The interesting thing about the angry-Webb mythology, though, is that it fascinates just as much as it frightens. Fellow Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill adoringly described Webb as a "street brawler," capturing the way some Democrats--call them the Jim Webb Orientalists--romanticize Webb's aggressive, exotically redneck roots and, by extension, his capacity to hormonally invigorate a party sick of its effete, wine-sipping image. Why promote aristocratic Democrats like Al Gore or John Kerry when there's Webb, who hangs out not with actresses or New York bankers but with the likes of his friend "Mac" McGarvey, a rough-hewn, ex-Marine honky-tonk manager with a nipple ring and only one arm?
My kinda guy! Let's have him for Veep!
I like this passage too:
Webb came to believe in anger not during his childhood, nor at war, but at Georgetown Law School. Landing there in the early '70s after Vietnam, he found himself thrust into a den of upper-crust snobs who relentlessly mocked the soldiers who had served with him. He describes the type in his novel A Country Such as This:The students, the people of books and pep clubs and prom committees, who had from their childhood feared the simple power and brutality of the blue collar kids, the red-necks, the bowling alley kings, the hot-rodding, ducktailed greasers who once mocked their studies and their lack of manliness ... [now] unloaded on the soldiers, cursing them, daring them, under the accepted guise of hating Army, Pentagon and War.
I think Webb gets it. Not bad for an officer.
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