As both our esteemed editor, R. Emmett
Tyrrell, Jr., and George Will have pointed out, it didn’t take
long for Senator-elect Jim Webb, representing the courtly Southern
gentlemen of Virginia, to demonstrate that he himself is no
gentleman. At a White House reception he publicly snubbed his host,
President Bush, and took the occasion of the President’s polite
inquiry after his son, a Marine serving in Iraq, as an invitation
to air his political differences with him. “Boor” (Mr. Will’s word)
and “cad” (Mr. Tyrrell’s) do not seem terms too strong to describe
such deplorable behavior, though some people might have pointed out
that it could hardly be counted a surprise in a man who makes such
a public fuss about his record of military service and uses it to
belittle and intimidate others — a man who, moreover, is
apparently unashamed of having achieved his present eminence by
turning his coat and betraying so many of his former friends and
colleagues in the Republican party.
But I wonder if Mr. Tyrrell can be right to say that the man
whose campaign slogan was “Born Fighting” is a throwback to the
days of Andrew Jackson and dueling politicians? On the contrary, it
seems to me that his accusation of cowardice brought against his
opponent, Senator George Allen, during the late campaign for the
latter’s failure to serve in Vietnam could only have been issued by
someone who knew he was safe from a challenge. Or, I suppose, a
fool. Can’t rule that out. But what struck me about the
Senator-elect’s ungentlemanliness was that he seemed to be proud of
it. He was not being merely uncouth but was rude on principle, and
in this he showed himself to be very much a man of our own times.
In fact, Mr. Webb illustrates how the psycho-therapeutic revolution
of the last century helped to undermine the traditional honor
culture to which, despite his military vainglory, he remains such a
stranger.
Manners, you see, are fake. Manners are inauthentic. Manners are
pretending to have feelings you don’t have. And for
post-therapeutic man the feelings he does have are the
most important things in the world. Not to nurture and fondle them
and take them out for public display on the slightest pretext would
be to be guilty not only of dishonesty but of “repression” — than
which not even President Bush is more to be hated. That’s why
Fightin’ Jim is so proud to be a boor, a cad and a jerk. It’s not
just that he doesn’t know or care that that’s what he is, though he
may not. It’s that he expects the world’s applause for being
authentic and true to his feelings. Unfortunately for him, the
world rarely does applaud such authenticity, for all its
theoretical approval of it. Just because we believe implicitly in
true psychic reality — whether angry, hate-filled or lascivious —
it doesn’t mean that we enjoy seeing it on public exhibition.
The first “we” in that last sentence is rhetorical. I, for one,
don’t believe in true psychic reality. I believe it to be a
modernist superstition from which our culture’s enlightened
liberation cannot come too soon. But that happy day seems a very
long way off. In fact, it’s not too much to say that Mr. Webb owes
his senatorial seat to the undiminished power of the same
superstition, since Senator Allen’s casual use of a word, “macaca,”
which might or might not have been a racial epithet, was made into
a scandal by the Washington Post and other interested
parties on the sole and sufficient but unspoken assumption that the
word was a key to unlock the secrets of the Senator’s discreditable
racialist unconscious. Now and forever after, he will find himself
in the company of such “celebrity racists” as Mel Gibson and
Michael Richards for no better reason than that the use of a racial
taunt (if, in his case, that is what it was) is assumed to be an
expression of psychic reality.
Look here, for instance, for what the Post’s columnist
Eugene Robinson had to say about Mr. Richards’s
outburst in a nightclub in Los Angeles:
Anyone who thinks that racism in this country is
history really ought to watch the video of Kramer going postal. I’m
not saying that everyone is like Michael Richards….I’m not saying
that evil lurks in the hearts of all men and women. But I am saying
that, as a society, we still haven’t purged ourselves of racial
prejudices and animosities. We’ve buried them under layers of
sincere enlightenment and insincere political correctness, but
they’re still down there, eating at our souls.
Really? How does he know? Rather than getting into the metaphysical
realm, isn’t it easier to suppose that Mr. Richards, when he was
attacked, simply reached for a weapon that would wound as he
himself had felt wounded? It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t honorable. It
wasn’t admirable — except, barring the racial content, to those
like Mr. Webb who admire sincere expressions of feeling above all
else. But why do we have to bring anybody’s soul into the matter?
Alas, there is an answer to that question. The reason is that doing
so is what feeds the scandal-devouring beast that our media and
political culture have become in the absence of the honor that
Senator-elect Webb is very far from being alone in spurning.
