….okay, I have every intention of belaboring it.

But tonight’s events have really wedged into my craw.

I just did an Amazon search on the passage in Webb’s book. It isn’t the least bit titillating. It’s in the context of an American in an exotic, backward, remote part of a foreign land. The penis-kissing scene baffles and bewilders the Americans. It is clearly not a “fellating.” It is not a depiction of pedophelia. It’s very obviously scene painting, and the shock and oddity of the act adds to the lead characters’ sense that they’re out-of-place.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the right wing blogosphere from gleefully calling Webb a pedophile.

This is really despicable on the part of the Allen campaign. It’s little more than a celebration of ignorance, isolation, and fear. It’s a bald attempt to deflect the Foley scandal, not to mention Allen’s own ethnically insensitive missteps in this campaign.

Let’s summarize: While George Allen was discovering his love for the Confederacy in Southern California and at the University of Virginia, Jim Webb was fighting the war in Vietnam, finding himself wholly immersed in a completely foreign culture. Webb was obviously rather profoundly affected by that experience. Because he chose to write about it, in a series of books that have won widespread praise from politicians, from fellow Vietnam vets, and from literary critics.

But war-loving, flag-waving George Allen has decided to hold all of that against Jim Webb. Tonight, Allen took what was clearly a scene-painting, cultural passage from one of those books, grotesquely took it out of context and sexualized it, then slapped it on a press release in an attempt to cheapen Webb’s well-received books as cheap porn with hints of pedophelia.

This isn’t just a political attack. It’s an attack on art. On writing. On expression. Hell, it’s an attack on knowledge and learning. It’s cheap and tawdry and cynical.

Perhaps if George Allen hadn’t himself procured a student deferment from the Vietnam War, he’d be more familiar with the country’s culture, and wouldn’t bastardize the work of a man who did fight, and who saw to share his experiences with the rest of us — Allen and his campaign of course announcing and advertising their own willfull stupidity in the process.

Just politics, I guess.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 1:28 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.