Just when you
thought we were all safe from the f word, Little Miss
Sunshine, a.k.a. Ann Coulter, shows up at the
Conservative Political Action Conference, a.k.a. the
Reichstag, and knocks Anna Nicole's baby off the news
by calling John Edwards a "faggot."
"C'mon, it's just a joke," she said of
this brilliant bit of Swiftian satire, explaining
that she was trying to poke fun at the Isaiah
Washington controversy. The f word, she said,
was a "schoolyard taunt" that means
"wuss" or "sissy" and has
nothing to do with gay people.
Golly, I seem to remember a remarkably similar
schoolyard taunt directed at me by similar satirists
in the ninth grade, which resulted in a black eye and
a sprained wrist. It was accompanied by the brilliant
lampoon "gay boy" (another ribald retort
Coulter has used), but since my face was being smashed
in at the time, the humor escaped me. It's nice to
know--at last--that it had nothing to do
with my being gay and that the guys were just
practicing their budding stand-up skills.
Even though I'm out, maybe I don't
get out enough. I've heard "wuss" used
to describe, well, a wuss, but any moron knows that
"faggot," if not directly meant as antigay, is
pretty freakin' close. I guess I wasn't
brought up in the right place. In England, a
"fag" is a cigarette, and
"bitch" refers to a female dog. That goes
for Merican canine, too, though it's more commonly
used as a slur against women. To paraphrase Rodney
Dangerfield, if you look up "bitch" in the
dictionary, there's Ann's picture.
C'mon, it's just a joke.
Coulter has the right to call a presidential
candidate a faggot in public or to say that liberals
should worry about being killed, as she previously
has, as long as I retain the right to call her proof of the
need for retroactive abortion. C'mon, it's just a joke. Oh,
wait, she got me--I've been dragged down
to her level. Not only that, I'm talking about
her, again. Who said, "There's no such thing
as bad publicity?" Coulter should buy them a Mercedes.
But why even go there, for heaven's sake?
Why swim in all that negative energy? Because Coulter
and her comrades Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage have
lowered the tenor of the debate to the point that the only
response is another "schoolyard taunt"
or the actual threat of physical violence. You
can't reason with these people. The only thing you
can do, to preserve your sanity, is ignore them
completely or express your displeasure to the
organizations that promote them.
Coulter fancies herself an actual joke writer
and has compared herself, astonishingly, to H.L
Mencken and Jonathan Swift. Why she doesn't
just compare herself to Ernest Hemingway and put a bullet in
her head, I'll never know. C'mon, it's just a
joke. After watching her CPAC speech, I can state,
after 20 years' experience as a comedian, that none of
her "jokes" would have gotten her a spot at
any comedy club in America. I understand her defense
of her "faggot" joke as really making a joke
about the PC police condemning Washington. But
it's horseshit, because she knew that the use
of the f word was going to get her a ton of
free publicity. She eats this stuff for breakfast.
Great comedy amuses people on both sides of the
aisle. When a comic makes a joke, he or she is just
trying to get a laugh and perhaps make a point.
Coulter is actually trying to affect U.S. government
policies, which makes her act a lot more heinous. And
besides, conservatives can't do comedy. They
can only preach to the converted, merely smearing people and
whipping up their fan base. Have you seen the Fox News
Daily Show spin-off she's part of?
It's a train wreck.
And it's important to realize that even
though American voters kicked conservatives in the
nuts and told them to get lost last November, they are
notoriously big babies and sore losers, so they squirm and
scream like fourth-graders and use words like
"traitor," "un-American," and
now the f bomb. Annie is their very Botoxed
public face. Besides, they've called us faggots for
years. What else is new?
What's new is that she said it at a
gathering of the nation's top Republicans, who
laughed and applauded. That was the real horror. You
almost expected Michael Richards to follow her with his
n word greatest hits. The bigwigs in tow
included Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, and
Little Dickie Cheney, who, as usual when a public
figure uses a vile put-down of the group to which his
daughter belongs, said nothing. What a wuss.
People spend way too much time thinking about
Coulter. I admit that sometimes while channel-surfing
at night and coming across her yammering death mask,
the most vile thoughts enter my head. I picture jumping up
and down on her in a parking lot like Donald Sutherland on
Jackie Earle Haley in The Day of the Locust
and--ooh, she got me again. Damn. I resent her
for invading my brain with such negativity.
It's only got so much room.
All Coulter has ever done is make people
furious. That's it. She makes liberals furious
who see through her act, her endless lies, and the
nails-on-the-blackboard sound of her voice, and whips
conservatives into fury against liberals. It's
the unabashed hate twisted into a well-turned phrase
that's so depressing. I want no part of it. Life is short.
But, frankly, I hope she keeps it up. I wouldn't
put it past her to call Barack Obama the n word
and then defend herself by saying it's a term of
endearment among blacks and has nothing to do with
racism. The viler she gets, the worse her
followers--and the Fox dittoheads who support
her--seem. If you want to protest her
advertisers and promoters, have at it. But the fact that she
has become the face of modern conservatism is fine
with me. They all say "faggot" behind
our backs. I trust that the majority of Americans will see
that if they give power back to these bozos, this is
what they will get.
