An artist named Spencer Tunick has a project going. After making all the proper arrangements and issuing calls for volunteers, he photographs large groups of people in the nude. Last weekend in Melbourne, four thousand of them showed up. Here’s one account of it. Here’s another. And here’s a gallery of the photos, beautiful or unnerving depending on your take, of four thousand cheerfully unclothed and goosefleshed Australians looking like some strange migratory species.
In my entry of 01 October, I talked about how strange it felt to know so many people who’d had near escapes from the WTC disaster, or who knew people who’d been killed, when no one I knew personally had died.
It turns out I’m not alone. According to David Plotz’s piece, “Why Didn’t I Know Someone Who Died? Life’s Odds and Sept. 11”, the entire staff of Slate found themselves in the same position. This prompted Plotz to look into statistical analyses of the odds that any one person would know a victim of the WTC disaster.
If the calculations are correct, around 1.1 million people were personally acquainted with one or more of the dead. “Fewer than one American in 200 is likely to know one of the 6,000,” he says — a useful way to think about it, though neither the dead nor the mourners can be assumed to be Americans. But if they were, then more than 80% of the people in America would know someone who knew someone: “We are all mourners at the second degree.”
Our friends Ellie Lang and Greg Costikyan live a block from the World Trade Center. Greg got to watch both towers collapse from a few blocks away. Ellie had just stepped outside when the first tower collapsed, and had to dive for it. She was evacuated to Staten Island, unhurt but covered from head to toe in dust, with nothing but what she had on her. She and Greg stayed in our basement for a while, then moved over to Soren and Velma’s.
Greg’s now staying with another friend, and Ellie and the cats are up at Nancy and Elric’s place in Manchester, New Hampshire. It’s a strange new life for a New York girl. Here are Nancy’s photos of their trip to the annual Topsfield Fair.
I note with disapprobation that that wench Columbia has lost her innocence yet again, putting me strongly in mind of a young woman I used to know who had the Worst Experience of Her Life at least once a year. Our national version of that is to declare we’ve Lost Our Innocence every time some unpleasant event creates a major psychic upheaval. Yesterday I got three pieces of e-mail in a row that referred to the WTC bombing as our National Loss of Innocence. The Web is similarly oversupplied with this insight: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].
We love her, but let’s face it: America is a chronic drama queen. To quote Dan Victor,
Loss of Innocence is the theme of every major American event, including assassinations. It’s an American staple. The Vietnam War: The end of our Innocence! The Kennedy Assassination: The end of our Innocence! Watergate: The end of our Innocence! The Clinton Impeachment: The end of our Innocence! Now, the Columbine killings, the Innocence of the American High School lost! As a society we love to entertain this view of ourselves.Indeed we do. We consider ourselves to have lost our innocence at First Manassas, the battle of Shiloh, and Antietam. The wound created by this national orgy of bloodletting was a long time healing, but we were in shape to lose our innocence again in 1919, which a striking number of commentators reckon was The Big One.
That was the year the soldiers came back and started telling the folks at home what the War to End All Wars had really been like. In no particular order, it was also a year of severe inflation, a killing flu epidemic, race riots, lynchings, bombs in the mail, an unprecedented wave of strikes (including the Boston police strike), the harsh repression of same, the Red Scare, the Palmer Raids, Congressional rejection of the League of Nations, the post-war continuation of the Allies’ blockade on foodstuffs going into Germany, President Wilson’s incapacitating stroke, the mass deportation of foreign-born citizens, espionage laws, sedition laws, the expulsion of duly elected officials from their positions solely on account of their political beliefs, the beginning of Prohibition, and the Black Sox baseball scandal.
We lost our innocence again because the Japanese took us by surprise when they jumped us at Pearl Harbor. Then we surprised them at the end of the war with the first atomic explosion and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Naturally, this represented a loss of innocence on our part.
After that it sort of got to be a habit with us. Over the next decade we lost our innocence to the Korean War, the Quiz Show scandal, and the Dodgers’ move to LA, and lost it once more on general principles when the Fifties ended. Then John F. Kennedy came along, and we really lost our innocence over him. (Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, too.) We were picking up speed. We lost it over the My Lai Massacre in particular and the Vietnam War in general. We lost it to everything ever mentioned in “American Pie”, and to some unspecified thing that happened to Don Henley in 1969.
