Deconstructing Ann Coulter

Andre Maurois, in his beautiful, impressionistic biography of Benjamin Disraeli, writes of the words of consolation that Disraeli's great rival, William Ewart Gladstone, wrote to him upon the occasion of Disraeli’s wife’s death: “He was sincere, and for an instant, no doubt, each of the two rivals appeared to the other in his true light, no longer distorted by passion. Thus it happens that from time to time, a madman may have a few minutes of relief, during which his phantoms flee away.”

So it occasionally happens. Every so often, we are given the grace to view those whom we despise and detest with understanding and compassion. I recently had that sort of moment concerning Ann Coulter, whom I’ve never met and most likely never will, since I’m not famous, and whom I regard as the absolute worst, out of a strong field of contestants, of the far-right-wing political commentators and pundits.

There aren’t really words strong enough to describe the depths of my antipathy for Ann Coulter. Her smugness, her shrillness, her stridency, her mean-spiritedness, the jawdroppingly stupid outrageousness of her public statements, elicit in me a visceral disgust and a rise in my gorge not unlike the one I experienced when, as a child, I picked up the body of a dead bird I’d found in the woods, and saw its underside crawling with maggots.

Ann Coulter today, the snarling darling of the Far Right fringe. 

The sheer banality and calculated offensiveness of the stuff this detestable bitch says (“Liberalism is a mental disease,” “Enthusiasm for soccer is a sign of moral decay,” etc.) are shocking even to someone like me, who enjoys being offensive and appreciates the quality in others, and who is, as Robert Benchley once described himself, “an old public school boy with a strong stomach.” The terms she uses in reference to Arabs and Muslims—“ragheads,” “jihad monkeys,” “carpet merchants,” “camel jockeys,” and her demand that Muslims be barred from airplanes and suggestion that instead “They could use flying carpets”—are worse than racist, they’re not funny. She goes for the cheap shot—cheap shots like “Man Coulter,” “Stan Coulter,” “Dan Coulter,” and Ann-Drogynous Coulter.”

On one of these occasions, she reminded me forcibly of an asshole I knew in fourth grade who used to call a biracial friend of mine “nigger,” “zebra” and “Oreo,” as we rode the bus to school, looking around quickly after each insult to gauge the other kids' reaction to his bons mot. 

It was at that moment that my Mauroisian moment hit me like a ton of bricks. In one second, I got Ann Coulter. I understood her completely, right down to what I’m certain are the cracked and leathery soles of her greyhound-like feet. At that second, I could read her whole history and psychology like a book.

I don’t know anyone who knew her in her youth, so I’ll probably never get confirmation of my hypothesis, but I don’t really need it. Even if I were proven wrong about her, it wouldn’t do any good. Much as a religious zealot, confronted with unassailable evidence that his faith is malarkey, digs in his heels and continues to keep the faith, so would I. The following is purely hypothetical, but I’m sure as shootin’ that I’m right. But you judge for yourself.

Ann then, as a high school student at New Canaan High School. 

Ann Coulter was, throughout most of her childhood and adolescence, a painfully shy, gawky, awkward, clumsy girl who looked like she was built out of kneecaps and tinkertoys. She would have been mousily invisible had she not shot up to adult height somewhere around seventh or eighth grade, and thus became a magnet for mockery—not that of the genuinely cool kids, who probably ignored her, but that of the second-tier cool kids, the hangers-on and toadies. Throughout adolescence, she kept her mouth shut (no doubt to hide her braces and retainer as much as to keep quiet), and she walked with a stoop to try and hide her Amazonian height. She moved with the quick, small, mincing steps of a person both hurrying to class and petrified of her own clumsiness. Once, perhaps several times, in spite of her caution, she tripped over her own feet going down a staircase, scattering the books, notebooks, folders, pens, and pencils she usually kept clasped tightly to her chest all over hell’s half acre, to the hilarity of whomever happened to be standing around. She probably spent most evenings weeping herself to sleep.

When she got to college, however, that all changed.

At Cornell, she quickly discovered that some men like tall, blonde, blue-eyed, willowy women, and she, to quote Naomi Wolf, bloomed in the sunlight that is male sexual attention. Or to put it more concisely and less poetically, she slutted out. Once she realized she was desirable, she gave it away like candy at Halloween. She threw it out there like nobody’s business. She took all comers. She not only became easy, she became notoriously so.

Eventually, though, she realized her mistake. It was the wrong kind of attention. She’d been reduced to nothing but a slampiece, a toy, a three o’clock girl, a skank, a cooze, a disposable momentary diversion, a dehumanized walking means of the relief of unbearable urges.

