A few quick points on the ostensibly grotesque sexual scenes in James Webb's fiction. The first is that it's rather remarkable how few of them there are. The guy's a war novelist -- and somehow, the testosterone pumping through those stories tends to enable no end of pornographic asides. And yet only three of the examples on George Allen's list are actually sexual in nature. One is a scene set in strip club where a stripper mounts a banana. Another has two male prisoners engaging in furtive mutual masturbation. And then there's the the real excerpt:
“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. 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.”
That seemed a bit odd to me too. It's fiction, to be sure, and if Scooter Libby can indulge his demented fantasied of brown bears raping little girls -- repeatedly -- Webb can do what he wants. But as you folks pointed out, this isn't Webb's fevered imagination at work. Someone linked to this anthropological piece on crosscultural treatment of children:
The authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no incest, just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their baby's genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals...In China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters and suck the penis of a small son...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually strokes her son's genitals."
Judge that how you want, but it's important confirmation for Webb's explanation this morning:
"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist. The duty of a writer is to illuminate his surroundings."
So what we're left with is rather remarkable: Webb, who fought in Vietnam and spent much of his lifetime exposing that experience in his fiction, documented a real and unsettling feature of daily life there. It was non-sexual, but testament to his actual experience in the country. The Allen campaign is warping it, ripping it out of context and pretending that it stems from Webb's own fantasies of pedophilic fellatio.
My guess? This is going to come out. Days one and two of this story will be very bad for Webb. Day three will not be. It's going to come out that these were strange and nightmarish remembrances from when Webb was overseas, fighting for his country. And Allen will look like a fool and a knave for trying to turn evidence of his war record into proof of perversion. This will give Webb the opportunity to speak of all he saw in Vietnam without seeming exploitive or opportunistic about. And Webb's service there, and the lesson it taught him, are not issues Allen wants on the agenda.
The book, by the way, was a terrific seller. And it did so well in no small part because it was endorsed and enthusiastically blurbed by one John McCain.
Also at Tapped
