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United States News Title: Symptom or syndrome? The Ann Coulter phenomenon explored I MAY DISAGREE with what Ann Coulter says, but I will defend to the death Oscar Wilde's right to say it. Describing the same kind of widow that set Coulter off, he quipped: "Her hair turned quite gold from grief." Wondering what life in America would be like if Coulter used a stiletto instead of a sledgehammer is a tempting but futile excursion into dreamland. Suppose, for example, she were confronted--like Jennie Churchill, storied mother of Winston--with a pompous young man who boasted that his financee's virtue was "priced above rubies." Without missing a beat, Jennie said, "Try diamonds." But if the young man said the same thing to Coulter? "The godless liberals are trying to link Pat Robertson to Charles Taylor's diamond smuggling cartel in Liberia while they cry crocodile tears over the poor starving Africans they're helping to starve by conniving with radical National Congress goons trained by Winnie Mandela who controls every mine in South Africa, all because they hate Robertson's Christian beliefs so much they'll be cheering and dancing in the streets if Taylor and the god-hating Marxists succeed in smearing him!" If Coulter lacks Jennie Churchill's sophisticated wit, neither does she show any trace of Dorothy Parker's lethal impishness. Parker's assessment of her dependent husband--"Allen will always land on somebody's feet"--would probably leave her cold. Not because she didn't get it, but because it is so perfectly epigrammatic that there is no way to "mischaracterize" it, to use Coulter's favorite fighting word; it can be quoted in context, out of context, or out of the blue without losing a thing. Wit keeps sexual repartee from being offensive; the sharper the wit, the cleaner the joke. Challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, Parker immediately shot back, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." Her opinion of the current crop of debutantes: "If they were laid end to end I wouldn't be a bit surprised." The English adventuress who broke her leg in the middle of her divorce trial: "She probably did it sliding down a barrister." By contrast, Coulter's sexual remarks are at once grim and flippant. Commenting on a psychologist's plan to teach children about gay sex in a loving way, she said: "How can you teach children about anal sex in a loving way? Or any sodomy for that matter." I am not saying that everyone has to be witty and original and overflowing with dazzling bons mots--after all, Coulter is a lawyer and I wouldn't want to see her let down the side. I am just curious to know why she was content to call Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun of morning TV." Couldn't she come up with something better? How about "Simper Fidelis"? And why a Nazi comparison in view of her own strenuous objections to the way liberals "characterize" right-wingers--herself in particular--as Nazis? Why would she call the liberal Couric a Nazi? Did she mean to imply that Couric is anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel in the far-left fashion? And since Eva Braun has no identity without Hitler, who was his stand-in on the morning show supposed to be? Maybe what she was striving for was not a Nazi but a German, one of those take-charge Teutonic battle queens like Brunhilde who ran the show, so to speak--to imply that Katie Couric ran the morning show and hence the whole country from her powerful liberal throne while cloaked in phony affability. This certainly works better than the powerless, pathetic Eva Braun. But Coulter knows her audience too well for that. While she herself is familiar with Brunhilde, chances are the average American is not, so she probably decided to use Eva Braun whether it made sense or not because everybody knows who she was from seeing all those war movies. And even if they don't, she needed the name of some bad person, and "Eva Braun" sounds like a big, mean Nazi dyke, so--hey--it's good enough. At her best, Coulter writes well, but the chief source of her success is that she is a perfect match for the American ideal: smart as a whip but dumb as a post, educated but not learned, sexy but not sensuous, all at the same time. She would not hesitate to choose a sledgehammer over a stiletto because her instincts would pull her back from what the 18th century called "demolishing your enemies without raising your voice." She would know that if a writer uses a stiletto, a lot of people might not get the point, but they would definitely get the loftiness that accompanies irony and understatement. And so, knowing that being called an elitist spells ruin, she opted for a sledgehammer and raised the roof instead. Her timing was perfect, putting her before the television cameras just in time to take advantage of the whoosh. That's the sound cable news uses to signal each new 15-second segment in a round-up. They report the latest border debacle, then they go whoosh! and start talking about Midwestern floods. When they finish the floods there's another whoosh! and the subject changes to the stock market. Gone are the days when a break was signaled by a soft rattle of the host's fake papers and a murmured "We'll be back in a moment." Now, if a revered philosopher came on a show, the host would say "Hold your thought, Plato" and cut to whoosh. CNN has the loudest whoosh--a harsh wheezing sound so labored that at first I thought it was me. Although I've managed to cut down, I still haven't stopped smoking. But no. The whoosh is television's way of telling us that we are being swept up and borne aloft on gusty torrents of swirling excitement. To train us to gasp, they walk us through it by gasping for us. The whoosh needs a blowhard and it has gotten Ann Coulter, a one-woman Hyde Park Corner who, love her or hate her, is saving television from itself by never uttering Guestisms--those gummy little nothings that guests keep saying over and over without thinking until everybody thinks they have said something thoughtful. Four of the most frequently heard Guestisms are: "That's a good question." "You can indict a ham sandwich." "I saw the gentleman kick the store clerk in the head." "Y'know, Greta..." Coulter has been called so many names that it won't be long before somebody creates a site listing them all under http://cussoutcoulter.com. My favorite among the printable ones is "Twiggy with Tourette's." I vetoed "virago" because its original meaning--"a woman of stature, strength, and courage who is not feminine in the conventional way"--should be reserved for true heroines like Joan of Arc. As for the devolved usage, it may fit her, but I have a mental block against it because it's the way intellectual snobs say "bitch." You know who the real winner in the Ann Coulter controversy is, don't you? GEICO Insurance Co. Whenever their ad comes on after I've been watching Coulter do her howling-Boudicca number, their little gecko lizard seems so plangent and defenseless that I want to hold him close and protect him from her. I feel completely mischaracterized and it's all her fault. FLORENCE KING is a Fredericksburg writer. Her newest book is "STET, damnit!"
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Neither of these women can rite.
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