As often occurs, ash found herself anticipating responses before the fact. The editor taunting, the friend questioning her motives, other correspondents taking her on. While the editor let the publication speak for itself, she did hear from her friend. Here's the column which started it all.
Is there a parallel? Is that a fair characterization?
As a wise friend observed, now that the editorial page and SJ-R editors have declared Ann Coulter’s column fit for publication, they’re pretty well stuck with that decision. Based on the uncanny timing, it’s impossible not to speculate: has she been keeping track? Or has she merely been topping herself, as demonstrated when last week’s essay insulting all sorts of demographics eclipsed her infamous “faggot” remark?
As far as this newspaper is concerned, if Coulter is aware of the debate on the outcome of which her continuing syndication depended, she must be cheering the freebee her joint absolution provided. How can she be in jeopardy, at least for the foreseeable future, for anything she says in the paper or elsewhere when she’s just been cleared not only retroactively but proactively as well?
The editors are locked in. It’s like committing additional crime when you’ve already been convicted of murder. As long as Coulter doesn’t use literal profanity (which would only be edited if she did) she can express obscene notions and spew preposterous stereotypes (how ‘bout them food-obsessed, perpetually kvetching Jews?), under the guise of just joking, with no consequence or accountability into eternity - or until the paper pretends she finally entered the indecent territory she actually tread into years ago, a tough case to make. Unless or until the syndicator finally rips her microphone cord out of its socket, that is, when is there any question she’d seamlessly be rescued by another ethics-challenged outfit?
As if this dilemma weren’t embarrassing enough, consider the ban on this correspondent whose letters enhanced these pages, now silenced as a result of a personal dispute. She could write the most salient, insightful masterpiece - for no charge - redounding to the editor’s credit, and he couldn’t print it. Not only that, he can’t even print any protest letters he may or may not have received.
One stays in; the other stays out. Double pity.
Now, here’s ash’s reply to the taunting from Mike she never received. No matter, she wrote it anyway:
The producer doesn’t produce. The producer judges the productions of others worthy or unworthy of sponsorship. Sponsorship is money or a venue. The producer supplies the money, the venue, or both.
The producer is important, just not creative. The writer creates the material. The producer bets on its value.
I still have access to those letters. Not supposed to, but I do. I read the letters, if by “read” I mean scan through them in a minute or less. Frankly, they’re a snore. It’s not your fault. That was demonstrated when Locher made the Coulter calculation (and a strictly business calculation, complete with the predetermined outcome, it was) at his level and, agree or disagree, you merely followed orders. You told me yourself. You have bosses to answer to; you’re not the master of your domain. It does mitigate your behavior toward me – a little. The betrayal was a matter of professional survival, not done capriciously. Your head-jerking 180 stance on prayer entreaties in a secular format was done not on a whim but was strategy, self-preservation. Nevertheless, I maintain it was despicable. You did have other recourses, but I suppose they were more difficult than sacrificing another person.
Shortly afterward came the pronouncement: keep it local, almost entirely. Actually, that makes sense. If you read the online paper, it’s striking which stories garner comments – lots of comments – and which are ignored. The closer to home, the more people care. You don’t have to see it laid out on the computer to predict that. Local reports, locally-focused letters, and never mind the Big Bad World beyond. Please the reader, salvage the enterprise. Particularly now, the few who crave news beyond the community go elsewhere for it. It’s all over cyberspace, and most of it is free.
So here you are. While you have to keep producing Coulter (and just as I was betting Michael on the birth certificate I’m betting you find her as illegitimate as I do) you can’t produce me. Yeah, there was that one letter I didn’t sanction, but that happened before the Coulter scam (in which you certainly did your part; the Editor and Publisher interviewer cringed as you spun him), before the “cooling-off” period morphed into permanent disbarment. I don’t want my letters in the paper and that’s beside the point. You can’t publish them anymore. You can’t reverse yourself like you reversed your position on prayer letters. Sure, you could physically do it – your bosses wouldn’t overrule – but mentally, emotionally, psychologically, you can’t. Because of what it would represent. It would violate your resolve, more inviolate than directives from others.
You know as well as I do how I’m signaling not to publish. I call them Poison Pills. There’s a grouping of letters on my website under that umbrella: the Poison Pill Portfolio. It’s a self-explanatory term. The latest letter is one huge Poison Pill – absolutely no part of it passes muster. Why bother? My brain entertains itself. And I get to laugh. And every once in a while I get to write. Since I’m not a journalist but a rhetorician, my motivation comes from within.
Need more? I doubt I’ve told you one single thing you didn’t know already.
ash suspects her friend has never fully comprehended what was entailed in the matter with Mike. Thus, she wouldn’t understand the psychology of the letter either. Here’s her response to ash’s letter (before it was published) followed by ash’s explanation:
I like the part about the food-obsessed, kvetching Jews, but think you should have left out the personal stuff about you. Has anyone ever told you right out that you're banned?