We were getting indiscriminate.Yes, we lost our innocence over the Watergate scandal and the AIDS epidemic ; but we also lost it when Studio 54 closed, the 70s ended, and Charles and Diana got divorced. More recently, we’ve lost it to the Oklahoma City bombing, the deportation of Elian Gonzalez, the Columbine High School shootings, and of course the Big Awful.
Perhaps it’s time to stop protesting our innocence, and behave ourselves like grownups instead. To know next to nothing about the world — and as a nation, that’s been our preferred state of affairs — is the innocence of a small child. But we’re not small children; and in an adult that same lack of knowledge is willful ignorance. To have power, to act in the world without knowing the consequences, is dangerous negligence. Even our friends and allies find us maddening that way.
Yes, we mean well. They do give us points for that. But it’s not enough to mean well.
Historically, we’ve cherished the comfortable belief that the rest of the world is a game we can opt out of. There are two problems with that idea. The first is that we’ve never opted out. We’ve just officially ignored other countries’ surface politics. In the meantime, American business has engaged in all kinds of amazing skulduggery, some of it on a level that should have been a matter for openly discussed national policy. (See also: William Walker, Standard Oil, United Fruit Company, etc. etc. etc.) We can’t honestly blame other countries for seeing these as American activities.
I’ll put the other problem in New York terms: the richest neighborhoods and the poorest are all on the same subway lines. Distance isn’t insulation. One day’s travel from where you’re sitting right now, there are people who are still personally pissed off about what went down during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. One of them incited the terrorists who broke our city. You might want to look into that. 1919 is a good place to start.
Here’s the story. And here’s a somewhat clearer image. It would appear that the posters carried by many pro-Osama bin Laden protesters include a picture of Bert, the Sesame Street Muppet.
No, really. Or probably really; it comes from Fox News. But Fox News says:
The photographs do not appear to have been doctored. They were taken by news photographers covering at least two different demonstrations from different angles on at least two separate days.I await the theories that are bound to follow. They’re going to be ingenious.The first known Bert-bin Laden posters appeared on Oct. 5 in Dhaka, and photographs of them were printed by the Dutch news service Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau anda0the Associated Press and Reuters news services. At least one other photograph including the posters was taken by Reuters photographer Rafiqur Rahman in Jakarta on Oct. 9.
Reuters spokeswoman Felicia Cosby said the photos were authentic. … Associated Press spokesman Jack Stokes said the AP photographs were also untouched.
This started when Patrick AIMed me something called Ten Rejected Lord Of The Rings Plot Twists:
1. Balin emerges from the depths of Moria, claiming he “fell asleep in the tub”.This joyful document is from The Tolkien Crackpot Theories Page, a collection of ingenious arguments that lembas is actually Hostess Twinkies, Tom Bombadil is actually the Witch-King of Angmar, Sauron invented the mobile home, et cetera and so forth. Up one level from there is the Tolkien Sarcasm Page, home to things like the Melkor-Bradley Home Page and the Hunter S. Thompsonesque Saruman’s Diary.2. Galadriel discovers Pippin singing the praises of a bath while he takes one in her mirror.
3. Boromir uses the ring, saves Gondor, destroys Sauron and becomes a wise and benevolent ruler. Book ends 40 chapters sooner.
4. Orc-slaughter competition between Legolas and Gimli becomes so fierce, they take to killing some of the smaller, uglier men of Gondor.
5. Farmer Giles of Ham shows up at the Pelennor Fields and saves Gandalf’s life.
6. Pippin hits on Eowyn in a dark corner of the Houses of Healing: “The hands of a Hobbit are the hands of a healer too, you know…”
7. In the happy days after the defeat of Sauron, Gimli keeps his promise and visits Mirkwood with Legolas — where they are eaten by giant spiders, whom everyone had forgotten about.
8. Aragorn discovers that he is not, in fact, Elendil’s heir. His older brother Mutt, after having lived with Ghan-Buri-Ghan & Co. for decades, lays claim to the throne after all the “dirty work” is done.
9. Ents and Elves dispute over title of “first-born”. Elrond has Quickbeam made into an armoire; Treebeard grinds Glorfindel into mulch.
10. The Shire, mobilized by Merry and Pippin and now hungry for vengeance, annexes Bree and slaughters “the big folk”.
Special bonus plot twist:
11. Gollum adapts to molten Mt. Doom environment, and later plays a critical role in Fourth Age crisis.
Up one level further, it turns out that all these marvels and wonders reside at The Flying Moose of Nargothrond, website of a fellow named O. Sharp, who appears to work part or full time as a stagehand. Mr. Sharp is also the author of Hamlet and the NeXT Computer and Mr. Potato Head, Defender of the Geologic Ecosystem: The Complete Evolution Of Life On Earth To The Present Day In Four Acts And An Epilogue.
