Ann Coulter: Right Wing Kooch Dancer
31/12/05 08:36
Her
ignorance is almost as stunning as her...
ignorance. I would say "viciousness," but she
hasn't the gravitas for that. Ann Coulter is a
carnival kooch dancer for the Republican right. The
mainstage shows hold Peggy Noonan, Condoleeza Rice,
and even the recently cancer-humbled Laura
Ingraham. But then the white Republican men pay a
few extra bucks on the sly, the sleazy barker parts
a curtain, and their on the stage lays Ann... her
legs straight up in the air, spread wide, showing
all... all the hate, all the lust for dark men's
blood, all the impotent rage of race-hating white
men that they can no longer quite so freely, quite
so openly rape the world for their fun and profit.
Now, as George Bush discovers, there actually might
be some reckoning.
Today, she attacked Kwanzaa--a subject not worth much thought, much less some silly white woman's vitriolic ink--on the basis that black folks love Jesus just like white people like her taught us to so we could better suffer their tender ministrations, deprivations, humiliations. She, of the party who tittered while black men and women sat stranded, some dying in New Orleans because the government just saw some poor niggers down there, and everyone knows that they don't count. She who said of Muslims, "We should invate their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." To Ann, you see, Christianity will work just as well for the sand niggers as it does for the real ones. It will let them pray noisily for next-world deliverance as their lands and propserity are savaged for oil.
If Kwanzaa can piss Ann off enough to allow her to print a ditty so racist that she will, in a few minutes, be forced to explain ad nausem that her meaning was "miscontstrued..." in other words, if it pisses her off enough to force her to show her true contempt for black people, to show the depth of the hatred that sits in the deep dark hole between her political legs that her white supporters throw quarters to gape at, well then, maybe there's something to Kwanzaa after all. Or maybe black folks having something that white people did not hand them, regardless of its quality, is what so enrages her and her ilk.
Today, she attacked Kwanzaa--a subject not worth much thought, much less some silly white woman's vitriolic ink--on the basis that black folks love Jesus just like white people like her taught us to so we could better suffer their tender ministrations, deprivations, humiliations. She, of the party who tittered while black men and women sat stranded, some dying in New Orleans because the government just saw some poor niggers down there, and everyone knows that they don't count. She who said of Muslims, "We should invate their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." To Ann, you see, Christianity will work just as well for the sand niggers as it does for the real ones. It will let them pray noisily for next-world deliverance as their lands and propserity are savaged for oil.
If Kwanzaa can piss Ann off enough to allow her to print a ditty so racist that she will, in a few minutes, be forced to explain ad nausem that her meaning was "miscontstrued..." in other words, if it pisses her off enough to force her to show her true contempt for black people, to show the depth of the hatred that sits in the deep dark hole between her political legs that her white supporters throw quarters to gape at, well then, maybe there's something to Kwanzaa after all. Or maybe black folks having something that white people did not hand them, regardless of its quality, is what so enrages her and her ilk.
Strangling Fiction
09/12/05 08:24
NY
Times reported on the increasingly bleak fiction
sales. Much
hand-wringing ensues, and, as a result of these
numbers, agents, publishers and other
gatekeepers continue to tighten the noose around
their own necks in response. It's as if someone
told you that you were threatened with
frostbite, but instead of getting out of the
cold, you began lopping off your limbs.
Modern fiction is dull. It is too often stilted, precious, small, and inconsequential. Look at the fiction titles on the NY Times' list of "10 Best Books of 2005." Is there one book there that does not testify to the severance of "literature" from "entertainment?" Is there one book there you can call "grandly entertaining?" I cannot tell you how many recent books I have put down at page 100, bored to death. Most seem the tortured efforts of the excessively trained and mildly talented. It's like shrill broadway voices. You can hear the voice lessons in every note. "Hear me work!" the voices scream at you. It is an inherently selfish sort of act--to demand that others watch you work. It means that the audience is there for your benefit. You are no longer there to entertain them. So many of those voices sound alike because they are trained to sound alike. So it is with the modern novel born of writer's workshops and BAs and MFAs in creative writing. "Watch me work," they scream.
I don't pay good money to watch people work.
The academization of letters demands that "literature" become arcana. Academics cannot own what everyone understands or enjoys. Once that happens, the public owns the form. There must be codes and signs and ciphers that the elite book reviewers and fiction profs alone can decipher. They don't care if the novel loses its audience. As a matter of fact, that loss simply cements their ownership of the form. The loss of the audience is growth of their power.
I find few things more annoying than the sound of Garrison Keillor's cloying voice as he introduces the day's poem in his "Writer's Almanac." First, the entire exercise seems a paeon to the death of letters. It's a daily eulogy, with its funereal music and his oh so morticianly vocal tones. "So and so died on..." He's asking us to fetishize the dead. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to realize that what's dead is reading and writing about which anyone gives a shit.
"They" seem desperately to want writing to be like Classical music--a reference to a better (to their mind) and bygone age. Culturally, Classical music is quite insignificant. Symphonies struggle and die, the form barely refreshes itself. It is absent from the popular mind. However, its practice requires monastic devotion and the judgment of it requires a depth of musical knowlege most can't approach. The specialists own it lock, stock and barrel.
However, most of us don't make music at work every day. We don't write music to our friends and co-workers. We don't use music to communicate daily. However we do us words thusly, and we use stories as well. Thus it is a far greater stretch to drag away from us these things--words and stories--with which we're intimate--to divorce them from us, their natural audience The pulling and tugging it takes is herculean.
