She Said What? Ann Coulter, twit. P.J. O’Rourke
Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/she-said-what_1035823.html
Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.
Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.
She’s from Connecticut and is very upset about immigrants. I am willing to lend a sympathetic ear to people from Connecticut who are very upset about immigrants, if they have a tribal casino.
And I forgive her for supporting Donald Trump. Kids do that stuff. My 17-year-old daughter has wheedled the car keys and right now is out probably behaving at least as stupidly.
Other than that I’ve been, I suppose, to the extent I’ve paid attention, on the same political page as Ann Coulter. Well, in the same political book, several chapters further on, under the subhead “Grumpy Old Farts and the Libertarian/Neocon Conundrum.”
Then, during the September 16 Republican presidential candidates’ debate, Ann Coulter twittered or tweeted or whatever the verb form of that waste of time may be.
She is young, scatter-brained, and heedless, but she is not an idiot. She graduated cum laude from Cornell and has a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. But no intelligent hike through the Minotaur’s labyrinth of politics can be made in 140-character baby steps. Especially when you’re walking in clown shoes.
What Ann Coulter tweeted was:
Cruz, Huckabee Rubio all mentioned ISRAEL in their response to: “What will AMERICA look like after you are president.”
And
How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?
Not anywhere near as many as there would and should be if FDR hadn’t been as much of a jerk about immigration as you are, Ann, you etiolated bean sprout butt trumpet.
As to why Israel is important, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ikh bin a Ishral.’ ”
And I mean it, even if, pope-kissing Mick that I am, my Yiddish is maybe sketchy.
Partly this is personal, Ann, you jangle-tongue, you all-clapper- and-no-carillon, you crack in the Liberty Bell. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, “It’s not me, it’s you.”
But, first, my contempt is moral. Antisemitism is evil. Per se, as you lawyers like to put it. For the sake of argument, let us “stipulate” that you are not per se an antisemite. Instead of saying that’s true, let usstipulate it with all the snarky lawyer freight that “stipulating” carries.
Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.”
Manners are the small change of morality. You, Ann, are nickel and diming yourself. And may all the coins in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin land on you and squash you flat. (Scrooge, by the way, is not a Jew, he’s a duck.)
Second, my contempt is religious. The Jews found our God, hiding in plain sight, while the rest of us were praying to “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”
And what thanks do the Jews get? They get this wisecrack from William Norman Ewer, early-20th-century Brit journalist (and Commie):
How odd of God
To choose the Jews.
To which there’s an anonymous capping reply that I would like to second:
Not odd, you sod
The Jews chose God.
Third, it’s political. There is a vein of antisemitism in conservatism. You’re mining it. I trust the claim you’ve staked will pan out with you getting a smack in the pan.
Antisemitism is almost an original sin of “classical liberalism.” It is present at the birth of the Enlightenment, with Voltaire who, in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, under the entry for Tolerance, of all places, calls Jews “the most intolerant and cruel nation of all antiquity.” Voltaire! Even he who all but invented liberty and saved us from that ur-leftist fool Rousseau.
And 200 years later it was still there. In the effort to expel antisemites from conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. had to pause in his war against collectivism’s barbarian hordes and sever ties with the man he had endorsed for president, Pat Buchanan, and stifle his old friend and National Review senior editor Joe Sobran. (Joe, whom you, Ann, have called “the G. K. Chesterton of our time”—a two-edged compliment in this context, viz. Chesterton’s essay “The Problem of Zionism.”)
In between Voltaire and Sobran there were all the entre-deux-guerres conservatives willing to tolerate or even endorse the cancerous sores of fascism as a sort of homeopathic remedy for the leprosy of Bolshevism.
And, finally, Ann, it really is personal. I owe my life as something other than a complete nebbish to Jews. I didn’t grow up in New Canaan, Connecticut, and I don’t know if there was a “gentleman’s agreement” at the Round Hill Country Club. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and I didn’t know anything about country clubs.
When I was growing up, Toledo was a factory town, a magnet for the immigrants you deplore (both foreign and from Kentucky). My neighborhood was peopled by Krauts, Poles, Hunkies, Bohunks, shanty Irish, Jews, and white trash, with a sprinkling of WASPs, mostly fresh off the farm. (The Lebanese were up on the North Side. For some reason Toledo didn’t have many Italians. And—this was before you were born—blacks and Latinos had not been discovered, socially.)
The Protestant German kids in my hometown were good in school but dorky about it, with Monday’s homework done on Friday night. The Catholic German kids were somewhat the same but less so, classic B students, and ditto for the farm boys except they had a blank look on their faces and clothes from the Montgomery Ward catalogue.
There were smart Micks and Polacks, but they kept their heads down about it because they grew up in households where “Don’t get smart with me!” and “What makes you think you’re so smart?” were parenting terms of art and often accompanied by a whack from Dad.
And the white trash, jeez were they stupid. They were out in the high school parking lot practicing to be stupid, quizzing each other on it. “Hell, no, Bubba, that ain’t the way you say it. It’s, ‘Hold ma beer, y’all, an’ watch this!’ ”
The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.
I was raised in a house without smart. My mother may once have had a life of the mind, to judge by the dusty copies of Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley, Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber, and It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis on the underpopulated shelves of the bookcase in the front hall. But being widowed, raising kids, marrying a drunk second husband, and having cancer distracted her.
One night at the dinner table, when I was about 13, my stepfather called me a skinny little smartass show-off for asking what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was about. Of course I wasshowing off. What it’s about is self-evident. I was smugly savoring the fact that I was the only person in the family who knew the title and author (if nothing else) of such a tome.
But I bet the conversation wouldn’t have gone that way at my friend Barry Cantor’s house. There would have been a discussion. Perhaps with a tactful elision of how it was all the Christians’ fault. Or at least somebody would have looked up Gibbon in the World Book Encyclopedia. The Cantors owned the complete set.
The bell curve being what the bell curve is, and applying, as it does, uniformly to the human race (including lawyers who went to Cornell), some Jews weren’t smart. For example, my drug dealer pal Louie Schlotsky with the mobbed-up dad. Louie died of a heroin overdose in the 1970s. Or my buddy Steve Plummerberg, son of a brain surgeon. Steve joined the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi cult.
But at least Louie and Steve tried to be smart. And thank God—specifically YHWH—for the few, the very few, the chosen if you will, people in Toledo who tried. Who tried to cheer the Freedom Riders, tried to debate the ideas of Herman Kahn, tried to get to Chicago to see Lenny Bruce at the Gate of Horn, tried to read Herbert Marcuse and Eric Hoffer, and tried to dig Thelonious Monk.
Ann, I understand you’re a fan of Phish.
P. J. O’Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
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