Earlier this year, I traveled with Senator Jim Webb and his staff through Southwestern Virginia, his first visit to the region since his upset victory over George Allen. I was on board as a writer for Rolling Stone, but I was there as a fan, too -- of his politics, sure, but also of his fiction. There has never been as talented a novelist in national American politics. But what impressed me most about Jim Webb were the people who supported him, so it's with them that I decided to begin my story for Rolling Stone, just published in the issue on the stands now (look for Amy Winehouse on the cover--much cuter than Jim Webb). Here's the lede:
As night settles between the mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state's southwestern corner, Sen. James Webb's people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse. They're coal miners and miners' wives, a third of them in the camouflage strike gear of the United Mine Workers, many of them wearing ball caps declaring them veterans of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. A leather-skinned veteran named Eldridge tells me in a raspy whisper that he voted for Webb because Webb, a novelist and historian, had gotten these people, mountain people, right in his most recent book, a best-selling history of the Scots-Irish in America called Born Fighting. "We've got our own ghosts and goblins," Eldridge says, and he thinks Webb sees them. "He has the Second Sight."
Eldridge is the third person this evening to cite the supernatural -- a kind of cultural memory, maybe -- as a reason for supporting Webb, a fact that doesn't surprise Virginia's new Democratic senator. "My grandmother taught me my ghosts," he tells me, his voice a low, considered rumble.
Which is to say, Jim Webb is man with a sense of history. Rolling Stone has put the first half of the story online, but in the second half, Webb and I sit down in a bar outside of Roanoke and I discover what seem to be the magic words to get this rather stand-offish man to talking. "The past isn't dead," he started to quote Faulkner at me, to which I responded "It's not even past." It's one of my favorite lines, too. I'm interested in any politician who thinks like that.
A lot of Kossacks were upset with Webb's recent break with the Democrats over war funding. So was I. But in his defense, I'll say this -- despite his reputation as fighter, Webb is also a subtle strategist and diplomatic thinker, as evidenced in his novel The Emperor's General, a fiction built around General MacArthur's occupation of postwar Japan. It was in the context of a discussion of that novel, in fact, that Webb told me that he'd been quietly meeting with Condoleeza Rice. I didn't include that in the story, but I wish I had -- we'll never know for sure, but I wonder how much of Rice's recent willingness to talk with the Iranians -- which is what Webb has been prescribing for awhile -- is the result of those meetings.
Some people are going to say, So what? Rice is still a tool of the Bush regime.
I agree. But Webb, through Rice, has been slowing down the drumbeat for war with Iran. If he can slow it down enough -- until a less bellicose administration is in office -- that might be all that matters.
As for Iraq, and what Webb can do about it, that's a much harder question. Webb believes he's been consistant in his views over the years. That's fine -- that's a novelist talking. I don't mean fiction -- I mean that he's thinking about the themes that have absorbed him and supplied him with stories over the years, questions of class and anger. And in that sense, he has been consistant. But the trajectory from his first novel, Fields of Fire, to his most rightwing work, A Country Such as This, to his most recent, Born Fighting, to the moment this spring when Webb sat in his office and spoke to me about the "underclass" and recommended I read a Nation article by William Greider (not online) is anything but a straight line. And I wouldn't want it to be, not as a fan of his writing or as a journalist sympathetic to his current politics. From the story:
Just a few years ago, Webb described America's elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were "cultural Marxists," and "the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood" were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means "the military-industrial complex," and "the Cheney factor," the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class -- sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China -- are becoming interwoven in his mind. Iraq has aligned his angers.
If you're interested, you can read the first half of the story online at Rolling Stone And if you're really interested, go out and buy the issue with Amy Winehouse on the cover (follow the cleavage) and get the rest of story, including Webb's discussion of Hitler, Stalin, Marx, and our present situation. Also, the great photo of Webb with Mac McGarvey, one of his smartest advisors since Vietnam and, during the campaign, his one-armed driver. I wish Rolling Stone put articles in their entirety online, but usually they don't. The upside of picking up the prinst is that you'll also get the brilliant Matt Taibbi's demolition of Rudy. Not that anyone was wondering whether Rudy was a good guy, but the article is still pretty damn funny. And there's always Amy Winehouse.