I just wrote a long meandering explanation ostensibly to Mike which he won’t be sent unless he asks for it, so to speak. I can send it to you if you like, or I can put it more briefly:
If you think in the same terms as I did – the analogy between being stuck with Coulter and without me – there is a convincing case. The backstory on this letter – which is not in the email – is that Randell visited a client yesterday who remarked on the absence of my stuff. So Randell explained the situation, came home and told me, and it was that renewal of the topic juxtaposed with the lingering awareness of Coulter’s incendiary column and your penetrating synopsis that linked them into one theme. It mulled around and swished together in my brain as I sloshed through my reading until, at some point in the middle of a sentence I was reading, I found myself switching to Microsoft from Maxthon, my mouse tapping “new message” detached from my brain directing my finger, and, as always, the text dictating itself until, also as always, it ran out of steam and I had to force the rest, then revise, revise, somehow during the revision I deleted the word “only,” and read, reread, until I decided it was good enough and released it.
When I read it aloud to Randell, the missing “only” was conspicuous.
See, the point of the letter was the connection. It wasn’t about Coulter, it wasn’t about me; it was about Mike being stuck. In other words, without the part about me there would have been no letter. Coulter’s column – and I read passages of it before it was published last Friday, ie a very long time ago – wasn’t the trigger. Randell’s client’s observation was. But while Mike is stuck with Coulter from without, he’s stuck without me from within. Within is a more powerful sanction. If you apply psychology – and remember, I’m not political, this is all psychological to me – people are easy to read. No, I can’t prove I know what he’s thinking, and I wouldn’t speculate on what level of consciousness he’s operating. And sure, if he felt like contradicting my perception skill he could take the letter with the fewest Poison Pills – one or 2 of them have none but they’re hopelessly outdated - and print it, since he knows I don’t want them to be. I’m not trying to reenter the inner sanctum; I’m trying to ensure I don’t. But spiting me by not following the script is eclipsed by spiting me by exercising his power to disenfranchise me. Or, I suppose, he could print the Coulter part and drop the rest,. if it occurs to him, which would be suiting himself totally at my expense. And that would follow the pattern.
Damn. This is as long as the email. To summarize: I wrote the letter in order to make the comparison. Coulter alone wouldn’t have been enough. She wasn’t enough for all those days I was aware of what she said. Only when I told Randell, Ya know, she’s the flip side of me and he said exactly what I’m thinking, was that enough to make me write the letter, and get the diatribe out of my head. Then, since I wrote it, I sent it.
Did any Jews write to complain? Any other ethnicity? Those letters would warrant publication. But there were none as of yesterday. I haven’t checked today’s paper yet.
By the way, ash refers to Mike by his last name in personal messages. In a public forum, she grants him anonymity. Anyway, this one’s a little trickier. In this instance, ash has imagined a retort to the effect of well, what about the guy as far to the left as it gets? Yes, that useless false equivalency defense. Here are her reasons there is no valid comparison between Coulter and several classically cited liberals:
Funny you should mention Ward Churchill. Churchill, despite his brief notoriety, isn’t prominent. Churchill doesn’t write a syndicated column (if he does, it’s not in this newspaper).Churchill doesn’t churn out blockbuster books. Churchill doesn’t have a national forum; he doesn’t appear not only all over cable but on broadcast media from The Today Show to The Tonight Show.
There’s a more important difference, and here’s where the “wish I’d thought of that analogy” comes in. He’s not a minstrelsy. Coulter is. According to Wikipedia (and as even Conservapedia would acknowledge) that’s the creature of 19th century entertainment – pre- and post-emancipation – in which white guys painted themselves black in order to portray Negroes in the world’s cruelest, most demeaning stereotypes. Although by 1910 minstrel shows were pretty much out of fashion, not out of a collective sense of decency so much as they were overtaken by vaudeville, they persisted into the 1950s. Imagine that. It took an imminent civil rights movement to wipe them out.
If you enlarge the definition what do you get? You get Coulter poking at the historically disadvantaged: the weak, the poor, the ailing, the marginalized. When she doesn’t do it directly she indirectly goes after them via their advocates. Thus a crack about Helen Thomas, John Edwards, Jack Murtha, is afflicting the afflicted by proxy.
Who was Churchill’s target? The strong. The powerful. The wealthy. The connected. Corporations. Agree with or denounce the extent of his conclusions, he’s championing the underdog. She’s the precise opposite.
Coulter’s no Churchill of the right, and she’s no Michael Moore either. Nor Ted Rall. The flip side, maybe, but not the equivalent. Only Churchill comes close, and only through this one infamous statement compared to her too many to count.
Hate to break it to conservatives, but liberalism doesn’t lend itself to Coulter’s brand of incendiary. It’s incompatible with our mindset.