Sunday, March 04, 2007

Coulter: our Moore?

One of the most exasperating periods of my life was the two-week boomlet for Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. The week the movie came out, I was staying at Evergreen State in near Olympia, Washington, for a conference on Learning Communities, and to understand this location, you should be familiar with 1) Chuck Klosterman's dictum that people attend Evergreen State to avoid attending life, and 2) Olympia is an hour away from Seattle.

The conference was run by a series of professors--ones that either taught at Evergreen or should have--and on the Thursday of that week, the night Farenheit 9/11 came out, a group of them drove an hour to Seattle to stand in line for two hours in order to see the movie. I should emphasize that, by and large, these people (two-thirds of them women) were wonderful and kind and and brilliant and hospitable to a fault--right up until the second when the subject turned to politics, at which time these people would turn into fanatics ready to lecture all of us on the stolen election, the corrupt Supreme Court, Chimpy McBushhitler, and Ho ho ho, wasn't it just hilarious that Fiji had signed off on the invasion of Iraq (leaving aside that 250 Fijian soldiers, who were placed in charge of currency transports through deadly territory, were roughly equivalent to 117,000 French, had France ever intended to stick an oar in, which it hadn't)?

One woman in particular sticks out: mid-fifties, attractive, and dressed in the de riguer Birkenstocks, she was one of those who had gone to see the movie, and on the Friday morning of that week, she described the movie to me, then realized that I was from Texas, then with utter solemnity said, "You'd better hurry and see it. You're in Texas. You know they're going to try and have it shut down."

When I expressed doubt that government agents would be charging into the River Oaks 3 to confiscate a documentary, she shook her head: No, no, Bush would be coming after the movie.

Once I returned to Houston, I emailed her that Farenheit 9/11 was playing in a movie theatre not four miles from the elder George Bush's house, she emailed me back, wondering, Well, how can he live with the shame?

Now comes the truly exasperating part. I saw Farenheit 9/11, not that I bought a ticket. (I purchased a ticket for something else and snuck in, not wanting Michael Moore to have a single dollar of mine.) Afterwards, in talking to people about it, I was struck by a certain debating tactic. Point out six falsehoods, ten, twenty, and wait for the response: "So? So he's our Rush Limbaugh. Big deal."

No kidding. I must have heard that line of argument a dozen times, everytone from dinner companions to Bill Press on cable news, repeating that line over and over and over until it became established fact. Point out blatant falsehoods in the first scene in the film, and get this: So? Our Rush Limbaugh, bro.

And so it has been with our side and Anne Coulter: living off her hyperbole, taking joy in the rage she conjured in others, excusing her hyperbole by saying, So? She's our Michael Moore. Or Bill Maher. Or Al Franken. Or, speaking of dissemblers, Bill Clinton.

So--I always imply--shut up.

Not any more. I give up.

The Sainted Soxblog makes the case.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure what a cutesy liberal-bashing story has to do with Ann Coulter's gaffe. Okay, so Coulter, Moore, Limbaugh, and Franken are attention-mongering extremist blowhards. That's beside the point. The media has probably done a disservice to Coulter by not providing the context of her remarks (she said she WASN'T going to call Edwards by that term). Nevertheless, using such hateful language in such an offhand way is deplorable (as if it doesn't really "count") and can be dangerous when used in what is supposed to be intelligent public discourse. The PC crowd does tend to overreact to language, but words do matter, especially when their use demeans an entire group of people who had nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Anonymous said...

You show an amazing ability to produce illogical statements that you believe to be rational. The fact that no truly significant contribution was provided by any other country than Britain (prior to their draw-down) has what exactly to do with the supposed cowardice of the French?

Of course no one was talking about how cowardly the French were when they Napoleon was conquering large swaths of Europe but what does France have to do with Fiji?

You are rationalizing the worst president in our nation's history. There is no rational objective point you can make that would forward your agenda so you waste time demonstrating your willingness to see reality as it is. You are a clown and a waste of flesh.