I'm sure many of us recognize that as from Ann Coulter. Ok, so I don't actually know much about this lady. I tend to avoid political pundits because they say the same things over and over, except that the party changes depending on their personal political persuasion. One minute the Republicans are racist, the next minute Democrats are. One minute the Republicans are traitors to the great U.S., the next minute it's the Democrats who commit vile acts of treason. You get to the end and you realize it's pretty pointless. Liberals will get flaming pissed at Ann Coulter, but conservatives will do the same when reading Michael Moore. Each pundit, after all, says exactly what the people they support want to hear and leaves no room for the "undisclosed opposing side;" they keep things black and white, and a lot people love that because the world with all its greys is too complicated to handle. Pundits are
meant to piss the other side off and make their own side feel superior, good, right, white (or left, black); it's all angry rhetoric that facilitates shouting contests, not open-minded discussion. Pundits do more harm than good, because they reinforce the shells people build around themselves with their vitriolic barbs against "the Right" or "the Left." They keep the walls up and firm and insurmountable, when walls should be breaking down between us, so we can see what is on the other side and realize for ourselves that it's not all that bad.
All this because I went to get money from the ATM in the bookstore and then decided to flip through Ann Coulter's
Treason, which was on display.:p It was below
Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man (or whatever the title is), sandwiched between
Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader and some other angry diatribe against the Right or the Left, the title of which I've forgotten but is probably something like,
How to Talk to a _Conservative/Liberal/people who disagree with you_ if the only other option is poking your eye out. How does all of this help us? Does it make us want to reach out and seek different opinions or does it just make us all hate and misunderstand each other more? I picked up the Ann Coulter book because, like I said, I don't know much about this controversial lady and wanted to see her words for myself. I wanted to break out of my shell and listen to the other side. But she just made me want to up the calcium levels around me again.
I mean, if you read some
Ann Coulter quotes, she is unbelievably nasty, almost to the point where you just want to laugh at her and wonder if she's for real. I say "almost" because she's got fans, so some people do think she's for real, and they gobble it up. Their anti-liberal prejudices strengthened, they continue to think the other side is full of crap.
And really, the other side is not helping with this perception. Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11 is
intentionally deceitful, meant to make liberals feel like they're the paragon of virtue because their conservative opponents are "clearly" lying scumbags and guess what? Full of crap. Solving the communication problem these people are decidedly not.
Having said all that, I need to immerse myself in academia again and resume studying for orgo. You see, there's a communication problem between myself and the information in my textbook. It does not want to be memorized. I say it
will be memorized. I'll tell you how well I've resolved the misunderstanding between us after 3:30 PM, tomorrow.:p