Or maybe she just got a dose of the clap. Either way, it made her mean.

I’ve often thought that conservatism is the default political position of the mean. Political affiliation, most likely, is as much a due to temperament as it is to upbringing or conviction, and modern American conservatism is the preserve of the bilious and dyspeptic. Immigrants? Send ‘em back. Blacks? Cut ‘em off. Welfare, Affirmative Action, all of it. Let ‘em sink or swim. Hopefully sink. Gays? Don’t let ‘em marry. Women? Send ‘em back to the kitchen. Prisoners? Fry ‘em. Other countries? Bomb ‘em. Poor kids? Let ‘em starve. The environment? Trash it. Spotted owls? Shoot ‘em. Pristine wilderness? Drill, baby, drill!

It’s an ugly, selfish, and nihilistic political philosophy—hell with everyone except me. The only entity for which American conservatives seem to have any sympathy at all is the fetus, most likely because it hasn’t yet committed the sin of becoming the thing conservatives hate most, which is a person.

And, just as Gollum went to Mordor because Mordor draws all evil things, so did Ann Coulter, the embittered former fucktoy, gravitate toward the far right.

But she still craved the attention. Being desired made her feel pretty—the things those college boys told her to get into her pants made her feel good. Now that she’d tasted attention after an adolescence of being either ignored or derided, she still wanted it, even if she’d grown a little tired of the threesomes, the gangbangs, the fulfilling of humiliating requests, and having to walk home across campus after being told, “Okay, you can leave now,” at two in the morning. And she realized that she could still get that attention by saying outrageous things as loudly as possible.

It was sort of a perfect storm of personal discovery. She discovered that spewing filth, which she enjoys, brought her attention, which she also enjoys. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate she got into conservative political commentary instead of scat porn (although I don’t see much difference between the two), but I’ll bet it was a horse race between the two career options.

Read one of her books sometime and tell me I’m wrong. I’ve read a couple of them. There’s nothing profound there. She doesn’t have an original thought in her head. There’s no research, no analysis, no synthesis, nothing worth reading. Her books are nothing but long, strident screeds, insult-fests that garner attention the way a toddler throwing a tantrum or a monkey its feces does. They are self-evidently, if inadvertently, pleas for attention.

It’s even more evident when you see her in action. Watch her on a talk show sometime—everything she says and does is calculated to bring attention to herself. The flamboyant, overblown and overenunciated manner of speaking. The ludicrously plunging necklines (which expose her bony ribcage). The laughably short skirts (which expose her camel-like knees and thighs). The constant tic of tossing her long, lustrous, luxuriant blonde tresses. The affected, insincere laughter. And most damningly, the tiny, tiny little pause that follows almost every statement she makes and the furtive little peek around to see how her witticism was received—the very same mannerism of the nasty little fourth-grade tormentor of my friend on the school-bus.

Try as I might to hate her—and I do, make no mistake—I can’t help but pity her, because she is pitiable.  Under her paper-thin veneer of bravado and belligerence, she’s brittle as hell. Fragile as a Ming vase. She’s morbidly vain, but blind to the laughable spectacle that she presents to the world. Incessant self-regard without a millisecond of self-awareness. As much as she insults and belittles, she desperately craves approval and appreciation. It’s as plain as the Adam’s apple on her neck.

Norman Mailer, in his last book, The Castle in the Forest, imagines the childhood of Adolf Hitler as a phantasmagorical, horrifying, scatological and squalid chronicle of demonic activity, incest (some of it between Hitler and his brother), rape, animal torture, violence, cruelty, coprophilia, murder, and sexual and emotional degradation, all of which turned an innocent child into the greatest monster that the human race has ever produced or witnessed. One reviewer called it “an utterly strange work of naked, wild empathy,” and it is. It’s tough to have compassion for an evildoer, but it’s much easier to have compassion on the child the evildoer used to be.

If my reading of Ann Coulter’s background is correct, and I bet it is, it illustrates the fundamental irony of her existence. If I’m right, she’s a deeply scarred and wounded being, the product of cavalier cruelty, a woman whose experiences crushed all the decency out of her, and who now trumpetingly advocates and celebrates the same lack of compassion that turned her into the miserable thing that she is.

She’s probably beyond redemption, but, properly interpreted, she serves as a terrific object lesson. If we want to keep others like her from spawning and germinating, all we must needs do tune her out, ignore her screeching prescriptions, and extend respect, compassion, and empathy in all arenas, personal and political, to those who need it.