The right is all atwitter with revelations, leaked to the Drudge Report, that Virginia Democratic Senate candidate [tag]Jim Webb[/tag], an accomplished and successful [tag]novel[/tag]ist, included a racy fictional scene in one of his books about a pedophile. It seems like a relatively odd thing to base the campaign on, but Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) is in a very tough spot with very little time remaining, and I suppose you have to go with what you’ve got.
I’ll concede from the outset that the sex scene Webb wrote about is pretty out-there, but then again, sex scenes in literature often are. Indeed, therein lies the point, at least as far as the politics of this story goes — if Webb is to be smeared for a racy description in one of his novels, conservatives are going to be pretty busy condemning several of their close allies.
For example, Scooter Libby wrote a novel featuring an incident involving bestiality.
“At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.“
Then, of course, there’s Lynne Cheney. In 1981, Cheney, part of a conservative movement that complains bitterly about popular culture and its negative effect on traditional families, wrote a lesbian romance novel. Laura Flanders, who was brave enough to read the book, described it as “celebrating and promotes the value of preventative devices, condoms, to women who want to remain free. It features a woman who has unmarried sex with the widow of her sister — all this by Lynne Cheney, the culture warrior of the right.”
In one particularly memorable, though poorly written, part of the book, Cheney wrote:
“Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.”
Perhaps my personal favorite is Bill O’Reilly.
It never generated much in the way of attention, but O’Reilly’s 1998 novel, “Those Who Trespass,” was pretty odd.
In 1998, after the launch of “The O’Reilly Factor,” but before superstardom, [O’Reilly] published a thriller called “Those Who Trespass,” which is his most ambitious and deeply felt piece of writing. “Those Who Trespass” is a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses. A tall, b.s.-intolerant television journalist named Shannon Michaels, the “product of two Celtic parents,” is pushed out by Global News Network after an incident during the Falkland Islands War, and then by a local station, and he systematically murders the people who ruined his career. He starts with Ron Costello, the veteran correspondent who stole his Falkland story:
“The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.”
Michaels stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. He next murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him: he buries the guy in beach sand up to his neck and lets him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. O’Reilly describes each of these killings — the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself — in loving detail.
Apparently, according to the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann, the book also offers readers a second tall, b.s.-intolerant Irish-American detective named Tommy O’Malley, who tries to solve Michaels’s murders while competing with the killer for the affection of a busty aristocrat turned b.s.-intolerant crime columnist. As Michael Crowley put it, “The book is reminiscent of a 14-year-old’s revenge fantasy in other ways, which explains a lot.”
The list goes on and on. The point isn’t that the public should condemn political figures who write novels with risqué scenes; the point is that it’s pretty common and hardly worth shaping a Senate campaign around.
Besides, the Webb novel that has so outraged Allen’s conservative allies? It was praised and endorsed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which probably wouldn’t have happened were the book some smut-filled pornography.