Concerned citizens have debated the Ann Coulter question for many years now. Does Coulter sincerely believe in the often ridiculous positions she champions in print, on Fox news, and during her campus lecture tours? Or, as many have suggested, is Coulter an ongoing “performance” project of some kind, a hyperbolic parody of conservative anger and illogic dreamed up by a conceptualist collective somewhere in the Village? Rachel Maddow has recently attempted to make this same “art school” argument about GOP pizza magnate and freelance genital inspector Herman Cain, but in truth, it is Coulter who first compelled left-leaning cultural elites to contend with the enigmatic posturing of feckless fascism. So, for example, when Coulter claimed after the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that there now exists “burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine,” baffled bystanders could only wonder at her motivation. Regardless of one’s position on nuclear energy, no one would really take a “pro-meltdown” position, would they? Talk about seeing the glowing silver lining around a hazy cloud of Cesium-137– this has to be a stunt, right? Ultimately, however, Coulter’s “intent” in her books and punditry is not all that important. Be it sincere or a sham, the effect on American culture and politics remains the same. If you want to drink from a mountain stream, after all, it matters little if a horse up river pissed in the water by design or by accident; either way, you still have a mouth full of horse piss.
On the other hand, if Coulter’s act really is a bluff, and she in fact spends all her free time in Manhattan clinking cocktails with book editors, gallery curators, and a few cynical but discrete Ivy League professors, laughing about the endless gullibility of the stupid hayseeds who are paying for her new walk-in jacuzzi–then don’t we owe it to her miserable captives to set them free? If, back in 1964, I had been struggling to sit through all 8 hours of Warhol’s Empire, I know I would certainly have appreciated it if someone had come into the theater to let me know it was okay to leave, that I was just a prop in the execution of someone else’s conceptual stunt.
Perhaps those of us who identify with progressive causes would benefit by digging a bit deeper, by subjecting Coulter’s oeuvre to a more sustained and probing form of textual explication. By “deconstructing,” if you will, the logic of the Coulterian universe, there is a chance–a slim one, I will concede–that we might better understand, a). what she professes to believe; b). whether or not she really believes what she professes to believe; and c). the sensibility of a readership that truly believes that she believes in things that she may or may not actually believe.
The only way to do this, I propose, is through a line-by-line examination of the work itself–what we in the academic game sometimes call a “close reading.” As a slanderous, treasonous, godless, guilty, and demonic member of the professorial class, I hope that I might be well-suited to such a task. In the interest of critical self-reflexivity, I will admit up front that I think she’s probably faking it, that she doesn’t really believe most of the positions she advocates (like carrying heavy water for the “pro-meltdown” community). But I am willing to keep an open mind, and if somehow Coulter can win me over with the strength of her arguments, I will be more than happy to concede that she is correct and that my “liberal” ass deserves immediate incarceration for crimes against the state, at least until it arrives at its final destination in hell where Coulter and other heavenly conservatives can pelt me and my fellow damned with burning copies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.
Let us begin with Coulter’s fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Though the title remains confrontational (it implies, you see, that talking to a liberal is so unpleasant that one would do everything in his or her power to avoid such a fate), I begin here because this book suggests, at least implicitly, that some type of dialogue might still take place (at least as of 2004, the date of the book’s original publication). Admittedly, in Coulter’s ideal form, this “dialogue” would be a Thanksgiving dinner wherein a witty “conservative” systematically decimates the sophistry of her uptight liberal relations by demonstrating that there is no problem in the 21st century that can not be answered by some creative combination of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Jesus. To put a positive spin on this otherwise depressing scenario, let us emphasis that this scene at least has us all sitting at the same table, as it were, and that if Coulter’s woefully naive young cousin doing an Anthro degree at Smith began choking to death on the ceremonial wishbone, she still might have enough empathy to get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver (then again, perhaps Coulter really does have the courage to commit an unparalleled act of pure Objectivism: No one help her! It is not in our interest to prevent this lazy, under-achieving masticator from choking, for her death shall leave more turkey and stuffing for the rest of us! Turn the highchairs this way so that the babies might also learn this lesson well!)
