July 2006 Archives

This post started out life as a rant on the WELL, in a discussion of the thing that is Ann Coulter. A WELL denizen who has been lamely championing her for years wrote:

I continue to find curious and telling the vociferous hooting and hollering disapproval that someone somewhere might find Ann or an ethnic joke funny.

My response (which I've edited a bit — the original was written off the top of my head and wasn't as clear in places as it could have been) is below.

It's neither curious nor especially telling that civilized people recoil from things that are recognizably inimical to civilization. Especially if those things have no other qualities.

Coulter is not so much a psychopath (though I think she's that too) as she is the product of direct incentives. For producing what, as Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, is essentially smut, she has become famous and wealthy. The curious and telling question is not "why are people mad at Ann Coulter?" but rather "what is the source of these incentives?"

Who benefits when smut dominates the public sphere? Smut, having no other purpose or effect than gratifying base impulses, provides no platform on which to build. But its effect is more pernicious: When smut crowds out that which is not smut, nothing gets built.

We are in a time of great decadence. Our nation has turned its back on its greatness and its destiny. Our legislature is corrupt and depraved, and its depravity has made it weak and cowardly. Our judiciary is inept and marginal. Our executive branch is in the hands of men who have seen clearly that all they needed in order to seize imperial power from this situation was the will.

These men have taken a nation that was once a beacon to the world and transformed it into something to be reviled. We are now a nation who kidnaps, tortures, and murders people without even troubling ourselves to determine that they are truly our enemies. We are an aggressor nation, an invader, an occupier, a conqueror.

Since such a role is so alien to our character and our history, we are also terrible at it, which is why we're losing the war in Iraq. Corrupt and evil our leaders may be, but our military and our populace cannot bring itself to truly be a nation of conquerors. We can't do to Iraq what Russia did to Chechnya. Some of our troops are, we are beginning to find, learning how to be ruthless conquerors instead of professional soldiers. But the disconnect between who they are and what their leaders want to employ them as remains great.

How can incompetent people wield unchecked power in a representative government that has been structured from its very beginning to prevent even competent people from doing so?

First, it is necessary that the branches intended to check their power be co-opted or corrupt.

Second, it is necessary to persuade the populace that change is undesireable.

Third, it is necessary to persuade the opposition that change is impossible.

The first condition is well established. Our legislature is so thoroughly corrupt that even if the administration's party didn't control both houses it's hard to imagine it taking any kind of effective action. The judiciary, whose complaisance has been evident from the moment it elevated this administration into power, is no check either.

The "war on terror" is constructed to accomplish the second condition. Its fundamental aim is not to put an end to terror, but to put an end to constraints on executive power. Its goal is to persuade the populace that preventing the men in power from doing whatever they choose is suicidal.

And it is the final goal, persuading the opposition of the impossibility of change, that brings us to Ann Coulter.

The content of her message is not so important. (Though its content, that any and all who would raise their voices to check the power of the executive branch are evil — treasonous, self-interested, hypocrites, Jews, etc. — is certainly in line.) What is important is that her message appeals to passion, not reason.

Reason is the enemy of the men in power. They recognize that reason has the capacity to bring them down. Not destroy them — there's no way this will end with David Addington hanging by his heels in a public square being beaten with baseball bats or Dick Cheney having his last heart attack in the cell where Slobodan Milosovic had his final stroke — but restrain them.

Reasonable people who have access to the facts are this administration's worst enemy. And as this administration and its allies take great pains to suppress the facts, they also takes great pains to suppress reason.

And there is why Coulter has received her reward. Why we have a Fox News. How we have come to have a mainstream media that consistently fails to follow arguments to their logical conclusions and insteads presents "both sides," as though truth and falsity are of equal weight. How it is that our national discussion about the education of our people focuses on the obsessions of a religious sect.

Reason is the enemy of the men in power and their friends, and they have dedicated themselves to extirpate it from the public sphere.

Civilized people see this happening. While they may not perceive it in its totality, they recognize its depravity. They recognize that not only is Ann Coulter's "humor" shallow and hateful, it is harmful. Not because it hurts the 9/11 widows to be described as money-grubbing media whores, but because when such a thing is what we're arguing about in our public sphere, reason has fled.

To choose smut over reason — to allow the thrill of "sticking it to the liberals" or the shiver of hating "the repuglicans" be what our public sphere is for — is to labor, however unwittingly, in the service of the men who are destroying this country.

This is why I despise Ann Coulter so. Not because what she says is offensive to me, but because every five-minute segment the "Today" show dedicates to her offensiveness is five minutes that it's not spending
talking about what's happening to us. That is what she is for.