"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I ... can't really talk about Edwards." – Ann Coulter, March 2, 2007
I was going to have a few comments on political commentator Ann Coulter. I was going to say that her writing ranges from weak to bland to unreadable and that it works on no levels. It does not work as political commentary since it too often lacks cohesive, well-thought-out arguments and too often contains unabashedly slanted, consistently dogmatic points of view to be taken seriously; it does not work as humor finding funny jokes in an Ann Coulter column is a needle-in-the-haystack situation, almost certainly stemming from the fact that her writing is too mean-spirited and unfeeling to be laughed at or even be enjoyed by anyone who does not read out of sadism or the desire to see cruelty inflicted on other individuals.Though some have called it satirical, Coulter writes satire like Jack the Ripper gives knife massages, even as propaganda, which surely Coulter does not set out to write, the writing is too reactionary and laughably confrontational to be persuasive or even easily distinguished from the output of a high school propaganda-writing exercise or some sort of Propaganda3000 automatic bile-producing computer program.
I was going to have a few comments on Ann Coulter; I was going to say that she has, despite having an Ivy League education, fallen into the talking-head ideology of "the louder you say something, the more correct it is." I was going to say that she has fallen into the childish belief that repeating ideas at higher volumes constitutes a new point, into mistakenly thinking that "stirring the pot" by unloading some needlessly offensive personal attack is as beneficial as supplementing political debate with an intelligent argument or relevant, incisive investigation of an issue; and she has unfortunately descended permanently into the spin cycle, jumping through hoops to put her opposition at fault, insisting on proving why the other side is wrong instead of why she is right, completely forsaking the central purpose of any respectable argumentative essay.
I was going to have a few comments on Ann Coulter; I was going to say that in her unwavering belief in her party's tenets, in her uncompromising stance on all matters political and especially partisan, in her inability to consider the opposing point of view as correct or even as holding any truth whatsoever, in her staunch ethnocentrism, in her incredible refusal to admit any wrong or mistake on her part, even though it would mean redemption and perhaps taking her first steps toward any amount of respectability or credibility, in her resistance to participate in any sort of real debate, in her ironclad resistance to use her obvious intelligence for any sort of pursuit that would be beneficial to academia, to the nation, to the general reading public or the growing bipartisan rift threatening to split the country against itself, in her unwillingness to be open to ideologies from other parties, cultures, religions or individuals that are not identical to her own, and in what can only be called a pathological insistence on the Truth (capital T) of her own words and the words of her dogma, Coulter represents everything that a political commentator should not be, embodies the factious loyalist that the Founding Fathers feared and attempted to defend against, and exemplifies all facets of rigid thinking that are opposed to achieving a level of intellectualness, personifying all that it means to not be a public intellectual, and in so doing becomes a public ignoramus.
I was going to have a few comments on Ann Coulter; I was going to say all this, but apparently I would have to go into rehab if I did.
What's that? I don't?
Oh.
Well, then I'm saying it. Jason O. Gilbert is a sophomore from Marietta, Ga. He can be reached at jogilber@princeton.edu.
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