Ann Coulter

I haven't read Ann Coulter's book "Godless," and, continuing my unbroken streak of never having read an Ann Coulter book, don't plan to. I have read her columns, though, and I laugh out loud half the time, and wince half the time. I find myself wanting to defend her, in part because I think it's risible to observe outrage over Coulter from liberals who think their counterparts who bear-bait conservatives in precisely the same way are engaged in good clean fun. I sometimes think that the problem liberals have with Coulter is not so much that she trashes them mercilessly, but that she's so much better at it than they are in doing the same to conservatives. Besides, Ann Coulter is a lot easier on the eyes than Al Franken.

That said, I know that "they do it too!" is not a defense. And in the end, even though I agree with her sometimes, what Ann Coulter and people like her across the political spectrum stand for is bad for America. As David Carr asks in his NYT column today: "You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us."

It would be a lot more persuasive to me if journos like David Carr spoke out equally against the bombastic left-wing vitriol that pollutes the public square. (Or, for that matter, if liberals would get equally as angry over the filth, the misogyny and the violence celebrated by many hip-hop artists, who are far more influential in the popular culture than this skinny right-wing WASP from Connecticut can hope to be). Because what Coulter and her fellow cynics of right and left have in common is a commitment to polemics as Total Warfare. They write like Sherman marched to the sea. Or, to switch martial-historic metaphors, they seem prepared to destroy the village in order to save it. (Was it really necessary for Coulter to savage the 9/11 widows by implying that they're enjoying their husbands' deaths for her to make the perfectly valid point that it has become unfortunately taboo to criticize any political activist who has suffered a tragedy?)They have no opponents, only enemies.

What especially gets to me about Ann Coulter is that she identifies herself as a Christian ("a mean one"). National Review dropped her column when she said, in response to 9/11, that "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." I know plenty of conservative Christians, but not a single one who would remotely want to do anything like that. Truth to tell, I don't think Coulter wants that -- this is just shtick with her. She's too smart for it not to be. But she plays into the stereotype that many people hold about Christians, especially conservative ones. I am all in favor of boldly speaking truth to power, but Coulter is very far from fulfilling that prophetic role. To put it mildly.

Let me make this personal. For much of my career, I was a professional film critic. There was nothing more fun than trashing a bad movie; in fact, there's an inverse law of film reviewing that says the better a movie is, the harder it is to write about. I can remember sitting at my computer writing harsh, cutting, clever, extremely snide things about bad movies -- and I even came to think of myself as a sort of virtuoso at that sort of thing, taking great pleasure in coming up with the most quotable nasty lines I could about a bad movie. It's been seven years since I reviewed for a daily paper, and I look back now on that aspect of my work with what you might call ... shame. It's not that some, and maybe most, of these turkeys didn't deserve carving. It's that I took pleasure in my own cruelty. Maybe it was becoming a father, maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was writing a book, or maybe it was all of these things, as well as beginning to mature in my Christian faith, that made me realize how -- how to put this? -- fragile all things human are. It didn't make me any less critical, I don't think, but it did make me think about how to criticize. It is insufficient to hate the bad; we must also love the good, and it seems to me that if we are to be critics/pundits of any lasting worth, that love of the good must not only guide our writing, but the love of people should as well. I admit, this is hard for me. Really hard. But as a Christian, I have no choice. Neither does Ann Coulter, if she is what she says she is.