No Offense

Ann Coulter is a big fucking bitch.

(Stop the presses!)

Actually, I bet if you knew her well enough, she wouldn't be so bad. But that public personality of hers...god dammit, I just want to punch her in the ovaries.

What most people probably don't realize about Ann Coulter is that her public political views are probably not what she really thinks. Like every famous person in the political sphere, she does whatever she can to make an extra buck. What's scary about that, though, is that she's making lots of bucks off that exaggerated right-wing personality of hers. That means she's got a market.

Like the KKK, or the Black Panthers, or Neo-Nazis, or al-Qaeda, Ann Coulter's flock are a bunch of extremists. They have their right to free speech like everyone else in America. Like my high school political science teacher always said, opinions are like assholes--everybody's got one. So for every pot-smoking vegan Green party hippie, there's a militant right-winger who thought Pat Buchanan's call for a public, government-sponsored assassination was a good call. I'm sure of it.

With every right in America, however, comes a responsibility. Thursday on Glenn Beck's CNN show, the bespectacled talking head had a discussion with an ACLU attorney about the rights vs. the responsibilities of the first amendment. Both agreed that freedom of speech should be damn near unconditional. They also agreed that people who take their freedom of expression to the extremes are irresponsible and dangerous. The ACLU attorney said that, though he may not agree with group of people who may have experimented with electrical outlets at an early age, on principle he feels obligated to defend them. And under U.S. constitutional law, he's right to do that (to a degree).

[One of the prominent modern interpretations of the first amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech, expression, assembly, etc. as long as the exercising of that right does not breach the "clear and present danger" clause. This is why, though the KKK is still at large, you rarely see the white supremacists rallying on, say, Capitol Hill. Besides the fact that no one would take them seriously, there's the issue of causing a riot--a very likely scenario on that stage. See, originalists? Sometimes it's okay to have a loose interpretation of the Constitution.]

So besides raging cunts like Ann Coulter, you have a shitload of people with these crackpot opinions coming out of left, right, and center field. And you know what? Maybe that's okay. Maybe we need a reality check once in a while. Not everything is red and blue. Sometimes it's green. Or turquoise. Or black as Dick Cheney's heart.

But along with the reality check, there's also the side effect of psychological numbing, a widespread cynicism across America. Then, to counter the cynicism is a widespread sensitivity which causes things like Janet Jackson's nipple to force freedom of speech out the window. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free tit, if you will.

The widespread sensitivity is a more obvious sign to us. You have people lashing out against the Patriot Act and all its sequels, even though the resolution was essentially a rallying cry after 9/11 that redundantly passed laws which were already in place. You have Howard Stern making a big fucking deal about getting out of terrestrial radio and onto his own channel on Sirius. You get the picture.

***

While sensitivity is the obvious issue, cynicism is arguably a more dangerous one. It's the silent killer in this case. There are no more lines to be crossed. The internet has destroyed them all through stuff like child porn, sensationalized violence, and the aforementioned psycho extremism.

Nothing is offensive anymore. And because nothing is offensive, no one knows where the line is. Are racist jokes okay when a person of the minority in question holds no grudge against them? Who knows anymore?

One of the most startling trends I've noticed, as the poor, powerless white middle-class young male, is that in television commercials, it's perfectly okay to portray men as stupid. The only time you might see a woman shown as dumb is if she's an airheaded teenage girl. But men of all ages are picked on. Dads don't know how to use cleaning supplies or new pieces of technology, or how to buy gifts for their wives. Twenty-something ex-fratboys pay attention to nothing but food, chicks, and beer. It's not okay for women to be stereotyped anymore, which is fine. But it's perfectly okay to stereotype men as blithering idiots?

That's just one example. Have you ever seen a gay man on TV who isn't flamboyant? Sure, there are tendencies all the time in real life, but there are a fair share of perfectly normal guys who happen to be gay. I guess convention doesn't sell products, though. Why don't we just wheel out ol' Mammy and Sambo and Liberace while we're at it?

This kind of stuff just slides right under our noses most of the time, and thereby becomes imbedded in our subconscious. Our worldviews become skewed towards these stereotypes. Sure, it's the natural thing to do, and it's our right to have any opinion we want, justified or not. But is it responsible? Fuck no.

Humans are naturally ethnocentric. It's the reason 9/11 happened. There were a bunch of misguided glue-sniffers who took an idea with a foundation and perverted it until it turned into a full-scale terrorist attack. They're still out there.

It's also the reason the U.S. is in Iraq right now. The people running our government have their misguided (but not unfounded) opinions of what Iraq should be like, and Iraqis have their misguided (but not unfounded) opinions of what the U.S. is trying to do to them. Every opinion is based on some fact, somewhere down the line. When the opinion strays too far down that line, however, you get conflicts. When both sides are as far apart as the U.S. and al-Qaeda are right now, well, you get a lot of people who are very pissed off.

The major problem in all of this is that people who agree with Ann Coulter are holding the Middle East wholly responsible for all the bad stuff that is happening. What the fuck, people? Haven't you seen Spider-Man? Do not tell me you didn't, because it made, like, 3 trillion dollars. "With great power comes great responsibility." What power does the Middle East have, compared to the United States? We're the richest country in the world. We're the most highly populated liberated state in the world. We have all the responsibility here. And instead of holding ourselves accountable for all this shit, we're pushing it on Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran and North Korea and al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and anyone else who so much as gives us a second thought.

I'm not sympathizing with the people who mean us harm. I'm asking for some accountability on both sides. And since we have 99% of the power in this case, we have 99% of the responsibility. It's not fuzzy math. It's an opinion based in fact, something the extremists lost a long time ago.

***

"You'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle," Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs says to William Miller in Almost Famous. I'd like to hope that this holds true for extremism--that they'll all meet up in the middle. The middle's where the compromise is, the idea of consensus without which we wouldn't have a concept of modern democracy. It might not be right all the time, but it's rational and responsible most of the time. It's where even accountability brings us. It's safe.

But hey, maybe "safe" isn't what people want. I guess that's why we have extremism. Without it, we'd have no rock and roll, or jazz, or monotheism, or atheism, or democracy, or communism. With every middle, there's a circle of extremes. The mission, should we humans choose to accept it, is to tighten up that circle. Extremes are like most women: good to have around at the right times, but mostly just really obnoxious.

(I'm sorry, was that offensive?)