I was working at my desk last week when I heard CNN’s Rick Sanchez announce to Kyra Phillips, “I’ll tell you what’s interesting about talking to Ann Coulter.”
Naturally this attracted my attention. It didn’t cause me to stop what I was doing and turn around in my chair to watch, but I’m naturally curious about why talking to Ann Coulter would interest anyone. I should think it would be about as interesting as talking to an air horn. So I listened and was rewarded with the
following:
“If you take her words and you parse them there is so much bite in the words she uses that you can’t help but feel you’re reading something that’s insulting to any one particular group that she happens to be talking about at the time.”
He had me there. Come to think of it, I did sense something insulting to liberals in Ann Coulter’s statement, "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors,” but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
However, I could tell he wasn’t finished because he had spoken with that bright, faintly surprised tone TV people use when they want you to think they’ve stumbled onto an insight. “But…” he said…
“if you read in context her entire book and the statements that she's trying to make, then it seems like someone who is actually just trying to do that.”
Let’s go through this sentence bit by bit.
Suppose I’ve just read that quote from Coulter about the group of 9/11 widows called The Jersey Girls. I’ve parsed words and phrases like “self-obsessed,” and “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.” I must now go on to reading this quote “in context” by plowing through
Godless, the book in which it appeared, and I should also bone up on the “statements that she’s trying to make,” though this “trying to make” part is a little strange. Is Coulter having trouble uttering or writing words? Did she stand before her audience at the last CPAC conference making desperate, strangled sounds in her throat until a little tow-headed boy in blue jeans shouted, “Look Gramps! Ann’s trying to tell us something?”
Anyway, I’ve done all this, and according to Rick Sanchez, the inescapable conclusion I will draw is that “It seems like”….(Not it is,” it seems like,” which means it’s not really, but just looks that way) “someone who is actually just trying” (Again, not “is” but just “just trying”) “to do…(To do what? Tell, Oh please tell!)
“…that.”
“
That?”
An ambiguous pronoun is our only payoff after working our way hand over hand down this sentence?
It seems like Ann Coulter is just “trying” to insult the Jersey Girls? Aren’t we back to the original conclusion we’d come to before parsing her words, reading everything in context, etc? Or is Rick Sanchez’ point that Coulter’s attempt at insult is merely an attempt rather than an accomplished insult? Did she misspell “Democrat ratpack gals?” When Coulter’s fans read, “now that their
shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy,” did many of them mistake it for a compliment?
Or maybe Sanchez is invoking that chestnut about Ann being a big ol’ kidder, and what she’s doing is trying to give the impression that she’s insulting a group of women who lost their husbands in the worst terrorist attack in US history when in fact she’s really not doing that at all. Sure, she typed out the words “How do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies,” but, crafty wordsmith that she is, Ann was in fact thinking kind thoughts about the widows as she did it.
And how in the name of the twelve apostles, does all this make it interesting to talk to Ann Coulter? Sanchez explains:
“She knows that every time she writes a specific word or phrase she's trying to make people angry, most often liberals or democrats. But when you sit down and you talk to her, you start to get a real sense of what it is she's trying to say. Look, there's no question, love her or hate her, this is a woman with something to say.”
…and that would be… what? Women shouldn’t vote? Liberals should be beaten, occasionally executed to keep them in line? And why would all this make Coulter “interesting?” All of us, including the Aflac Duck, have “something to say.” That doesn’t get us an interview on CNN.
The direction we’re heading as a society has become so obvious and so disturbing that some administration apologists are beginning to recoil. Other bloggers have commented on the dismayed exodus of former Bush supporters, in particular recent mea culpas by the likes of Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens. The mainstream media however, is having a harder time jumping off the locomotive, perhaps because the media has been, not the drivers and passengers but rather the nuts, bolts, engine and wheels of the train.
The result is what amounts to an attack on the English language as journalists try to convince themselves and the rest of us that insults aren’t insults, cruelty isn’t cruelty, and bigotry isn’t bigotry. Outrageous statements from conservative icons like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have become so blatant that the mainstream press can no longer just unfocus their eyes and pretend not to notice. Instead, like Sanchez, they scoop up double handfuls of words like “parse,” and “context,” mixed liberally with “buts”, “ifs,” and “seems,” and toss them into their audience’s collective face.
By the time we’ve finished coughing and wiping our eyes, CNN has gone over to another Viagra commercial.
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