To tie up the last remaining ends, Patrick found the piece he sent me via Vicki Rosenzweig’s admirably concise weblog Yawl.
Some days the web is almost too much fun.
If you thought Friday’s discussion of airport security firms was interesting (see below), check out this article, published about five weeks ago, on the push to privatize Social Security.
It is well to remember that if human beings have the power to do great evil, they also have the power to do good. At a recent Labour conference, British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered a radiantly sane, hopeful, practical speech. At moments it reminded me of parts of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses, though Blair’s language doesn’t have anything like Lincoln’s depth and resonance. And while I don’t agree with every word in it, I unexpectedly found myself thinking there might actually be a chance that in my lifetime the tangled and broken threads left trailing after the Great War might finally be gathered up and sorted out again.
“I’m dealing with a horrible webpage that has useful info,” Erik Olson remarked. “I hate that.”
I had to ask. He sent me the URL for the Desert and Derelict Retired Airliners website. I can’t do it justice. Let’s just call it folk art.
Why did I have a flag in my window before September 11th? Not because I’m a member of the John Birch Society or the Moral Majority or the Know-Nothings or whatever the current instantiation of the Party of Stupidity happens to be. It’s there because it’s my flag, just like it’s my government and my country, and I refuse to cede it to a passel of dingbats, wingnuts, blockheads, grifters, demagogues, and career liars.
I have no patience with members of my cohort who think that because we have an imperfect government and an imperfect country, they’re excused from participating in it (except of course for commentary and protest). They’re wrong. That position is plain moral vanity, an unholy hybrid of personal salvation and finicky retail consumerism. It has no place in our necessarily common enterprise of democracy. Politics belongs in the real world. I’m equally out of patience with street shouters who tell me that if I’m not part of their solution, I’m part of the general problem.
All the usual idiocies have been on display in the weeks following the Big Awful. I’ve been just too bleeping enchanted for words by commentators who take my personal flagwaving as mindless jingoism, or as a sure sign that I support George W. Bush. (Excuse me; I have to go wash my hands after typing that last sentence.) But there may be hope. The Los Angeles Times has awkwardly and tentatively taken notice of what they’re calling a new, nuanced patriotism.
Well, hallelujah. They got it half right. The half wrong part is that they think it’s a brand-new phenomenon, as though all these people they describe as having a complex, sophisticated take on patriotism only arrived at our opinions over the last fortnight. What actually happened is that that’s when the LA Times noticed our existence. Which is just about par for the course for the national media: they take counsel of their own thickheadedness, and conclude from it that I was born yesterday.
Grump grump grump. But…hey, by dint of simple, direct observation, they got something kind of right.
The New Republic has started running an Idiocy Watch, collecting stupid things said in the wake of the WTC disaster:
We ask you, our readers, to send us the dumbest and most outrageous comments made about America’s war on terrorism by politicians, pundits, movie stars, athletes, etc. Also keep an eye out for people who try to excuse their dumb and outrageous behavior with comments that are themselves dumb and outrageous…I wish to nominate John Keegan, whom I have hitherto viewed as a perceptive military historian and analyst. He’s the author of The Face of Battle, and the defense columnist for the Daily Telegraph; and on the 14th of September he went completely spla:
There are other current movements of which to take note, as yet insubstantial but certain to gather concrete form. One is the retreat of human rights lawyers from the forefront of public life. America in a war mood will have no truck with tender concern for constitutional safeguards of the liberty of its enemies. The other, which ordinary Americans will have to learn to bear, is interference with their liberty of instant electronic access to friends and services.Using cruise missiles to take out ISPs in foreign countries! Whoo! I could never have made that up.The World Trade Centre outrage was co-ordinated on the internet, without question. If Washington is serious in its determination to eliminate terrorism, it will have to forbid internet providers to allow the transmission of encrypted messages - now encoded by public key ciphers that are unbreakable even by the National Security Agency’s computers - and close down any provider that refuses to comply.
Uncompliant providers on foreign territory should expect their buildings to be destroyed by cruise missiles. Once the internet is implicated in the killing of Americans, its high-rolling days may be reckoned to be over.
