"The Ann Coulter show, and what it means
Rex Murphy, National Post Published: Saturday, March 27, 2010
More flamboyant than an airport tantrum, more durable than prorogation -- it's the Ann Coulter tour.
The Coulter tour -- three Canadian speeches, only two of which were actually given -- confirms her gifts as a controversialist. She does everything but give hives to the legions who Really Don't Like Her. Down south, she is one of the highest-profile combatants of the culture wars, owning an equivalent, thought diametrically opposed, status to, say, Michael Moore, a man with the same ability to summon hives in those who don't like him.
Both are agile in their approach -- Moore being the slickest of slick pseudo-documentarians, a foil to Coulter's Don Rickles conservatism. Absolute and deliberate attack on the preciousness of political correctness is Coulter's main game, and she plays it with vicious relish. Guileful shaping of documentaries lambasting capitalism, and posing as an outsized champion of the little guy is Moore's self-assigned beat, one he's walked to fame and fortune since Roger and Me.
It doesn't take much courage to be Michael Moore. For a while anyway, he owned near hero status with the activist base (and some of the leadership) of the Democratic party. He charms the trendy minds of the glitterati. I dare say there's a statue, complete with candles and incense, of Michael Moore in Sean Penn's living room.
Being Ann Coulter is a riskier gig. Coulter is so relentlessly and deliberately abrasive that she almost chases support away. In her London, Ont., appearance this week, her harsh "take a camel" answer to a Muslim student was fingernails on a blackboard to our sensibilities. But then, I recall the Michael Moore images of kids kite-flying in Saddam's Iraq, which was a real shudder-inducing moment. Disneyfying the torture state that was Saddam's Iraq was the grander affront by far. Moore, playing to the easy line of George W. Bush as an idiot-Hitler, got feted at Cannes and won an Academy Award.
They both operate in a new and mixed terrain, a compound of journalism, comedy, politics and entertainment, one brought on by a combination of factors -- primarily, the ever-escalating intensity of U.S. politics, and its concomitant withdrawal into zealously partisan camps. This fuels the "continuous debate" brought on by the new environment of the Internet, the blogosphere and the 24-hour news channels.
Cable news channels, in particular, have turned American politics into a continuous reality show, where the loud, hard and mostly humourless voices that pronounce on each day's stories achieve the kind of celebrity that used to be the property only of pop stars and actors. The more outlandish the performance -- think of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, in comparison with whom Bill O'Reilly is a self-effacing introvert -- the higher the partisan fame. These figures are less commentators than impresarios. They use politics as a rough script for a daily performance -- and are paralleled by the emergence of the comic pundits, of whom Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are of course the premier examples."
Coulter and Moore give a clue to one more aspect of the current scene -- politics as social marker, a brand signal. People "advertise" their politics -- where they are on global warming, for example, to signal their moral worth or sensibility.
Much of what when on in Ottawa this week was posturing of this kind. A lot of the clatter about Coulter and "hate speech" was neither about Coulter, per se, nor about so-called hate speech. It was a form of advertising of where certain factions see themselves on the moral scale. If you hate Coulter, you must be a good person. Certainly, the U of O's provost's now-famous letter warning Coulter about Canada's stringent hate laws was more advertisement, a signal to right-thinking people everywhere that he is very much one of them, than a genuine alarm over potentially improvident speech.
Coulter's visit, finally, did have one permanent utility. It was another vivid illustration of how elastic and feeble, at least in certain quarters, the Canadian understanding of free speech has become. The idea, evidently held by certain of the protesters, that merely to call something "hate speech" licenses an attempt to halt that speech is depressing because it has become so common.
The talk of the university as a "safe space," meaning a place when people will neither hear nor confront speech or ideas with which they are not "comfortable," is politically correct cant of the highest order. It is close to a contradiction of the idea of a university. If Coulter's tempestuous visit teased a few of these considerations into the minds of those otherwise innocent of them, it was worth all the flurry and the fury.
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