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Punchy messenger, from a punchy history

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Consider the source. Consider in particular the messenger as much as the message. The Democrats' televised rebuttal, that traditional chore of "loyal opposition", to George W Bush’s seventh (yes, count them) State of the Union address, was pretty engaging as these things go, but the man voicing it was a lot more interesting in his own right. The job after all fell - or more accurately was carefully directed - to Jim Webb, the newbie Senator from Virginia (pictured).

Webb had already propelled himself into the post-election media limelight with his prickly, curt reaction to the President’s unwisely glad-handing inquiry about his son’s welfare, a son who is - famously now - serving in the US Marines in Iraq (a tour just extended, with the new Bush troops "surge").

 

Webb is among that crop of Congressional arrivals being quite often celebrated as the new "macho Dems". And he has for sure a strong military track-record, including duty as a Republican Navy Secretary (in the Ronald Reagan Administration) and medal-earning service on the ground in Vietnam, notably in battles for the An Hoa basin - as, like his son, a Marine. (His own father served in the Air Force in World War Two and much of the Cold War, as the Senator took pains to tell primetime viewers.)

 

But it's as a communicator that I'm considering Webb for the moment. And in this realm, his chops previously rested for many, certainly for me, upon his occasional journalism (including getting an Emmy for his PBS coverage of the 1983 Marines' barracks bombing in Beirut) and upon six hard-driving, best-selling novels based largely on his Vietnam experiences.

 

But three years ago a completely different form of writing suddenly distinguished the still-undeclared office-seeker. Under the name James Webb (perhaps more scholarly-looking on dust-jackets than the "Jim" of campaign posters) he penned a riveting and authoritative study of the Scots-Irish and their deep influence on American life - titled significantly enough Born Fighting, from the  Broadway division of publishers Random House.

 

No less a sociological observer than Tom Wolfe hailed the book as "a bombshell" for the way "it reveals the all-but-invisible ethnic group that has created the core beliefs of democracy, American-style".

 

That's quite a claim for the Northern Irish protestant tribe whose roots go back to the Scottish lowlands and their perpetual warring with the English, only to end up as transplanted representatives of English aggression in the six counties of what is modern-day Ulster.

 

But Webb makes a convincing case for their decisive role once their cohorts crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century, bringing their belligerent individualism with them. He traces their flourishing as rebels and nation-builders, accounting for 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army and including pioneers like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Meriwether Lewis and  William Clark - and later throwing up military leaders like Ulysses S Grant and George S Patton, and Presidents from Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton.

 

Along the way Webb charts how Scots-Irish stubbornness, self-reliance - and, crucially, their mistrust of any elites, not to mention their sheer pugnaciousness - have also permeated American popular culture, not least in country music (as he sweeps for examples from Johnny Cash to the Dixie Chicks, especially with such songs as the Chicks' "Traveling Soldier").

 

Unsurprisingly Webb places himself foursquare in this social and political lineage; the Washington Post, well before his election victory against the hapless George Allen, headlined a profile this way: "Don't Call Him Redneck! James Webb Hates the Expression, But Is Very Proud of the Culture".

 

He certainly represents a very different kind of Democrat from the many Mr Nice Guys, nice sometimes to the point of being politically effete, that blue states sent to DC in the '80s and 90's. As I was reading the admiring litany of punchy, highly effective Scots-Irishmen in my copy of Born Fighting (a 2004 gift, by the way, from that iconoclastic Irish-American author, raconteur and virulent anti-Bushite, Malachy McCourt - who cannily guessed I'd like it) I couldn't help thinking about Webb's winning of the Navy Cross.

 

He received that honor in 1969 for sustaining fragmentation wounds as he shielded a comrade with his own body when a Viet Cong grenade exploded near them, and yet also managed to blow up an enemy bunker at the same time. The official citation made a point not just of his courage, but also his "aggressive leadership".

 

Somehow I cannot see Webb allowing himself (like the now self-marginalized John Kerry) to be ... in the resonant phrase that's taken hold in the darker annals of propaganda since 2004 ...  "swift-boated".