You know, there’s just no sport in responding to a provocation so inexpertly misogynist, racist, juvenile, and attention-seeking as this one . Slave masters and harem keepers will be rising from their graves to protest the insult to their intelligence. But a blogger’s work is never done, so here’s me trying my very best to get this post written with my eyes rolled so far up into my skull, I’m looking at gray matter. In such situations, my father used to say: “If you argue with a fool, what does that make you?” That wisdom is the reason I’ve kept my vow to speak Ann Coulter’s name only once or twice a year, but this drivel requires a few comments.
The utter depravity of the ad by conservative filmmaker Ladd Ehlinger Jr. has seen to be believed, so you go do that and I’ll just synposize it thusly: Saturday Night Live , Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert ought to class-action Ehlinger’s ass for producing the kind of nut-job, Willie Horton -esque satire that everyone knows is theirs by right of conquest. Except that Ehlinger didn’t intend it as satire but as what he hoped was a snapshot of the American id and a subliminal push to remind “real Americans” that “oh, in case you haven’t noticed: blacks and women have taken over America. Let’s put them in their place like we did in the good old days.” But Ehlinger will have achieved quite the opposite: reminders of how vile American has been, how vile it can be if not careful will, in the end, boomerang on them. Spewings like this one serve to shame us all, at least those who can be shamed, and push us that much closer to social harmony.
So the take-away from this nonsense is this: When overt rac- and sexism become laugh-out-loudable instead of terrifying, we have truly overcome. The fact that it’s the equivalent of screeching “Yo mama!” to the pack of cool kids paying you no attention at all? Doesn’t get much better than that.