So let us begin (Coulter’s prose will be in bold black, my annotations in red).
A special note to conservative readers: Given that modern American conservatism has now become indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, there will be no attempt made here to “persuade” or “convince” you of anything. Rather, much as one might address a co-worker who suddenly professes a belief that extraterrestrials are filling his head with voices telling him to kill the neighbor’s dog, the following will proceed from the assumption that logic and reason are of little use in convincing you of anything, and that your best hope resides in a carefully monitored regimen of Haldol or Thorazine. I’m so sorry. If somehow appeals to cooperative reason and socio-economic justice prevail in the future, we will try to send a time machine back to rescue the rest of you from yourselves. Until then, good luck. Also, I think someone on your local public access station just suggested adding a penny in sales tax to help clean up that toxic dump site that’s been festering out by the Johnson place and breeding all them mutant super-raccoons—your time might be better spent writing a letter about how the free market is the only way to deal with the mutant super-raccoon problem, and that you’ll shoot any city animal control officer who comes on your property to implement a socialist “one-size-fits-all” campaign of mutant super-raccoon eradication.
1How to Talk to a Liberal
(1) Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents’ home, get a job, and start paying taxes.
Coulter begins here with a touch of folk wisdom, essentially adapting Churchill’s bromide, “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,” so that it might better appeal to her most loyal readers (crucially, however, Coulter is not willing to concede the 20 year-old part of the equation. Even deciding to share your toys in preschool would be counted as a moronic flirtation with wealth redistribution). Conservatives love using this quotation because they believe it imbues the speaker with a type of practical philosophy born of hard-won experience and incontrovertible common sense. By dropping it into everyday conversation, the conservative signals that he or she possesses the necessary intellectual depth to reflect on life’s big questions, but still has not been swayed by the more “complicated” book-learned philosophies favored by liberal elites.
Unpacking the sentence, we see three interlinking assumptions:
1. Liberals are children.2. Liberals are unemployed.3. Liberals do not pay taxes.
By casting the liberal as a child who will, under ideal circumstances, be “cured” by confronting the more sober truths of adulthood, Coulter endorses the rather sad but protoypically conservative position that the world is what it is and nothing will ever change it. Only children believe that the world’s inequalities and injustices might be productively challenged. The “adult” conservative, on the other hand, knows how the world “really works,” and that the child-liberal will eventually understand that s/he must give up the ridiculous aspiration for a world that is less horrifying. Most often, this “adult” perspective is the product of having been worn down by age, fear, and fatigue so that no other possibilities remain imaginable. A mortgaged and mirthless 40 sees what carefree 20 cannot–life is an endless struggle to acquire shit and protect it from other people who want to take your shit, all so that when you get really old you don’t end up dying penniless in a ditch. Thus it has been since Thog the caveman first suckered-punched Grunda the hill person so that he might steal his woman, jaguar paw, and pointed stick.
By choosing to open her 2004 book with a generational mapping of right and left, Coulter gives us some insight into her core readership. While I have no empirical data to back this claim up, I am willing to follow Coulter’s lead here in baseless speculation to suggest that her books are most avidly consumed by white men who are married, middle-aged, and fairly well-off (given that this is the key constituency of the Republican party, this would not be surprising). Why this particular demographic? Because Coulter “gets” them, she understands the frustration of being a “wealth-producer” surrounded by parasitical sucklings–the wife, the kids, an idiot brother, the city, the state, public education, tollways, welfare deadbeats, the chronically ill, and so on. Thus the appeal of the regressive Randian fantasy of holding one’s breath and refusing to “produce” so as to teach all the ungrateful morons around you a lesson (much as the toddler will withhold feces during toilet training as a way of protesting the oppressive discipline of the parents). 
