As some of you might be aware from this thread, Ann Coulter and Michael Moore were both enticed to speak at my university this semester. Well, the first of these two controversial characters made her appearance last night, and i thought you might like to hear about it. I know that stuff like this probably belongs in MPSIMS, but there’s a good chance that i will descend into ranting, so i thought the Pit might be safer.
Let me start out by saying that i never really expected much from the occasion. I’ve read enough of Coulter’s online writings to have formed a pretty strong antipathy toward her, both for her politics and for what i believe to be her dishonesty and her misrepresentations.
The excursion to see Coulter was actually something of a mini-mini-Dopefest, with kiros, av8rmike and me making up the contingent. I knew that Coulter would be popular, so we arrived about 50 minutes before the speech was due to start. Half an hour or so later, the hall was full and people were standing at the back.
The start time of 8:00pm came and went, and so did 8:15. People started getting restless, and a some even ventured a short hand-clap. The organizers of the event did their best Amtrak impersonation, choosing to allow us to sit there in ignorance rather than actually letting us know what the fuck was going on. They were, however, making a big show of walking around with their ID badges on, just so we knew who was running things. Shows what happens when you put self-important undergrads in charge, i suppose. But i digress.
Finally, there was movement on the stage, and a gaggle of organizers (three, to be precise) moved to the lectern. Rather than have one person describe the lecture series and introduce the speaker, they felt it necessary for each one of them to get a minute or so in front of the microphone.
The third of these geese, whose job it was to introduce Coulter, made a couple of announcements about the events to come. First, we were told that Coulter would, after her speech was finished, be happy to stay and answer questions “as long as there are people at the microphones.” This induced a little buzz of excitement, because anyone who goes to events like this knows that generally only a few people get to question the speaker.
We were also told that Ann Coulter believes in the free exchange of ideas, and the right of people to present their ideas. And, because she believes in those things, she did not want to be interrupted, and anyone interrupting the speech would be removed from the hall. This drew wild cheering from her supporters, and groans and boos from the rest of the audience which, incidentally, seemed to be split about 50-50 between fans and opponents of Coulter.
Finally, our heroine took the stage, and began her “talk.” I put the word in quotation marks because such disquisitions normally adhere, except perhaps in schools of postmodernism, to a generally coherent narrative form. Neither i, nor anyone else i spoke to, could discern such a narrative in Coulter’s speech, and nor did there seem to be any central argument, except that liberals are traitors. And those who have any experience of Coulter’s work will know that i’m not being hyperbolic in saying that; she is quite specific in using the term. In fact, in the course of her 30 minute talk, she referred to liberals as “traitors,” “quislings,” and “cowards,” and to the Democratic party and liberalism (the two are essentially congruent groups in Coulter’s formulation) as a “religion” and a “cult.”
The aim of her speech, she told us, was to examine “liberals’ contribution to the war on terrorism.” I don’t think i’ll be spoiling the ending for anyone by revealing that her conclusion is that “the only consistency in their [liberals’] position is that we must not do anything to stop the next terrorist attack.” Along the way, she offered little more than a bunch of canned one-liners that elicited laughter and clapping from her supporters, and jeers or groans from her opponents. Of course, there were some people who couldn’t resist punctuating her speech with cries of “fascist” and other equally inciteful epithets, which was rather unfortunate. Coulter and her ilk lap that sort of shit up, because it only confirms their belief that liberals are a bunch of hypocrites who’ll use every opportunity to suppress the free exchange of ideas.
Not only was the speech a disjointed set of sound-bites, but Coulter’s delivery is not even interesting or engaging. She is a stilted, uninspiring speaker, who injects portentous pauses before her more outrageous statements so you can brace yourself for what’s coming, and expectant pauses after them so that the sheep in the audience can clap and cheer appropriately.
Discussing the case of evidence for WMDs, we were told that, “When liberals say there is no evidence, that means there’s plenty of evidence, just not enough to convince an OJ jury.” Of course, the only evidence she had to show us was, shall we say, dated, and the rest consisted of a simple parrotting of Administration assertions.
