Posted on 10/17/2006 9:01:21 AM PDT by ReagansRaiders
Dear Rembrandt_fan,
"Vote against Webb because he betrayed the trust of Reagan Administration, vote against Webb because he is an opportunist who switched parties and hitched his wagon to the antiwar Left, vote against Webb because he has overseen one of the dirtiest campaigns in political memory,..."
How about, "Vote against Webb because he's a pornographer"?
Reading what was at the link, it came across to me like pornography than trying to exemplify the nature of one of the book's characters.
sitetest
This sounds as if Jim Webb was angling for the all-important NAMBLA endorsement.
There are some really ill people in this world.
Later pingout.
Sometimes the law see more crime in a picture than in an act.
While many communities have an age of consent to sexual acts under 18, you'd better not consider taking pictures of your partner or the act even if you AND you partner are both under 18.
>>>You wrote, "...you are unimaginative as well."
That would be some surprise to the folks who buy and read my fiction and to the clients who employ my commercial art talent and graphic design expertise. That is how I make my living. And it's a very good living, thanks.>>>
Wow, it seems you reserve that imagination to those talents because it certainly isn't showing up here.
>>>Scooter's has a scene where a bear savagely rapes an underage girl. >>>
What the...??? A bear rapes an underage girl? Who even dreams up this?
DC people, I guess.
BTW writing about the rules of ettiquette in a whore house might be fascinating, enlightening, entertaining and socially revealing. But voters might also decide the author isn't the one they want as a senator.
You are correct.
Pretty amazing what passes for literature [sic] these days. And people act as though one can feed one's mind with any filth and the mind won't be affected. As though you could eat rat poison or live on total junk food and still be physically healthy.
Good grief. James H. Webb, Jr. is absolutely freakin' nuts.
I'm wondering if he didn't go to a seminar for blue romance writers where they tell writer wannabees the formula for inserting sex at strategic places throughout the book.
If his target audience is males one has to wonder what's up with that pedophile stuff.
I loved him on Dragnet.
The Hunt for Red October, Clancy's first novel, actually actually great fiction, for the genre anyway. In his next book, he basically blew up the world (Red Storm Rising). I read a couple of snatches of later works.
In the later stuff, he sort of repeats the formula that made Hunt for Red October such a great read. I guess it works. But he lost me when he blew up the world...or rather...didn't. The USSR and USA go to war, exchange a couple of nuclear weapons, but the whole thing falls apart because a major gets hit by a car? WTF?
Anyway, Red October was a different beast than what came later.
I read the passage. It's disturbing, but I'll tell you what I think Webb was trying to do: he was painting a scene of a corner of someplace - sounded like Southeast Asia - that has gone over the brink and is reduced to hell and craziness.
That was the sense I got from it.
The act was foul, but seemed normal to the characters doing it.
The observer was shocked, and what happened was clearly on his mind and disturbing him.
But everyone around him was just focusing on the mission.
Webb was painting a background where absolutely everything is baleful, but routine to everyone in it. A place reduced to Hell.
From what I read, he wasn't condoning it. It was supposed to be shocking and nasty. You, the reader, were supposed to be horrified. But the characters themselves weren't horrified, because they were all burnt out from living in hell. The one character-observer was disturbed by it, just like you, the reader, is supposed to be.
That's what I got out of it, and what I think Webb was trying to do.
And actually, I think he did it quite effectively. He painted a picture of a creepy and collapsed place.
He does something similar in a line in "A Sense of Honor", in which he discusses how a physics teacher at Annapolis makes refraction make sense to the Midshipmen. It's effective writing, because I still remember the particular line 24 years after having read the book, and I only read it once.
Webb's a good writer, but his writing does reveal his temperament. A Sense of Honor reveals his temperament. When he was the Secretary of the Navy, the way he behaved, and the way he resigned, resembled very much his hotheaded character in A Sense of Honor.
Or vote against Webb because he BELIEVES in abortion and is on his 4th wife.
Went to your web site. Never heard of you.
Never said I was famous. Am I supposed to be insulted? Try harder.
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