Yes, Coulter–or at this point, “Ann”–truly understands the middle-class white guy’s pain. She arrived on the national scene during the dark days of the Clinton presidency, a Godsend as the most vocal in a new battalion of younger, blonder, female Republicans who at last showed the world that not every right-winger had to look and talk like Robert Novak. Prominently unattached, Ann is the kind of gal you fantasize about while putting on your cleats to play the back nine at the country-club. Unlike your mollycoddling wife, Ann would understand the horror of having your oldest son come home from college to announce his plans to be a professional “graphic novelist,” or seeing your daughter go out every weekend with a trio of pierced weirdos who are most obviously homosexuals. Ann knows what it’s like to have your hard-earned pay taxed by an evil bureaucracy that wants to throw that money away on the prostitutes and drug dealers you sometimes think you see loitering around as you drive to the baseball stadium downtown. And with Ann by my side, I would never lose an argument ever again. Next time that wise ass liberal neighbor of mine points out that I’m much more likely to get shot by my own gun than to shoot a burglar, Ann would be right there to call him out for the dickless coward he really is! In fact, I wouldn’t mind if she called me a few names as well. Don’t get me wrong–I still think it is the man’s role to take the lead in any relationship. But when I see Ann in that tight, little leather vest…I don’t know, suddenly I want her to get mad at me. Really, really mad. I want her to tell me what a worthless weakling I am. I want her to yell at me for nicking the upholstery in the Beamer. I want her to lock me in the bathroom with just bread and water until I work up the courage to go tell off those pricks at the Sanitation department for cracking our new trash bins, just because they’re too lazy to put them back down gently (and I pay there goddamn salaries with my taxes!). And then I want Ann to hold me as I cry and cry. Why has the world become so scary and why don’t I understand anything anymore? How could anyone be against a flat tax, Ann, I just don’t get it–it’s so obviously and objectively fair to everyone. What do you mean you found a picture of Ashley’s vagina on her cell phone? Why would she do that? I don’t care what anyone says, Ann, this democracy will only really work as long as white people are in the majority.
And so on.
It would seem explicating the first line of Coulter’s book has taken more time and space than I anticipated, so perhaps this is a good place to stop for now. See you next time…maybe. I can’t decide if it’s really worth it or not.
Editor’s Note: I would also like to note that in googling the phrase “annotated Ann Coulter,” I discovered another site that had this idea long before me. You might want to visit them as well (here).
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just began its seventh season on FX. With any luck, the series will bounce back from a sixth season that, as any objective Phillyphile would agree, was uneven at best. Last week’s premiere, “Frank’s Pretty Woman,” was certainly a good start, returning “the gang” to the moral muck in which they thrive best (Frank decides to marry his favorite prostitute, the gang decides she needs to be “classed up,” hilarity ensues). 
Set primarily in the crappiest bar in Philly’s most dilapidated neighborhood, Sunny also references Cheers, but with an emphasis on capturing more honestly the milieu of the chronic drinker (Paddy’s, or its Boston equivalent, is where Cliff and Norm would eventually end up after drinking away their pensions). The “bar” set (or its displaced cousins like “Central Perk” and the “Peach Pit”) has long been central to TV architecture—public spaces where characters can congregate for jokes and plot points. Typically these sets weave the characters into a larger social world—the cast surrounded by various extras that circulate to signify the characters’ integration with our own reality. True to the wicked inversions of Sunny, however, Paddy’s bar is a bleak and generally empty space. It is occasionally packed on special occasions in service of the plot, but for the most part has no clientele and merely serves as an echo-chamber for the inane bickering of the cast. This isolation is further underscored in the exterior establishing shots that invariably depict the bar as standing alone in a beaten-down warehouse district devoid of all humanity, a place where one expects to see a tumbleweed blow by festooned with used condoms and dirty syringes 
American comedy is frequently concerned with the invisible shell-game of “class,” typically in ways that stylize poverty to make it either a momentary comic irruption in middle-class life or the launching pad for eventual middle-class success. Sunny, on the other hand, is particularly candid in examining the thin line dividing crippling destitution from out-and-out homelessness. Given their location, the gang is constantly mixing with addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and—perhaps most magically—various shady characters that Frank and Charlie meet “under the bridge.” Slightly better off than their neighbors, the gang’s relation to the human misery all around them is like that of most Americans—instrumental indifference (their repeated dealings with “Cricket” come to mind). Building on this bedrock of a permanent underclass with no possibilities or aspirations, individual episodes often focus on the particularly American delusion–cultivated by almost everyone occupying a position other than Fortune 500 CFO or crack whore—that every citizen of the USA is middle-class and rising. Dennis, Dee, and Mac (Rob McElhenney), in particular, are constantly misjudging their positions on the economic, educational, and cultural ladder (Frank and Charlie (Charlie Day), for different reasons, don’t appear to care one way or another).
