A feminist success story
IF ANN COULTER didn't exist, someone would have to invent her. She's the perfect creature for the ethereal planet of Infotainment, a realm where fact hardly exists, compassion is a yawn, civility is a bore, and the national anthem is ``another opening, another show."
Coulter's comments criticizing the 9/11 widows were everywhere in the media recently. But it's sometimes hard to figure out whether she's a spoof segment on ``The Daily Show," a sitcom character too caricatured to exist in the world that isn't composed of electrons dashing to and fro, or a latter-day Father Coughlin, who spreads hate like hair spray. She's miniskirted, bottle-blonde, and mean as a warthog, a fascist fashionista.
Coulter is the perfect icon of the way in which the values of infotainment now have almost completely taken over what we used to call news and comment. As ``Godless," her latest book about dreaded liberals, was to roll off the presses, Coulter took out after the widows, to wit: ``These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities, and stalked by grief-arazzis. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much." She also called them ``harpies" whose husbands were probably about to divorce them before the Twin Towers fell.
A slip of the lip, a gaffe to be regretted, perhaps? Not at all. As the
The book world, alas, has been sucked into the black hole of planet Infotainment. What used to be the realm of Emerson, Faulkner, and Wolfe is now chock-full of packaged plagiarism, celebrity trivia, and wall-to-wall gossip, diet, and advice.
Coulter's newest book once again takes on her favorite bete noir, those liberals. In ``Godless," she says they will burn in hell for casual sex, opposing school prayer, not believing that the world was created in six days, or not thinking that sex education is the handiwork of Satan. In her last book, ``Treason," anti-Communist crusader Joe McCarthy was the good guy and all Democrats, she said, were anti-America Benedict Arnolds.
She's had her own Time magazine cover, something akin to beatification on planet Infotainment. The Time piece was a cotton-candy valentine, basically writing off her racial and Arab-bashing remarks as rather adorable. Time said, ``It would be easier to accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of her statements about Arabs and Muslims." Not to mention blacks. Coulter once wrote that school desegregation has led to ``illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell." She also noted in a speech, ``Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie," and said that airports should establish separate security lines for men and boys who look dark enough to be from the Middle East. ``Swarthy men . . . We'd be searching, you know, Italians, Spanish, Jews."
Coulter's books are a mishmash, seemingly put together with a trowel instead of a pen, a blend of invective, jokes, outrageous statements, and, from time to time, a modicum of sense. She's much more fun on television, where she can make grown men gasp. She's not employed anyplace, so no one has to fire her when she gets especially racial. She did get canned from one steady job, at National Review on-line, after she wrote about Muslims, ``We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."
Apparently she woke up one day and decided the world did not need another bright woman lawyer. She decided to become an entertainer, not a bad decision. Nobody near the Washington Beltway takes her seriously, of course; I've seen committed conservatives roll their eyes when her name is mentioned. You can't really envision an inflamed mob marching behind Ann in her miniskirt to lynch Muslims or tie liberals to trees and set them alight.
She'd hate to hear it, but Coulter is a feminist success story, as well as being an emblem of the collapse of the American news media. She is filthy rich, from her book royalties and her lecture fees. She already has her own Barbie-type action figure, which blurts out her outrageous-isms. She is tailor-made for the modern media, which values high-decibel rant over thoughtfulness and for which no statement is too extreme, especially if it can be made with flair on television.
Certainly, when we feminists were marching in the 1970s trying to knock down doors barred to women, we never imagined that one person who would follow us through was Ann Coulter. But, hey, everybody can't be Gloria Steinem.
Why should middle-aged white guys get all the shekels from tossing red meat to gun nuts, school-prayer zealots, militias out in the woods, and haters of all things swarthy?
The radical right outspends the lunatic left by a country mile. At least a woman is getting a piece of the action.
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. 
