Everything I said about Ann Coulter was wrong
Don Surber blog
I condemned Coulter for her over-the-top remarks about the four Jersey Girls– 9/11 widows who politicked for Kerry. But after reading her JamsBand.com interview with Taylor Hill about being a Deadhead, I realize that Coulter is entitled to a mistake now and then. She shoots from the hip too often for my tastes, but if we are all the same, it is a dull world.
I am not a fan of the Grateful Dead although I did like some of their songs. Is there a rock song that is more Grumpy Old Man than "Touch of Grey"?
Coulter is a Deadhead and she gets it:
"As a Deadhead and a freedom-lover, I am wounded to the bone that you think the two do not naturally go hand in hand. The Deadheads I just met casually and not through conservative politics were almost always right-thinking, whatever they called themselves. Deadheads believe in freedom – not a government telling people how much water they can have in their toilets or where they can smoke or whether they should be allowed to own a gun. (Remember the photos of Jerry testifying before some Congressional committee while chain smoking? Yeah, he'd really bond with Henry Waxman.)
"One of my Dead friends I met at Vail made candles for Grateful Dead merchandizing. His daily routine consisted of waking up, smoking a bowl, and turning on the Rush Limbaugh radio show while he made his candles. (It's true. He's so far out there he practices this weird, freaky ritual known as "commerce." Don't try telling me pot is harmless!)
"Also there was a big Deadhead Christian group that handed out terrific pamphlets at Dead shows. Admittedly, many of them found God staring into a puddle while high on LSD, but whatever the path, they were very serious Christians – they made Jerry Falwell sound like a secularist.
"Either Bobby or Jerry was asked by a Rolling Stone interviewer to denounce all the Young Reaganites attending their concerts in the 80's, and whichever one it was not only refused to attack the young Republicans, but said he liked some of those "rightist" ideas. Consider that when the Dead decided to do something to save the Rain Forest, they didn't harangue poverty-stricken Third Worlders to give up washing machines and electricity. They did it the free market way: buying up parts of the Rain Forest, parcel by parcel.
"And they provided the Lithuanian basketball team – recently liberated from the Soviet yoke – with totally cool uniforms so they could play in the 1992 Olympics.
"After Jerry died, U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham (R-MI) gave an incredibly touching tribute to Jerry Garcia and the good work the Dead's Rex Foundation had done promoting the arts privately – in contradistinction to millionaire actresses standing up in $50,000 gowns at the Oscars and demanding that hardworking waitresses and truck drivers be forced to support the arts through government taxation. You can look it up in the Congressional Record."
Coulter gets it. There's this place called America where you can be anything you want to be. I raised our kids that way. I used to point to RuPaul on MTV and tell the kids, "This is America. You can be whoever you want to be."
The whole Ann Coulter interview is fascinating. Her critics can read into it whatever they want. For me, it was an eye-opener. Anyone who gets what the values of this country are cannot be all bad. I may not like what she said about the Jersey girls, but in retrospect she did nothing to harm them.
I was wrong about her. Wasn't the first time I was wrong. Won't be the last. I will get by. I will survive.
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