So it’s vampires everywhere nowadays, and but none of it is Anne Rice, which is a weird way for the pop culture of the undead to be, right? I bring this up because of Ann Coulter. Where is she? It’s screaming clown-show time in the culture wars: race-baiting ! Liberal journalistic conspiracy ! Treasonous publication of Our Military-Security Secrets ! And Ann Coulter is barely in on it.
Google News does say she went on TV some to yell about the Shirley Sherrod thing, but it was like Branson, Missouri for pundits: ” Rick’s List “? ” The Joy Behar Show “? This is not famous-person television, or even famous-screaming-head-on-the-television television.
Before that, she was having a fight with a bunch of Canadian college kids , way back in March. That’s it.
What happened? In March of 2009—so long ago that Conde Nast Port f olio (pronounced: Port-SO-lio) still existed—Jeff Bercovici noticed that Coulter’s book sales were in decline : Nielsen BookScan had her selling 105,000 hardcover copies of Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America , which was a nice sales volume but somewhere between half and a quarter of her old-time unit-shifting achievements.
Since then, in sales measured by Nielsen BookScan, she’s added 16,000 more hardcover sales of Guilty , and the paperback edition came out, only logging 14,000.
Again, that’s better than most authors, but not good at all for Ann Coulter, or for what Ann Coulter used to be.
And subjectively: do people even care that the book didn’t sell? It’s like Wes Anderson. Even though he got that long profile in the New Yorker or the New York Times Magazine, whichever it was, about Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Fantastic Mr. Fox bombed , there wasn’t much schadenfreude. More just relief, because America was free to stop thinking about whether it needed to give a darn about Wes Anderson anymore. (Not even in that order, probably. The Fantastic Mr. Fox results only confirmed that everyone else had already jumped off board with Darjeeling Limited. Really, in retrospect, were you even with The Royal Tenenbaums, by the last reel?)
Is America done with Ann Coulter? Is she done with America? Maybe the whole brittle drag-queen cocktail-dress thing stopped going over with the audience, in this era of Mama Grizzly Palin and her flag-pinned performance fleece. Maybe she got an outside hobby? Anne Rice sure found something else besides the vampires to keep herself busy !
