Some government employee sent me the word about this excerpt from the Jim Webb profile in Rolling Stone magazine, which is largely about Southwest Virginia.
It begins:
"As night settles between the mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state's southwestern corner, Sen. James Webb's people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse. They're coal miners and miners' wives, a third of them in the camouflage strike gear of the United Mine Workers, many of them wearing ball caps declaring them veterans of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. A leather-skinned veteran named Eldridge tells me in a raspy whisper that he voted for Webb because Webb, a novelist and historian, had gotten these people, mountain people, right in his most recent book, a best-selling history of the Scots-Irish in America called Born Fighting. "We've got our own ghosts and goblins," Eldridge says, and he thinks Webb sees them. "He has the Second Sight.""
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