Your Prayers, Please
My wife Allisyn is in the hospital with either really severe angina or yet another heart attack. She may need surgery. They are to stress test her tomorrow, and after that the doctor will see if there is a need to invade. Even if so, they wont do the work until Monday, so she'll be home for the weekend.
But this comes hard - it never comes easy for Remy and me. If you could remember us in your prayers, I would kindly appreciate it.
Kick Down the Idol that's in the Corner and a Little Dusty
I'm a guy who doesn't pay a lot of attention to what conservatives do or say. I lived through the Reagan era fully awake and became accustomed to the games that they play. I remember Watergate and what it was about. I'm not easily taken in by a lot of jargon, stumping, foolishness and dirty tricks.
But even I gotta admit, Ann Coulter is a special case in point. Tall, blonde, U of M Law School alumnus, she's not pretty enough to be a fashion model but looks more like someone you'd see in porn. But it's her words, not her explosive, rambling apperances in the media or on TV, that are truly pornographic.
Ann Coulter is the current day darling of conservatives, and is marketing herself as an "intellectual." Her new book, full of lies, is "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism." Much of her hard-won historical research is actually cribbed from elsewhere, in particular the works of conservative British pop historian Paul Johnson. I guess it makes sense to "steal from the best," and steal she does. But she is no better than Johnson at checking facts, and unlike Johnson, does not feel compelled to retract or make corrections should the red spectre of error appear at her door.
"Treason" is a venomous book which takes to historical liberalism what her column brings to the liberal agenda every day - utter condemnation without the guilt of having to look at both sides of (any) issue. Coulter makes the case that every decision made by a person, politically active or not, who may be tagged with the "l-word" has led to the bad ends and disastrous consequences which have unfolded in the last 58 years. Her conclusion is that America is better served if the liberals just get the hell out of government and let the "grown ups" - conservatives - run things from now on. Like it's really a good idea in our democracy that we change it to a one party, one rule system.
This would remove the checks and balances in American democracy and turn it into a totalitarian state. At the risk of psycho-analyzing Coulter, I suspect that beneath it all she merely has her ukelele out and is serenading conservatives with the song that they want to hear. She believs that they are the winning team, and that through them she can gain power, influence, money and prestige. She doesn't want to do that as some male conservative's trophy wife - she wants to do it on her own terms.
And by all accounts, Coulter is succeeding - the book has already hit the NYT bestseller lists and is going strong. And not a word of it is true - as history. Both liberals and conservatives are equally responsible for the mess we've made of America in since the end of World War II. As liberalism is the weaker of the two in the current day political environment, it proves an easy target for Coulter, who is plenty playground bully enough to kick its butt in full view of wide-eyed, slack jawed Americans too awed and dull-witted to try to step in and break it up.
At times like this I wonder what sort of response I would get from Julius Streicher were I to go back to 1933 and ask him "What if I told you that the lies you are spreading right now in Der Stürmer will lead to the destruction of all Europe and your own swinging at the end of a noose?" Probably Striecher's response would be something like "If that's what it takes, it's worth it, just to be rid of the horrible scourge of European Jewry." That's why I don't consider writing Coulter about my concerns; the response would be about the same. Take liberalism out of the American scene and you take away the friction that makes the system work. Then we'll all go to hell in a handbasket, if we aren't on our way already.
In any event, I didn't want that whole thing to go so long. The reason I'm so pissed at Coulter is that in her book she has this passage -
"In 1945, with Stalin safe, The Nation magazine derided the atrocity films
of Hitler's death camps as a hoax. The films had been made by American
GIs still reeling from what they had found at Nazi concentration camps --
stacked bodies, mass burials, and ditches full of human remains. Writing in The
Nation, the novelist, poet, and film critic James Agee denounced the films as
propaganda.(1) The Harvard Graduate School of Education now has a James
Agee chair of Social Ethics."
The footnote "(1)" leads us not to Agee but to a reference in Paul Johnson's book "The History of the Jews" (1998). If if you (and she) we're to check out the
original article, it appeared 5/19/1945 and is included in the 2-volume set "Agee on Film," not in print, but housed in nearly every sizeable university library in the country. As it should be - "Agee on Film" is to the canon of American film criticism what the book of Deuteronomy is to the Holy Bible. Agee in no way "denounced" the death camp films "as propaganda" and nowhere did he refer to the films as "a hoax." He admitted that he hadn't even seen them. But he was critical of the way that the films were being used by politicos to stump for a raw deal for the Germans in immediate post-war America.
This was not one of Agee's shining moments as a film critic, but he was seldom off his mark. He also wrote the novel "Death in the Family", a "great American novel" that belongs in the same class as "Moby Dick" and "Catch 22." His poetry is outsanding, and among the films he co-wrote were "The Quiet One", "Night of the Hunter" and "The African Queen." in just about every other sense, for his time, Agee was highly "socially ethical."
And Agee, who died of a heart attack at age 45, is forgotten among the mass American public, was a liberal, and thus is an easy victim, the kind who won't complain as he's been dead nearly fifty years. Perhaps his 1945 comment seems not so politically enlightened by the standards of 2003, but lots of folks in 1945 both liberal and conservative were looking for ways to rebuild the wrold rather than to divide and destroy further. Does that really need to be explained?
Yep - liberalism is down, down on the ground. And there's this tall blonde bitch, in high heels (or is it Doc Martens?) kicking and kicking and kicking and kicking...
Sound familiar?
Uncle Dave Lewis
UncleDave41@comcast.net
PS: I am not the first person to call Ann Coulter a "bitch." Until recently there was even a website called www.anncoulterisabitch.com but now it just leads to a 404 not found message. I guess she had it taken down - after all, she is a lawyer.