back in the late 1980s, thought Old Ron was going soft...
...We as a country need to have a long debate about these things...
...In every speech he cites the same statistics: "Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies pay zero corporate income taxes," he says...
...He's a war hero, but you know he's refusing to let the campaign reference his war experience," one of Mrs...
...Using diversity dogma to put the white man back on top—it is a marvelous inversion...
...A spokesman of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose hand Webb refused to shake for 20 years, Kerry is genuinely a man of the left—a cen-timillionaire of the wind-surfing left, to be sure, but still a man whose every political instinct made him feel right at home in the peace party of George McGovern (another war hero, about whom Webb once said: "I wouldn't have voted for him if you put a gun to my head...
...Politicians in Webb's telling are always "posturing . . . each of them possessed with the type of personality that could slap the back and shake the hand of a complete stranger [yuk...
...The embrace of Webb in Virginia has had the same effect...
...We will continue to work with Jim on this," Tejada said...
...The argument that runs through it is an ingenious act of cultural jujitsu...
...There's a large difference between Webb and John Kerry, however...
...Webb is what the political taxonomists like to label a blood-and-soil conservative...
...As chairman of the County Board a decade ago, Ellen Bozman helped bring about Arlington's continuing era of Democratic dominance...
...He named his son after Robert E. Lee...
...Wait a sec...
...That's the same James Webb—the staunch defender of the right to bear arms who's warned his countrymen about collectivist taming by the Left, its war on salt-of-the-earth "Joe Sixpack" through such programs as affirmative action, also known (to Webb, among others) as "state-sponsored racism...
...I had a cousin who had guns...
...And Webb's opposition to the war is doubly valuable to Democrats because of his bona fides as a warrior...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 8
