If I lived thirty miles further south, in Northern Virginia, I’d be voting for Jim Webb for Senate in the upcoming election. Call me a Virginia values voter, or at least a wannabe Virginia values voter. According to the Washington Post, incumbent Senator George Allen accuses his opponent, the recent Democrat Webb, of writing “inappropriate sex scenes and demeaning descriptions of women” in his novels. This isn’t just dumb, it’s scary. If you demand that characters in fiction be politically correct, not only are you showing how out of tune you are with reality, you’re halfway to the thought control of Orwell’s 1984. Nobody who thinks this way should be in the Senate.

If you don’t live in my neck of the woods, the very inside-the-Beltway world covered by the Post, my morning newspaper, you may be unaware of this latest bit of political shadow-boxing. To be sure, many people with a military connection, local or not, will have registered Jim Webb, war hero, former Secretary of the Navy, Marine, and US Naval Academy graduate, who’s switched his party allegiance to run against Allen largely on the assertion that the Iraq war has been botched. They may even have followed the oddities of Allen’s ongoing gaffes that have melted his once sizeable lead to what may be invisibility. These include his gratuitously singling out a brown-skinned Indian-American manning a camera at a news conference with the puzzling epithet “macaca,” and his flailing in public when it was revealed that his mother is Jewish. It’s all made for fascinating political theater.

But for me, nothing has been more fascinating -- or horrifying -- than the recent accusation of the Allen campaign that the sex scenes in Webb’s best-selling Vietnam novel “Fields of Fire” and others are “inappropriate.” Clearly the Allen camp is trying to capitalize on the negative fallout of Webb’s celebrated article of l979, “Why Women Can’t Fight,” that argued that the battlefield was no place for women. The Allen camp has aired spots by female Naval Academy graduates and other female military officers who claim that this article made their careers at the Academy, and in the Navy, that much more difficult to sustain.

Webb didn’t make things any better, as it happens, by retorting that Lynne Cheney, wife of the VP, wrote a book with “lesbian love scenes” and a rape. I’m inclined to go easy on Webb, however: I imagine his jaw dropping at Allen’s first round, and read his equally stupid retort as an “I can’t believe this guy” comeback.

Suddenly it seems that authors of fiction or literature themselves believe, do, or would like to do (? -- pick one, I can’t) what their characters do, believe, or say?

If so, then I guess Shakespeare killed his uncle. Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s characters, does this. Apparently Shakespeare also killed himself. Romeo, another of Shakespeare’s characters, does this. Shakespeare was a girl masquerading as a boy; Viola, yet another of Shakespeare’s characters, does this. When a poet says “I” you know it’s unvarnished, let-it-all-hang-out, tell-it-to-Oprah truth? For that matter, I guess that means I, Bruce Fleming, always say things as if I were at my most intimate and honest? So when I say “I really loved the tie Aunt Sally gave me for Christmas” I really loved the tie? 

Between you and me, I hated the tie. But that’s not what I’m going to say to Aunt Sally. We all know there are degrees of self-revelation, aspects to our personality that come out at various times. If I were the same guy in the classroom as I am at a loud party, you’d have something to worry about. Nor is an author revealing the whole of him- or herself in each and every character.  Literature isn’t on-truth-serum fact, it’s a bringing to the surface of what may be intrinsically tiny and submerged strands of its author -- strands we only know are there because they find expression in the fiction. We’re not talking to the author when we read what his or characters say, we’re present at a performance. We have to look at the whole thing before we react.

Implying that authors of fiction are their characters is a piece of stupidity on the part of the Allen campaign I can’t ascribe to Nth hour political desperation in a race they could well lose. Still, I have to admit it’s a piece of stupidity I fight every day. I don’t know how many midshipmen papers I’ve corrected that tell me “the author believes X” when really the only thing we can say is that “the narrator tells us X” or “the character believes X.”  

Jim Webb made characters who talk dirty! Jim Webb has his characters showing less than total “may I hold your coat ma’am” respect to women! Horrors! So what we need to do is go around making sure that everybody in literature acts in exactly the way we want to see people acting, as if literature were only a series of role models?

I wrote in a previous column about “virtual controls,” the “if things go wrong” scenarios we have to run to have backups in case, or when, things really do go wrong. People who are proud of being “doers” rather than “thinkers” (rather than both) typically hate these alternative scenarios: to them it shows lack of conviction that things could go any other way than the way they want them to. Literature provides the virtual controls of our daily life. Books and movies are the places where we play out alternative scenarios, not where we necessarily give role models. If we’d lived then and been this, here’s how we might have reacted. If we were in this situation, here’s how we might have been. If we were more of what we are a little bit, these are the consequences.

Of course people are going to act badly in literature. That’s where they’re supposed to act badly, in the virtual realm, in “what if” simulations -- precisely so we can learn how to act well in reality. If all of a sudden characters in fiction have to act well, we’ll have no controls on reality, no alternative universes to pick among. And I guarantee that things will be even worse than they are.