Coulter Kampf
Apologies to anyone who has already used this title - it’s just too damn easy, like “Bareback Mountin’”
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What’s intriguing to me about Ann Coulter is not the pathology of her own behavior and persona - that’s easy enough to understand. The secret truth is that it’s fun to be a provocateur - its fun to be an enfant terrible and enrage perfect strangers and get all sorts of attention and positive strokes from other perfect strangers, to position yourself in the Us. Vs. Them game and get energy from one side (or another).
Ann just bought a $1.6 million townhouse in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, so I guess it can (on occasion) be lucrative as well - as long as you have the stomach for it, and don’t eventually begin to see the humanity of the people you’re using to score cheap points and grow sick at heart about it and have an attack of conscience.
No, what’s interesting about Ann is not this overgrown little girl begging for attention and the transparent mnechanisms she uses to do it but the 20-30% of Americans who love her schtick and don’t get that its ironic - that she is (to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan) a drag queen posing as a fascist.
They don’t get the schtick - they think its real. That means that 20-30% of the people in this country actually are hard-core, exterminationist fascists, or very sympathetic to that POV.
I think it was Norman Mailer who said that there is something about the human species that makes us all latent fascists - see also the Stanford Prison Experiment. Thus my neighbor, whose car displays a “Club Gitmo” bumpersticker purchased from the Rush Limbaugh online store.
Is there any difference between her and the good Germans of Hitler’s era? Political paraphenalia certainly hadn’t acheived the same degree of market penetration yet - there were no bourgeois burghers driving their VWs around with (ironic?) “Club Auschwitz” bumper stickers on their cars.
“Fascism” said Adorno “is psychoanalysis in reverse.” It takes strength, and commitment, to untangle your projections from the world outside you, to withdraw and examine them. Not everyone has that strength, or that commitment. And so we remain a species where about 20-30% of us exist on a psychological level not too far removed from a chimpanzee troop.
(shrug) fuck’em. I’m gad I live in SF and don’t have to deal with these idiots, except peripherally.
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You bring to mind that Doug Adams character who built an asylum for the outside world.
The trouble with these chimps is, they lob bombs instead of poop.