We were informed that US action in Iraq was not unilateral. This, of course, is strictly true. What it ignores, however, is that the decision to bomb Iraq was, at best, bilateral, and that most other nations in the “coalition of the willing” were bit players and post facto supporters, at best. For liberals, of course, “Only if France and Germany signed on would that be true multilateral action.”
She of course had plenty of barbs for our Gallic and Teutonic friends. She asked why anyone was surprised that Germany wasn’t interested in going to war against a despotic ruler “who gassed his own people.” They’re all Nazis, you see? We are also reminded that “the Warsaw ghetto held out against the Nazis about as long as the whole nation of France.”
Coulter denies that the war in Iraq is all about oil (and i actually agree with this), but goes on to say that, even if it was, “We need oil? Why not go to war just for oil.” After all, oil is needed for planes, and how else “do those liberal celebrities think their cocaine is going to get delivered to them?” This was about where she described the Democrats as “quislings and cowards [who] will be remembered as the Neville Chamberlains of our day,” and liberalism as a “religion of civic political correctness.”
She then moved on to what appeared to be the main point of her speech–strong advocacy of racial profiling. Her mantra here, of course, was “muslim extremists,” a term that she used at least a dozen times before i stopped counting. Another label that came up frquently–seven at last count–was “swarthy,” used completely without irony, of course. She listed the terrorist attacks that have been carried out over the past two decades by dark-skinned muslims, and said “When there is a 100% chance, it ceases to be a profile, it is a description of the suspect.” The skin color of these evildoers, we are told, is so consistent that we “could use paint chips” to identify them.
After this, she drew her inevitable conclusions about the liberals and their treacherous ways, and that was the end of the speech. The response was divided about equally between a standing ovation and a chorus of boos and jeers.
When the question period began, there were probably about a dozen people lined up at each of the two microphones. Coulter’s strategy for answering questions seems to be, in general, to ignore the question itself and rant on about whatever happens to take her fancy. Of course, some of her interlocutors didn’t help, asking some inane questions or simply choosing to offer insults or political slogans. One moron accused her of bearing a physical resemblance to Leni Reifenstahl, and made an even bigger idiot of himself by forgetting the director’s name and having to be corrected on it by Coulter.
The answers that Coulter did give to questions tended to be of about the same depth and complexity as her speech. One person asked why she had not spoken on the topic that was advertised in the Symposium booklet. The Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, of which her speech was a part, has the theme this year of “The Great American Experiment: A Juxtaposition of Capitalism and Democracy,” and the title of Coulter’s own speech was advertised as “The Sum of Capitalism and Democracy: What Makes an American?” When asked why this issue had not even been raised, Coulter’s response was simply to say that she had never been informed of such a theme, and that we should complain to the organizers of the symposium. I know that i was critical of the organizers at the beginnig of this tale, but i can’t imagine that they invited her to speak and paid her thousands of dollars without informing her of the theme.
In the spirit of the symposium’s theme, one person asked a very straightforward question: What place do you see for liberals and progressives in America? The question was not asked in a hostile manner, and nor was it tacked onto the end of a political speech. Coulters response? “There’s plenty of room at Guantanamo.” In her answer to another question, she described Iran’s Ayatollah as “Carter’s guy.”
She did give an amusing sound bite in response to the guy who compared her to Reifenstahl. She said “That’s a very good argument: I’m much like a Nazi.” If we were to take the second half of that response completely out of context, as she does with so many of the people she cites, it would simply be poetic justice.
Finally, despite the earlier promise that Coulter would answer questions for “as long as there are people at the microphones,” she only answered five or six questions before the organizers pulled the plug on proceedings. This was yet another example of the awful organization that seemed to dog this event, and it led to think that maybe Coulter wasn’t lying when she claimed not to have been informed of the event’s theme.
In the end, i found myself strangely unconcerned about the whole spectacle. I mean, some conservatives infuriate me, either because they’re smart and make me think harder about my beliefs, or because they’re smart and can twist evidence in a disingenuous and confusing manner. Coulter, as i expected, is really not that smart. Or, at least, she chooses not to make use of her intelligence to make a coherent or challenging argument. She is nothing more than a master of the ad hominem attack. As a friend said to me afterwards, “She didn’t scare me, but her supporters in the audience sure did.”
but here’s a mini-interview she did for your student paper(at the bottom of the story):