The example The New Republic uses in their explanation of the Idiocy Watch project is the recent behavior of Attack Bimbo Ann Coulter. If you’ve so far managed to miss her, she’s a whiny blonde airhead who wears very short skirts and will say anything — most usually about the Clintons and other heavily fictionalized liberals. For a while she was getting a lot of airtime on Geraldo and the like. She’s been a creature of passing circumstance, a disposable pseudo-journalist kept around because she makes colorfully actionable remarks that the real pros can thereafter quote without endangering their own careers. If she weren’t useful in that way, not to mention a utility-grade blonde babe, she’d be lucky to have a gig reporting local stories in some venue where the biggest news is the weather.
You can get a sense of the woman herself from some of the remarks she lets drop in her “No Shadow of a Doubt: Liberal Women Are Worthless” column, written the white heat of her outrage at finding out that a Lifetime Television poll of women voters — all kinds, not just from one party — revealed that more than half of them thought the government’s “insufficient efforts to cure breast cancer” were a major concern, and nearly three-fourths thought shoring up Social Security was more important than cutting taxes. Coulter was disgusted:
These could only be the poll results of people who have nothing to do with the creation of wealth. They sit at home waiting for their husbands to bring home the money, or toil away at little jobs dreamed up to assuage the egos of bourgeois women living in the suburbs. (I eagerly await such a station in life. But when I’m there, I won’t forget how horrible — horrible — it was to wake up to an alarm clock, respond to bosses, and be responsible for my own rent.)You could get the impression that she thinks women who work because they have to, and women who do real work, don’t exist now and never have in the past. That would be a barely forgivable level of ignorance if she were a wealthy dimbulb who lives to shop. But she doesn’t have that excuse. She’s a dimbulb lawyer and demi-journalist, and she knows better. The truth is, for Ann Coulter those women simply don’t matter. They’re not citizens of the country to which she gives her true allegiance, and their experience has no place in her native political discourse.…As a class, women have never borne collective responsibility for work, they have never had to store food for the winter, and they have not generated economic growth. (At least not by dint of hard work — more by inspiration.)
(This is what I kept trying to explain about Bush before the election, back when I was getting into arguments with a lot of young conservatives and small-town Republicans: Just because you’re on their side, doesn’t mean they’re on your side. There’s one club they’ll say you all belong to when they’re trying to get your vote, but the rest of the time there’s a different club, and you’re never going to belong to it. Give your heart to your country and to democracy itself, not people and parties, and only honor those who honor what it stands for. Otherwise you’ll spend your whole political life being seduced and abandoned, over and over again.)
The national newsfeed has also treated us to such gems as her screed on Title IX athletic funding rules, which she pretended to believe are “an insane feminist dream … to make women’s sports equal to men’s.” As any fule kno, Title IX mandates equal resources for female athletic programs, not equal results. But Coulter’s view is that a university reshuffling its sports budgets “…actually violates the law’s own language (to say nothing of the Constitution), which forbids gender discrimination in college programs. Cutting men’s teams in the name of gender parity is gender discrimination.”
Which is astounding logic, if you can call it that; but hey, anything for a column. Commercial-grade blonde babes have a short shelf life. They have to do what they can. I do think, though, that people who call themselves conservatives, ditto constitutional lawyers, should know what is and isn’t in the Constitution. It mentions sex exactly once, in the 19th Amendment, and gender not at all.
In another piece Coulter displayed a comparable knowledge of American history — i.e., about as much as you can learn by reading Gone with the Wind — when she dismissed objections to displaying the Confederate flag with “If the Confederate battle flag can be tagged as a tribute to slavery, how is it that the American flag has gotten a pass so far? Slavery existed far longer under Old Glory than under the Stars and Bars.”
Remove glasses, pinch bridge of nose, shake head. If she can base her argument on simple duration, ignoring the circumstances under which the Stars and Bars were devised and flown, she can ignore anything.
Thus Ann Coulter in her salad days.
The day after the Big Awful, she came out with a new column titled This Is War. About two-third of the way into it she hit her stride:
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.“That’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncey.”We don’t need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don’t need an “international coalition.” We don’t need a study on “terrorism.” We certainly didn’t need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week. …
The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers “packed their own bags,” and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)
Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
“What’s that, Edgar?”
“The Jewish World Review publishing a call for the forced conversion of infidels.”
