Daily Blague

Here is a portrait of the Democratic candidate for one of Virginia's two US Senate seats, James Webb.*

He saw himself as a creature of a pervasive but nearly invisible Scot-Irish subculture, descended from the warrior clans of Ulster who migrated to North America in large numbers in the eighteenth century. They came to live mostly in the Appalachian South - a stubborn, bellicose people, fiercely individualistic and egalitarian. They settled the frontiers, invented country music, and fostered a truly native form of American democracy. Most important, they bore the brunt of fighting the nation's wars. ,,,

In Webb's world, manhood was a standing, to be earned. When he was a small boy, his father, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, would clench his fist and dare his son to strike it, taunting him o keep punching until the tears flowed. But Webb accepted that a father's highest duty was to prepare his son for manhood by teaching to fight, to hunt, and to handle a weapon. He got his first gun when he was eight, and Jimmy [his son] did, too. In such a culture, going off to war is part of what Webb calls "the Redneck Bar Mitzvah." **

Reading this for the first time, I felt myself bristling, and not because I thought that it misrepresented Mr Webb. No; I stiffened because everything about Mr Webb's "subculture" repels me, right down to the country music. What I have to face, though, is that what Mr Webb sees in the Northeast elite subculture to which I belong is the very same thing that I see in his: a smug smirk that I want to smack. Anything that we can do to marginalize one another, we will do, because the dislike is bone-deep. I hate his people for breaking the elite American republic created in 1789 - a republic that offered a very limited franchise. And he hates mine because we tried to do everything to block the influence of his Founding Father, Andrew Jackson. I honestly don't believe that we were meant to cohabit the same sovereignty, not then and not now, and it's why I curse my Yankee forebears for not allowing the South to secede upon the election of Abraham Lincoln. (There would still, in all likelihood, have been a war over the West.)

To Webb, himself once a distinguished member of the Marine Corps, military service was not just a patriotic gesture but a test of honor and courage, an essential rite of passage.***

I cannot express how pathetically benighted I find the musky reflex that associates honor with warfare. And then to complain about bearing "the brunt"? Of wars that might not be undertaken were it not for Mr Webb's need for rites of passage? Sending rednecks to war while sparing Ivy Leaguers seems just about right to me.

But what if James Webb and his tribe were our only allies in the fight to subdue the corporate colonization of the United States?

(On a related note.)

* From "Southern Discomfort," by Peter J Boyer, in The New Yorker, 30 October 2006. ** page 43. *** page 42.