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people used to be
embarrassed?
phenomenon.
Phenomenon like Ann Coulter, for instance.
If you’ve had better things to do - and we all pray that you have -
you may not have noticed recently when Coulter, a noted
conservative pundit, was skewered for attacking a group of 9/11
widows who committed the unpardonable sin of questioning the
Bush administration.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles
about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by
grief-arazzis,” wrote the ever-pleasant Coulter in her most recent
book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. ”I’ve never seen people
enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
For those of you living in a cave not equipped with Fox News,
Coulter is among the most successful of the new breed of
overemoted conservative wingnuts whose excessive supply of
loud opinions and total absence of human decency has allowed
for a rapid climb to the top of the malodorous, hateful, fetid dung
heap of glassy-eyed personality cults that slowly began replacing
American political discourse sometime during the 1990s.
But dung being a soft and unsteady affair one must always watch
one’s back. Peddling bumper-sticker venom covered with a thin
scum of regurgitated Goldwaterism may be a profitable enterprise
but there’s always another bug striving over the nearest turd. In
fact, Coulter wannabes dot the landscape like pimples on a nerdy
teenager. There’s moonbat-in-arms Michelle Malkin who wrote an
entire book defending the WWII internment of Japanese-
Americans and later gained fame by suggesting on national TV
that John Kerry’s Vietnam wounds were self-inflicted. Or there’s
professional homophobic nutcake Michael Savage who’s
comments on immigrants and gays make Coulter and Malkin
sound like Martin Luther King, Jr. Savage, a best-selling author
whose radio show is loyally listened to by an audience estimated
at ten million by his website, regularly goes into spittle-emitting on-
air tirades against the ”gay mafia” who - of course - control the
media. Despite his antics he got a job at MSNBC where he was
eventually fired for terming a caller a “sodomite” and telling him to
“get AIDS and die.” Even tamer performers like Sean Hannity and
Rush Limbaugh are almost indistinguishable from paranoid
lunatics when talking about the ”liberal media conspiracy” or “the
War on Christmas” or any of a host of other mostly imaginary
outrages. Indeed, there are many graduates of the “Now, You Too
Can Write A New York Times Bestseller” school of political
literature. Coulter, Savage and Malkin have managed to do to
American social dialogue what Howard Stern did for talk radio and
Larry Flynt did for magazine publishing.
The exception being that Stern and Flynt, like most great
champions of the First Amendment, are virtuous enough to be in it
for the money and fame. The reason for Coulter’s latest adventure
into the colorful arena of knifefight politics is up for speculation.
But this being something less than her first foray into controversy,
we can likely assume its for sheer enjoyment.
Some of Coulter’s other gems that have slipped quietly under the
public radar:
“Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They
don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have
indoor plumbing by now.”
“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to
physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can
be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”
“I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as
I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in
torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters
wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to
Guantanamo.”
“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New
York Times building.”
On Muslims: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders
and convert them to Christianity.”
On communicating with liberals: “I think a baseball bat is the most
effective way these days.”
She also managed to refer to the 2004 Democratic ticket as “an
America-bashing trophy husband and his blow-dried, ambulance-
chasing sidekick,” has speculated that women should be denied
the right to vote, has verbally attacked triple amputee and war
hero Max Cleland (“He didn’t ‘give his limbs for his country,’ or
leave them ‘on the battlefield.’ There was no bravery involved in
dropping the grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight.”)
and once suggested that the only debate over Bill Clinton should
be “whether to impeach or assassinate.”
Coulter’s latest bout of verbal diarrhea did manage to elicit a few
condemnations from more responsible quarters of the
conservative movement. Bill O’Reilly took her to task. (The fact
that O’Reilly could be called “responsible” in such a comparison
says more about Coulter than I can.)
But beyond all the furor, given her track record, the question is
not how she could say something so loony and awful but rather
why did anyone actually notice this time? After all, one need not
peruse Coulter’s latest collection of rambling, hateful meanderings
to understand she is a first-class, Grade-A whackmobile. And yet
despite all the fire a controversial figure like Coulter elicits, what
seems to escape understanding is her utter normalcy. Corrosively
hateful people spouting insane opinions are hardly an unusual
feature of planet Earth. Thus in the end, Coulter, Malkin, Savage
and the other members of the right’s tin foil hat brigade must be
seen in context as the vaguely harmless and remarkably common
specimens they are, no more self-obsessively annoying than
someone’s spoiled, airheaded teenage daughter and no more
dangerous the guy on the corner who’s always yelling incoherently
at the lamppost about how the fire hydrant and the mailbox are
constantly plotting against him.
But then again, that guy doesn’t have a book atop the New York
Times bestseller list either. And here lies the one unusual aspect
of Coulter, Savage, and their friends, not that our nation produces
a given quantity of paranoid nutjobs - for it always has - but rather
that a significant segment of the general populace is presently
unable to distinguish their particular brand of mental imbalance
from some variety of useful thought process. There is nothing
wrong with a culture that occasionally produces crazy people.
There is something very wrong with one that admires them.
The disturbing fact is that folks like Coulter and Savage used to
the sort of characters you were vaguely embarrassed to have on
your side. Today, however, embarrassment seems a sadly
neglected art form. As long as someone advances your cause,
who cares if they’re nuts? Not that the left is immune to this
problem - Michael Moore being Exhibit A - but such excesses
seem far more common - and far more often excused - by the
right. Conservatism has fallen a long way from William Buckley.
Every ideology attracts its share of nuts and hatemongers. But
some have a chunk bigger than they should. Conservatism has
long since passed just such an uncomfortable threshold.
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