This was followed a week later by Where’s Janet Reno When We Need Her?, in which Coulter repeated her objections to “incredibly burdensome” security measures like being asked whether she packed her own bags or is carrying a package for someone else:
The genius security procedures laboriously implemented by the government over the past decade certainly served this country well on Bloody Tuesday. The real puzzler is how the hijackers managed to evade the “Did you pack your own bags?” trap. Only further investigation will solve that mystery.If she’d looked into the matter — and if I were writing a weekly column, I’d have found the time — she’d have discovered that both those questions were added to the airport catechism in response to specific ploys used by real terrorists: Nezar Hindawi, for example, who persuaded his pregnant and unsuspecting Irish girlfriend to carry three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jumbo jet at Heathrow.Last week a CNN anchor raised the “Did you pack your own bags?” dragnet and somberly remarked — this is a quote — “No one will answer those questions so cavalierly again.” We certainly won’t. We will all remember: If those asinine questions hadn’t been asked of millions of travelers day in day out year after year, enragingly stupid every time, it might have been possible for 19 murderous hijackers to board four separate commercial jets in America almost simultaneously one Tuesday morning.
Oh — no, wait. The hijackers weren’t foiled. But somehow the manifest irrelevance of the “Did you pack your own bags?” question has become its principal selling point.
Coulter then went into more detail about airport scanners, those people she’d described a week before as “hostile, lumpen mesomorphs”:
We are also grateful for the magnetometers. The McDonald’s rejects who man the machines are so efficient and courteous, you hardly notice them anymore. That’s sarcasm. Despite addled TV commentators claiming that, heretofore, travelers had breezed right through the metal detectors, these are obviously people who haven’t flown since the ’50s.Dang. Just can’t get good help these days.Back on Earth, the sullen, dictatorial security personnel invariably stop all passengers who are not likely to punch them (girls), rifle through their belongings, slowly wipe some wand over their computers (a procedure that takes just long enough to almost miss your plane), carefully examine their persons — down to the tiny metallic bra-strap hook — and then methodically break any crystal vases the passenger is carrying. So don’t tell me they’re lazy.
I’m glad I’ve never had to work in airport security. There’s a reason scanners have a turnover rate between one hundred and four hundred percent annually. Working conditions are miserable. The pay is bone-scrapingly low, with no benefits and derisory raises.
The effect on airport security is a well-known problem. The GAO and the FAA have been issuing warnings about it for years. As one FAA security administrator put it, “At 400 percent turnover it’s hard to train people to sharpen pencils.” He added that the higher standards the FAA was considering might or might not help boost pay, since many airlines simply went for the security company that was the lowest bidder. Which is in fact true. Moreover, for years now many airlines have been lobbying against security upgrades, which cost more and create airport delays.
Let us pause here to reflect that the invisible hand of the marketplace has no brain attached to it.
The airport security industry is dominated by two companies, Argenbright and Huntleigh. They’re experts at lowball bids. Neither pays a living wage or provides benefits. Employee training is minimal, and they place no particular value on experience. The only activity they pursue with any degree of enthusiasm is employee intimidation. Both companies have been repeatedly cited for labor violations. Huntleigh’s management has come in for other criticism as well.
So, when it comes to actually providing security services, neither company is what you’d call results-oriented. This is because they’re not really in the security business. What they do is satisfy the letter of the law at the lowest possible cost. And those minimum-wage scanners are the ones upon whom the weight of the whole godawful system comes to rest.
I could go on. There’s a huge amount of information available. If you want a job lot of recent stories, go here. If you want older stuff, Google’s a firehose. The thing is, you can’t begin to look at this subject without running into all that info. I can only think that Ann Coulter never even tried.
She went on in this vein. Basically, she wants much tighter security, but she doesn’t want any system that’s going to inconvenience or delay her personally. Which is not an unusual viewpoint, except for the part where she gets paid for writing it and it’s reproduced in lots of publications. Pilots locked into heavily armored cockpit, check. Two undercover agents per flight, hollow point bullets, check. But then:
(3) We should require passports to fly domestically. Passports can be forged, but they can also be checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males. It will be a minor hassle, but it’s better than national ID cards. It’s also far less annoying than the seat belt instructions.Swarthy males. Internal passports. Deport all Arabs who aren’t citizens. Keep resident aliens off flights originating in the US. What comes after that? Are we to the part yet where we smash all their shop windows and require them to wear star-and-crescent patches on their clothing?(4) All 19 hijackers in last week’s attack appear to have been aliens. As far as the Constitution is concerned, visitors to this country are here at the nation’s pleasure. Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave. (More on that next week.) Congress could certainly pass a law requiring all aliens to get approval from the INS before boarding an airplane in the United States.
