Much has been written about the conservative ideologue Ann Coulter, most of it negative. Her critics generally paint her as a harmless, if not foul, voice of an older generation. This is a dangerous underestimation, however. In reality Coulter is more of a threat to the consciousness of America than the liberals she so often blames.
Most of her arguments can be broken down into all the stereotypes one might find on an episode of The Simpsons: the black criminal, the lazy Mexican, the greedy Jew. But while The Simpsons pick at these stereotypes to point out their absurdity, Coulter tries to assert that these are realities, that every person of a certain persuasion behaves a certain way almost across the board. While anybody who has lived in a mixed community knows that everybody can exhibit these qualities, those in a more rural community have nothing to dissuade them from these bigoted ideas.
No rational conservative would say in a public discussion that women should not have the right to vote, yet they cheer Coulter on when she makes such statements. When Ann Coulter said that Christians were “perfected Jews” on CNBC’s The Big Idea in 2007 one would think that there would have been an outcry from conservative Jews. Instead several Jewish radio hosts contended her comments were not anti-Semitic.
It is surprising to learn that Coulter is a huge fan of the Grateful Dead. One would think that spending hours with self-proclaimed radicals would have made her more tolerant to other viewpoints. It seems the only thing she really picked up in those smoke-filled venues was a love for listening to old men play the same songs they were playing twenty years ago with a slightly better lighting set-up. Coulter, above all else, protects a status quo that was horribly out of fashion by the time she was born.
The real problem with Ann Coulter is the way she paints member of the opposing party. With book titles like “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” and “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” she creates an image of the Left as heathen monsters. This encourages the human need to sort things into little boxes. Ergo, somebody on the “right” should never mix with somebody on the “left” because then it would become much harder to classify “right” from “left.” “Good” from “evil.” “Us from them.”
This brings us back to our definition. Just as a Coulter rips through the soil and divides it, so does Ann Coulter cut through the fertile ground our democracy was planted in and chops up any remnants of the last harvest. With the soil divided, the farmers may come to check on their crop and find that the virility of amber waves of grain has given way to a field of weeds.
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