With one notable exception, perhaps unexpected in the show’s original design. Despite the program’s general commitment to venal nastiness, Frank and Charlie’s warped father-son vibe has become somewhat of a moral anchor for the series. Frank, again, has lived the middle-class “dream” of marriage, kids, and a house in the ‘burbs—but has decided, rather courageously, that he’d rather crash in a horrifying studio apartment and devote his time and energy to getting fucked up and laid as much as possible. Meanwhile, his room and Murphy-bedmate Charlie is the show’s sole remaining innocent, a guy that one could imagine, given the right circumstances, might end up institutionalized either out of injustice, inconvenience, or a simple misunderstanding. Like the rest of them, Charlie has his schemes. But he also seems relatively content to never leave Philadelphia so that he might continue devoting his life to trapping the bar’s prodigious rat population. 
Will Ferrell’s “Nick Halsey,” meanwhile, has taken a different route in Everything Must Go. When we first meet Nick, a slimy twenty-something is firing him from his job as Assistant Vice President. Halsey, we learn, is a recovering alcoholic, and his termination stems from a relapse at the Denver office that may or may not have led to the sexual harassment of a co-worker. On the way home, Halsey loads up with some 12-packs to make his fall off the wagon official. Arriving at his home, however, he finds that his wife has thrown all of his possessions out on the front lawn, changed the locks, and left a note demanding a divorce. Dealt this double-whammy of adult problems on the same day, Nick takes the one reasonable course of action available—he decides to live on his front lawn for a few days in a drunken stupor until he can figure things out. 
Of course, stepping straight from the “irresponsible” narcissism of childlessness to becoming a dad is not something that can be done in one step. Happily, both films provide their dysfunctional X-er’s with a “training child” so they can get some practice first. Greenberg must care for a suddenly ailing German Shepard, forming a temporary interspecies family with Florence. Nick, meanwhile, temporarily adopts a chubby, fatherless neighborhood kid to help with his garage sale (“Will you teach me to play baseball?,” the kid asks at one point. No, I’m not kidding, he really does say this). As the film ends, we sense Nick is probably only a few months away from acquiring the necessary skills to take over in the Dern household (he’s been invited back, once he gets his life in order). 
I think my favorite of this genre remains Step Brothers (2009), featuring Ferrell once again, this time alongside John C. Reilly. It is a much broader, borderline gross-out comedy that actually seems more intellectually honest than either Greenberg or Everything Must Go. Ferrell and Reilly play two guys in their mid-30s who, having been insulated from the “real world” by virtue of their rich single parents, basically live the dream-lives of 14 year-old boys. When the parents get married, the two must learn to live together as “step brothers,” which they do blissfully until thrown out to fend for themselves. As each takes the first tentative steps toward adulthood, there is a major falling out and ongoing feud. What is their reward for becoming adults? They both become incredibly boring and generally miserable. Courageously, the film finds a way for them to remain “independent” at the end while also allowing them to regress back into their personas of endless adolescence. I haven’t read Judith Halberstam’s new book on 
For those annoyed, finally, that this genre is so obsessively focused on retarded masculinity, you might want to check out The Future (2011), written and directed by Miranda July. Here the specter of adopting a sick cat sends a 30-something couple into a major life crisis, constituted in large part by their realization that by the time the cat dies (in about five years), they’ll both be 40 (“and 40 is the new 60,” they both agree in classic anti-Boomer logic). From here the film becomes an art cinema hallucination with July suddenly and seemingly randomly having an affair with a 50-something man, presumably because he’s an actual adult who owns an actual house. I’d write more about it, but as that would require me accessing a form of subjectivity that I don’t fully understand, I’ll leave it there. Some, I’m told, find July’s movies insufferably cutesy, but I appreciated the fact that the film made at least some attempt to escape the scourge of Hollywood naturalism. And it was nice, for a change, to see a woman as the center of all the generational floundering. 