Why would you want to take writing away from the mass of people who read daily, and tell and hear stories daily? Turning the writing of stories into a monastic exercise of a very few monks and acolytes toilling in dank rooms is a grossly counter-intuitive act. But it is succeeding. The sales figures will continue to fall as long as the gatekeepers continue to horde and fetishize the form, and see it as badge of membership into an elite clique, instead of a beautiful means of mass entertainment.
Modern fiction is dull. It is too often stilted, precious, small, and inconsequential. Look at the fiction titles on the NY Times' list of "10 Best Books of 2005." Is there one book there that does not testify to the severance of "literature" from "entertainment?" Is there one book there you can call "grandly entertaining?" I cannot tell you how many recent books I have put down at page 100, bored to death. Most seem the tortured efforts of the excessively trained and mildly talented. It's like shrill broadway voices. You can hear the voice lessons in every note. "Hear me work!" the voices scream at you. It is an inherently selfish sort of act--to demand that others watch you work. It means that the audience is there for your benefit. You are no longer there to entertain them. So many of those voices sound alike because they are trained to sound alike. So it is with the modern novel born of writer's workshops and BAs and MFAs in creative writing. "Watch me work," they scream.
I don't pay good money to watch people work.
The academization of letters demands that "literature" become arcana. Academics cannot own what everyone understands or enjoys. Once that happens, the public owns the form. There must be codes and signs and ciphers that the elite book reviewers and fiction profs alone can decipher. They don't care if the novel loses its audience. As a matter of fact, that loss simply cements their ownership of the form. The loss of the audience is growth of their power.
I find few things more annoying than the sound of Garrison Keillor's cloying voice as he introduces the day's poem in his "Writer's Almanac." First, the entire exercise seems a paeon to the death of letters. It's a daily eulogy, with its funereal music and his oh so morticianly vocal tones. "So and so died on..." He's asking us to fetishize the dead. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to realize that what's dead is reading and writing about which anyone gives a shit.
"They" seem desperately to want writing to be like Classical music--a reference to a better (to their mind) and bygone age. Culturally, Classical music is quite insignificant. Symphonies struggle and die, the form barely refreshes itself. It is absent from the popular mind. However, its practice requires monastic devotion and the judgment of it requires a depth of musical knowlege most can't approach. The specialists own it lock, stock and barrel.
However, most of us don't make music at work every day. We don't write music to our friends and co-workers. We don't use music to communicate daily. However we do us words thusly, and we use stories as well. Thus it is a far greater stretch to drag away from us these things--words and stories--with which we're intimate--to divorce them from us, their natural audience The pulling and tugging it takes is herculean.
Why would you want to take writing away from the mass of people who read daily, and tell and hear stories daily? Turning the writing of stories into a monastic exercise of a very few monks and acolytes toilling in dank rooms is a grossly counter-intuitive act. But it is succeeding. The sales figures will continue to fall as long as the gatekeepers continue to horde and fetishize the form, and see it as badge of membership into an elite clique, instead of a beautiful means of mass entertainment.
Why 'Liberal' Remains an Epithet
01/12/05 15:29
Digby has a comment on TNR and LA Times articles on cultural friction that help explain how "liberal" became a bad word.
Per Digby, the TNR piece (subscription required) cautions against seeing groups like The Minutemen as entirely extremist or fringe. The article suggests that a great many Americans feel an alienation affect when confronted with the ways of a decidedly different culture.
The LA times gives voice to those who fear the loss of middle class norms and the reduction of property values:
"The retired social studies teacher said she got involved because houses in her neighborhood had become packed immigrant dormitories. She suspects that most tenants in the rooming houses, including the one next door, are illegal. She deals with roosters crowing and men urinating in the yard, loud parties and empty beer cans dumped outside. She fears it's driving down the value of her house."
Digby quotes the TNR article:
"Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, "[t]hey're having coffee; they talk about issues. ... It's part of our community." For the neighborhood's Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime."
I am black. I am decidedly middle class. If I regularly saw a group of 5 or more white males "loitering" on a street corner or front stoop, I wouldn't like it. I would react just as those gentrifiers have reacted -- with suspicion and a bit of fear.
I have lived in LA barrios. There, I grew used to groups of men hanging about. It was a barrio for Chrissakes. Get used to it or get out. However, on LAs Westside, those same men would have been chased off by the cops so fast it would have made you dizzy. Different places. Different norms. As places change, so do those norms. However, during the transition, there is tension and anger--the latter mainly from those who see themselves losing something.
I most recently lived in a gentrifying area of Northeast Portland. It is Portland's black--and largely poor-- neighborhood. However, the neighborhood is changing--fast. Property values are skyrocketing and gentrifiers are coming in droves. Mainly all good white, particularly self-conscious liberals, mind you.
I set my black, decidedly middle-class ass across from a rental that was home to at least 5 unrelated individuals, some elderly, some young. Fine, sit on the porch. However, when a friend of theirs drives up with a bass thumping so loudly it rattles your brains, gets out of the car and leaves the radio BLARING as he goes in the house... sorry, my tolerance for "cultural tradition" ends.
When the neighbors had a house party (that charged admission) with folks spilling drunkenly out onto the street with their glasses and bottles in their hands until 4 am, my tolerance ends. This had been going on for years. It was a "cultural tradition." However, I happily called the cops.
The neighborhood was changing. And I was a willing change agent.
Suggesting that my reaction was "racist" is ridiculous. I'm just as black as those neighbors were. However, I was in the economic driver's seat. Middle class norms were prevailing here. I was willing to enforce them.
So Digby, get over yourself. There will always be racists among those who make such complaints. Those of us who are not must beware of them, and scream loudly when they show themselves. But to suggest that all those who make such complaints, that all those who express their economic and social anxiety are racist, simply makes enemies of those who ought to be your friends -- and your voters.