(This may not be the moment for sarcasm. If anyone living in the United States who is of Middle Eastern descent is reading this, please understand that if it became necessary I would support US citizens taking up arms in defense of your safety, legal rights, and peace of mind; and that if anyone in this discourse is being un-American, it’s Ann Coulter. Thank you. Peace. Be of good cheer.)
Believe it or not, there’s more.
Coulter’s next column, a week after that, was Future Widows of America: Write Your Congressman, and it actually managed to top her previous efforts:
Congress has authority to pass a law tomorrow requiring aliens from suspect countries to leave. As far as the Constitution is concerned, aliens, which is to say non-citizens, are here at this country’s pleasure. They have no constitutional right to be here.Yes, she really did say that. There’s a parody of her here, under the title “It’s Time to Empty the Arsenal”; but frankly, I think it’s a mere shadow of the original. The Onion couldn’t parody this woman.Congress has it within its power to prevent the next attack, but it won’t. When the Sears Tower is attacked, the president is assassinated, St. Patrick’s Cathedral is vaporized, anthrax is released in the subway systems or Disneyland is nuked, remember: Congress could have stopped it, but didn’t.
Pious invocations of the Japanese internment are absurd. For one thing, those were U.S. citizens. Citizens can’t be deported. So far — thank God — almost all the mass murderers of Americans have been aliens. …
As the entire country has been repeatedly lectured, most Muslims are amazingly peaceful, deeply religious, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Indeed, endless invocations of the pacific nature of most Muslims is the only free speech it is safe to engage in these days.
This is a preposterous irrelevancy. Fine, we get it. The New York Times can rest assured that every last American has now heard the news that not all Muslims are terrorists. That’s not the point. Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims — at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours. …
It is impossible to stop Islamic fundamentalists who believe that slaughtering thousands of innocent Americans will send them straight to Allah. All we can do is politely ask aliens from suspect nations to leave — with the full expectation of readmittance — while we sort the peace-loving immigrants from the murderous fanatics.
More benefits of the plan next week, but the beauty part of the Terrorist Deportation Plan can’t wait. There will be two fail-safes: (1) Muslim immigrants who agree to spy on the millions of Muslim citizens unaffected by the deportation order can stay; and (2) any Muslim immigrant who gets a U.S. senator to waive his deportation — by name — gets to stay.
This is brutally unfair to the Muslim immigrants who do not want to kill us. But it’s not our fault.
There’ve been assorted fusses kicked up over those columns. If you’re interested, there’s an account of it in the Washington Post. Coulter even managed to get booted out of her contributing editor gig at the National Review. When they refused to run her column with the “swarthy males” remark, she had no more sense than to go running around badmouthing them to the rest of the national media. She called them “girly-boys”, complained that they were censoring her (which they weren’t—did someone say this woman was an attorney?), and claimed that “Every once in awhile they’ll throw one of their people to the wolves to get good press in left-wing publications.”
Wooden bridge. Can of gasoline. Matches. Whoosh.
In their account of the dust-up, the National Review was careful to specify that they were reacting to her behavior and her writing, rather than her content. You may take that as another marker showing us that world is forever altered. Ann Coulter didn’t suddenly run mad in the wake of the WTC bombing. She’s always been a sloppy thinker, and an execrable researcher. Her career was based on the simple fact that many kinds of malicious invective go over better, and are harder to challenge, if you’re a pretty girl in a tight skirt. But she was never a writer.
So she was useful. But times are changing, and other games are being played. Coulter’s irresponsibility, cluelessness, and small, mean mind had their uses when she played at inventing new folktales about liberals. Now that the national subjects have been changed for us so forcibly, a columnist who can’t see the problem with remarks about swarthy males and forced conversions is a liability to be jettisoned.
Did she know she was never anything more than a dancing bear? Who can tell? I can’t find it in my heart to feel sorry for her. In the meantime, she’s been resurrected as a columnist in the drearily furious Frontpage, a magazine in which every third article seems to be about Dauntless David Horowitz, and a one-button clickthrough on the opening screen headed “Outrages” accommodates those who want their fix of cheap moral glow to be quick and uncomplicated.
Slate is also tabulating remarks that make you want to give two short planks a merit scholarship, which they periodically publish under the heading “Retract This, Please”. Herewith, the first, second, and third installments.
On this date in 1903 my grandmother, Barbara Allen Crandall, was born in Central Arizona. Yay, Granny! Ninety-eight! Way to go! And I love you very, very much.
