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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (230909)	4/28/2005 1:47:04 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571704

Nick Coleman: In the Coultergeist's wake, a teachable moment Nick Coleman, Star Tribune April 27, 2005 NICK0427 Ann Coulter is gone, but now we're having fun. Because listening to her is like hitting your head with a hammer: It's fun when she stops. The conservative pundit on spiked heels came to town last week, and they are still picking up the pieces at two citadels of saintly scholarship in Minnesota -- St. Olaf College in Northfield and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. I have already written about the miniskirted screechfest at St. Thomas, and I'd be glad to never mention it again. Except for the fact that left behind her, amid the wreckage of civil discourse, is that useful flotsam often found in the wake of a disaster: A teachable moment. What have we learned, class, about free speech after listening to Coulter call Democrats traitors to the country, threaten to give a Muslim student's name to homeland security and toss insults faster than a kid with a Dixie cup full of fish parts can toss herrings at a seal exhibit? Her herrings are all red. Even if you agreed with her political views -- and she has an absolute right to express them -- her manner of speech was so inflammatory and her derogatory ripostes so intimidating that both campuses she plucked last week (a total take of $50,000 or more) are still reverberating. That's not a good thing, but it has the potential to have good consequences. At St. Olaf, Coulter's ugliest comments were returned in kind with ugly taunts from some of the students who packed a chapel to see if anyone got hurt. But since then, a discussion has taken place about the hurricane that hit the campus to give a speech in which liberalism and terrorism were argued to be different variations of the same disease. Another variation might be irresponsible speech intended to incite controversy, but Coulter prefers to aim her brickbats at liberals and any of that breed remaining on campus who have not yet bent to their knees to utter, "Ronald Reagan was a great man, yes, ma'am, and he ate liberals for lunch." If fistfights and a general brawl had broken out amongst the Lutheran learners, Coulter would have considered the bloody noses proof of her cleverness. She could get her wish some day. Even at St. Olaf among the phlegmatic Oles, heated verbal volleys were exchanged to the extent that the dean of students pleaded for civility and recalled the traditions of a place that has always found its "way through controversies like this much better than the rest of the world." One lesson from Coulter's hit-and-run assaults, however, is that the time when the groves of the academy seemed above the battle are coming to an end. The grind of the culture-political wars at large may soon mean broken crockery in the cafeteria. If so, Coulter won't only be $50,000 richer, she will also be smirking. This is just what she wants: shouts, insults, angry venting, food fights. If she wants to call herself an itinerant instigator and foaming fomenter, she has every right to rent a hall and sell tickets and offer pitchers of beer along with the buffoonery. Why any student group would want to enable her with a $25,000 check in order to see their roommates' veins, pop, I don't know. And why any college would let some off-campus group underwrite the fireworks is truly a mystery. At St. Olaf, a student speakers' committee booked Coulter, but at St. Thomas, the bloviator's big bucks were paid for by the Young America's Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative group that reveres Reagan. But Coulter did a disservice to the memory of the Great Communicator. While she was spewing hate, many St. Thomas students felt too intimidated to speak back. That is not free speech. That is highly paid partisan bullying. The furor over her behavior brought a disclaimer by the Rev. Dennis Dease, the university president, who has tried to put the Coultergeist back in the box. It is not what Coulter said so much as how she said it, he concluded. And how she treated anyone who differed. Hate speech can come from lowbrow fire breathers of any view: A jerk is a jerk, left or right. But Coulter's comportment crossed a line, and Dease was wise to point that out and to make it clear that controversial issues should be discussed "in a responsible and educative manner" and in an arena "free of reproach or reprisal." His thoughts would make good reading at every college and in every other forum where citizens are trying to discuss the issues without throwing punches. The question is not whether vile speech is allowed. It is, and it can be very profitable, as Coulter knows. The real question is, what is acceptable on a campus and where is the line between illumination and conflagration? On that score -- though little other -- Ann Coulter's visits proved invaluable. Maybe we should ask her back. Next lifetime. startribune.com