If the war weren’t bad enough, some US corporations working in Iraq are engaged in importing involuntary labor into the country. In the June 2006 State Department report on trafficking in persons, the State Department stated that “A recent DOD investigation…identified a number of abuses, some of them considered widespread, committed by DOD contractors or subcontractors of third country national (TCN) workers in Iraq. Some of these abuses are indicative of trafficking in persons….”
Send Donald Rumsfeld a message that trafficking humans should not be tolerated.
The scary thing about Ann Coulter is not that she is getting rich writing her right wing bile. It isn’t scary that she’s blond, or a former Deadhead, and not particularly Christian until Christ appealed to her wallet.
What’s scary about Ann Coulter is that she actually lives in a reality distortion field so powerful that everything that enters her array of senses is twisted into a tightly circumscribed world of stark black and white.
What is scary is that a reasonably intelligent woman from an upper middle class Connecticut family who apparently graduated from law school (has anyone checked this?) has managed to submerge herself into a pool devoid of uncertainty. She lives in an American culture that turns inward, looking for–nay insisting on–certain answers to unknowable questions. At the center of the sphere of unknowable questions are a number of voices who claim through various media and modes to have answers concerning the true way. Each voice has followers who find that voice/mode combination is exactly the flavor of certainty being sought. You can name the famous personages peddling certainty as well as I could. Talking mouths: Bill O, Sean, Rush, assorted Reverends, people of some accomplishment who claim to know more than seems likely, like Michael Crighton. What the voices seem to have in common is that they are certain. The owners of such voices are capable of explaining everything to us, and are willing to help us out on the journey to understanding.
Ann Coulter is one of these people and she is very good at explaining everything. You just need to accept every premise she starts from and you will only be able to come to the same conclusion she does. After all if you don’t end up at the same place she is, you must be a liberal.
Ann Coulter believes everything she says. She is sincere. She has lost all questioning. She is at the center of the unquestioning sphere. Her fans find her certainty to be a source of great clarity in an uncertain world. “You wouldn’t understand,” they say to us. They’re right, we wouldn’t. We manage to live with uncertainty, maybe unsure of ourselves, but with some notion that we’ll survive. We sense that somehow Ann doesn’t know it all, and the more she turns in, away from uncertainty, the more we sense that she doesn’t know it all. Each step away from Ann’s certainty and towards greater questioning is towards a universe of possiblities that might be larger than Ann’s world. It IS a little scary.
We can see that Ann is turning in, further and further, because whenever something happens, she has a strong and unwavering opinion about it. In the past, she knew everything there was to know, and was completely right about: Clinton’s excesses, liberals, abortion, and gun control, and how they affected our children, schools, and families.
After 9/11, she seemingly overnight became an expert on terrorism, the Iraq war, persistent vegetative states, and the virtues of stress positions. And she continues to be completely unerring in her judgement and how these things affect our children, schools, and families.
Ann’s astounding infallibility betrays her. If someone else presumed to have never ending fonts of unerring wisdom on an infinitude of subjects, you’d find them boorish. If someone claimed that the 9/11 widows were doing better after losing their husbands, you’d find them mean, in the pinched and stingy sense of the word. If their words gained notoriety and opproprium and the person refused to apologize, you’d find them a lacking in some basic decency that is hard to quantify, but easy to recognize when it’s missing.
If the person was homeless and muttering on the street, you would wonder what sad set of circumstances led to such a sad situation. In our world, that person (and situation) is just as sad, but is capable of explaining herself in an attention getting way and looking good while she does it. She makes lots of money articulately explaining why you should have no question or uncertainty, or just hate or pity the liberals, which is roughly equivalent. She appears to have humor, and to be able to laugh at herself, and take herself lightly. She is attractive.
But the scariest thing about Ann Coulter is that there is something in the world that has caused the metamorphosis of an attractive intelligent lawyer into a person so afraid of uncertainty that she has reshaped her entire being one capable of creating a reality distortion field where she is completely right all the time.
If a baglady creates her reality, we think we understand. But when a woman something like us turns away from the normal question and answer process of healthy adult inner dialog and creates a reality where she is infallible on whatever the topic of news focus is, we are a bit of a loss for an interpretation. She doesn’t look like a baglady, after all, and she has a sense of humor, right?
She says she believes what she says. The scariest thing about Ann Coulter is she believes what she says. Deep in the pool devoid of uncertainty, at the center of the sphere of unknowable questions Ann Coulter is living. Her reality distortion field has fully formed around her, and she does not know that she answers unknowable questions because she is unable to question her answers. She sees a light at the center of the depths of that watery sphere, and it draws her in and subsumes her, and she shares the light with us and believes it. But the light is cold and pallid. Ann Coulter knows everything except that she is the generator of that unhealthy light.
She has tricked herself into believing herself, and without a tremendous act of personal courage may never be able to tear her eyes away from her own deceptive light to see the rest of the world. It would mean facing the fear of being wrong, which I agree, Ms. Coulter, can be a scary thing. Look at me, I am writing this publicly, and I am afraid of being wrong. If I’m wrong, I might be ridiculed, which I’m sure would hurt my feelings, despite how thick skinned I like to appear.
But I think there is hope that Ann knows the cracks in her armor, and will be honest with herself as she confronts the doubt that drives her towards greater certainty. One day, who knows, Ann may confront that scariest thing about herself, her fear of the unknown, the source of her turning towards the inner artificial light of certainty in an uncertain world.