Whether she is talking from a liberal or a conservative perspective, she doesn't have to be intelligent, or have intelligent arguments. She just has to be compelling and fill up the space between the commercials, in a compelling way. Her physical beauty is an asset that make the things she say, "real"...not necessarily factual, but it makes us more likely to believe her, and whatever nonsense she comes up with.
Fox News Channel, proved, that, what is called niche marketing, is very successful business enterprise. It's news with a point of view...but in reality NOT news, at all.
That's why it's so successful, because people really don't want to hear news or facts, per se, they want to hear what they believe in, their point of view, 24/7. With Fox, people know where to go for their point of view.
Ann Coulter's "Treason"
-
mikenycLI
- Posts: 526
- Joined: Mon May 26, 2003 2:02 pm
- Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States
On Coulter's brand of "treason"....courtesy of international herald tribune...
Frank Rich: Scars and Stripes divide a nation
Frank Rich NYT Friday, July 4, 2003
The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times
< < Back to Start of Article The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
http://www.iht.com/articles/101751.html
Frank Rich: Scars and Stripes divide a nation
Frank Rich NYT Friday, July 4, 2003
The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times
< < Back to Start of Article The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
.
At least she doesn't slap the flag on the front of her book to wrap herself in it. The same cannot be said of Dick Morris and Sean Hannity, who use the Stars and Stripes as a merchandising tool for their own self-aggrandizingly patriotic screeds cashing in on their TV celebrity. In this, they follow the lead of their employer, the Fox News Channel, which, like its less successful cable rivals, has exploited the flag as a logo to sell itself as more patriotic than thou. As patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, so the coercive patriotism of this historical moment is the last refuge of cynics. In "The Story of American Freedom," the historian Eric Foner observes that a similar phenomenon occurred a little over a century ago, uncoincidentally enough, in tandem with "America's triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power" during the Spanish-American War. It was in the 1890's that "rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and the practice of standing for the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' came into existence," as well as Flag Day. American leaders were then professing to spread democracy to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines with the same blithe self-assurance that current leaders promise to bring the American way to Iraq and its neighbors. The rituals that accompany our 21st-century imperial interlude include fights over the Pledge of Allegiance and a costumed president's re-enactment of Hollywood's "Top Gun." Most bizarre is the Defense Department's Operation Tribute to Freedom, initiated on Memorial Day weekend, which offers talking points to citizens too challenged to figure out how "to demonstrate public appreciation for American men and women in uniform."
.
But patriotism needn't make the populace so weary. Look around the culture, and it isn't hard to find a faith in America that is not defined by government-commissioned flag-waving, political demagoguery or cable news's jingoism-as-marketing-strategy. The most telling American fables don't come in the blacks and whites of current strident political and cultural discourse, which so often divides Americans into either flag-draped heroes or abject traitors. Great American stories, from Huckleberry Finn's to the Dixie Chicks', have always been nuanced; they can have poetry and they can have dark shadows. They can combine love of country with implicit criticism. One example this summer is the movie that could prove to be the redeeming Hollywood entertainment of this schlock-movie year: Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit," opening this month in the United States. The title character is the misshapen race-horse-that-could that captivated the nation in the 1930's, becoming a bigger story than Hitler and F.D.R. on the eve of World War II. The unlikely triumph of the horse, its jockey (Tobey Maguire in the film), its trainer (Chris Cooper) and its owner (Jeff Bridges) is right out of Horatio Alger, but as presented by Ross, the Depression background of economic injustice and deprivation is in the same sharp focus as the nail-biting foreground at the track. It's precisely this panoramic context that makes a classic American struggle against all odds all the more poignant. Not every American rooting for Seabiscuit, after all, got a piece of the purse.
.
"Seabiscuit" could be a bookend to an unexpected film success that has been sweeping the country since late spring, the documentary "Spellbound," about eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee of 1999. The kids it chronicles are almost a too-perfect American cross-section - from a privileged child of the suburbs to the black daughter of a single mother in a Washington housing project to (most stirringly) the daughter of non-English-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Texas Panhandle.
.
One parent in "Spellbound" is an immigrant from India who drills his son tirelessly. "There is no way you can fail in this country," the father says. "That's one guarantee in this country - if you work hard, you'll make it." As the movie then demonstrates, that is far from the case. There are 9 million children competing in the National Spelling Bee, most of them working hard, and, as in the races of "Seabiscuit," only one competitor comes in first. As one of the best American playwrights, Richard Greenberg, writes in another genuinely patriotic drama on tap this summer, the baseball play "Take Me Out," these competitions reveal something about America that the current political debates avoid: "While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose . . . So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades."
.
Most Americans, whatever their age, don't need politicians or government boondoggles like Operation Tribute to Freedom or enforced flag-waving or fictionalized TV dramatizations of Jessica Lynch's rescue to tell them what it means to be an American. You see the wise, optimistic young citizens of "Spellbound," whether struggling or triumphant, and you see the whole package that is America, imperfect and heartbreaking as it sometimes is. That the Ann Coulters of 2003 look around the nation and see traitors everywhere is pathetic, but not so much so that they can spoil what is celebrated on the Fourth.
.
The New York Times The week before Independence Day, the Dixie Chicks played the Washington MCI Center, a mere dozen blocks or so from the White House. "Well, what do you know, Washington, D.C.," said the singer Natalie Maines, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. "If I'm not mistaken, the president of the United States lives here." Then, as The Washington Post reported, the cheers grew even louder.
.
As the United States concludes this Fourth of July weekend, let us not forget the happy denouement to the saga of Maines, whose crime against America was to tell a London audience in March that she was "ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas." What followed were boycotts, death threats and a ritualistic network TV flogging in which, as Jim Lewis put it in the online magazine Slate, Diane Sawyer demanded that the Chicks "affirm their patriotism and their support for the troops" in the "tradition of a Stalinist show trial."
.
No matter. The Dixie Chicks have been able to exercise free speech happily all the way to the bank. They've posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with "Saddam's Angels" emblazoned on their flesh. Their album "Home" rebounded from its brief dip, returning to No. 1 on the country chart for weeks.
.
From national infamy to renewed superstardom in a matter of weeks: That's the kind of story that restores faith in an America where everything is possible. And most Americans, the Dixie Chicks no doubt included, not only have that faith in their country but love it as well. Yet you'd never know it from the more embittered cultural battles that have raged since 9/11. "Read 'Treason' this Fourth of July, and let the fireworks begin," commands the full-page ad hawking the latest book by Ann Coulter. In it the author claims that every liberal in the United States - or at least every liberal Democrat - "hates America" and is guilty of her titular crime, which, last time I looked, is punishable by death. According to her book jacket biography, Coulter's expertise in delivering such sweeping condemnations derives from having been "named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001." What she doesn't add - and this is typical of her own intellectual methodology in "Treason" - is that the list was compiled not on the basis of smarts but on the number of times names turned up in the media during the Clinton-hating heyday of 1995 to 2000. Posner's book was titled "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (my italics), and by its ranking system Coulter turns out to be far less of an intellectual than such conspicuous traitors as Sidney Blumenthal, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.
http://www.iht.com/articles/101751.html
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mikenycLI
- Posts: 526
- Joined: Mon May 26, 2003 2:02 pm
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Courtesy of drudgereport.com...
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN JULY 27, 2003 19:40:02 ET XXXXX
SOURCES: COULTER SIGNS NEW BOOK DEAL VALUED AT $3 MILLION
**Exclusive**
Controversialist and bestselling author Ann Coulter is on the verge of signing a new publishing deal valued at near $3 million, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT -- a deal which would become the highwater mark for an advance paid to a conservative author!
The Coulter bonanza is expected to be finalized this week at CROWN FORUM.
The deal comes after more than 600,000 copies of her SLANDER and TREASON have been sold at market.
Impacting...
http://www.drudgereport.com/coulter1.htm
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN JULY 27, 2003 19:40:02 ET XXXXX
SOURCES: COULTER SIGNS NEW BOOK DEAL VALUED AT $3 MILLION
**Exclusive**
Controversialist and bestselling author Ann Coulter is on the verge of signing a new publishing deal valued at near $3 million, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT -- a deal which would become the highwater mark for an advance paid to a conservative author!
The Coulter bonanza is expected to be finalized this week at CROWN FORUM.
The deal comes after more than 600,000 copies of her SLANDER and TREASON have been sold at market.
Impacting...
http://www.drudgereport.com/coulter1.htm