Remora

LI was going to write a post about Ann Coulter, but we didn't have the heart. Actually, this post was going to use Coulter's remark, in the New York Observer that "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." I thought I'd use this remark to map the interlocking major political weblogs and how they operate to exclude or include agents in the blog discourse -- which has a form consonant with other closed clubs, cliques, and in-groups. And blah blah blah. But... but I didn't have the heart for any comments on Ann Coulter, beyond the fact that the more interesting part of the Coulter story was the writer's part in it -- George Gurley. One got a whiff of something I haven't thought about in years: that old 'Nancy Reagan's queens'" culture. Frankly, I thought that was good and dead. The explanation is probably that Gurley, on his own account, is from one of those tight assed hetero villes -- Kansas City -- where camp is still alive. In larger cities, that aesthetic of resistance and self mockery is pretty dead. The parasitic attachment to some uber-heterowoman's desires, which fills the piece, is quite, uh, familiar. LI was raised in the South, and saw a lot of that weird nexus between a certain rich strata of rich, cultured but limited women and gay guys, who are in a much more precarious position in midsized towns in the South and Midwest than they are in, say, California. Anyway, I'd see that attachment to the only sophistication available -- which was in the salons of these women. The agreement was that these guys would close their eyes to peripheral, anti-gay context these women operated in, while the women ornamented their circles with something definitely different from the country club wit of their hubbies. Ah, the compromises that were struck! I remember a friend of mine, who had confessed the love that dare not speak its name to his best friend, an older, wealthy woman, being told, at one point, that she didn't want him hanging around with her son. Just out of the blue, and as a matter of course. But I felt at the time that there was something that satisfied my friend in that gesture, however hurt he was.

In any case, Gurley's political motives are quite funny. They go back to being insulted in his senior year -- it isn't clear whether this is in high school or college.

"I first started thinking I might be conservative after witnessing the communist radical Angela Davis give a speech at University of Kansas in the late 80�s. Hundreds of students cheered after she blamed the Bush administration for the crack epidemic.

This reminded me of that hippie girl my senior year who berated me at a party for saying I admired Margaret Thatcher. "She�s a capitalist pig!" she screamed at me. I stammered. Then one of my best friends defended her, saying, "George, sorry, you got no leg to stand on, man." I had left the party ashamed, powerless.

That was in 1991. So I called up this same friend of mine, Hampton Stevens, now a freelance writer now living in Kansas City. He responded to Ann immediately. "I love it when she�s unafraid to say that people are stupid and ignorant. She�s written some stuff about liberal folly and it�s so fantastic."

And so, dear readers, leaving that party ashamed and powerless, Gurley vowed that someday, he'd show that hippie girl (not chick, oddly enough)! Which he does, by getting Coulter to tell us who she thinks is sexy, and the candy just rolls out:

How did she feel about the Vice President?"Cheney is my ideal man. Because he�s solid. He�s funny. He�s very handsome. He was a football player. People don�t think about him as the glamour type because he�s a serious person, he wears glasses, he�s lost his hair. But he�s a very handsome man. And you cannot imagine him losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there�s a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it�s one of our little methods of social control. We�re supposed to fly off the handle."They are supposed to be rock-solid men. Dick Cheney exudes that. Can you imagine him yelling at Lynne Cheney? No. Every female I know finds that so incredibly attractive.

"What about Rumsfeld?"Mmmmm-hmmmm. And I might add, inasmuch as we have just left the Clinton era, everyone recognizes this: There is absolutely no possible way any one of those men have ever cheated on their wives. No possible way. Even Colin Powell, who I don�t particularly like politically�no possible way. These are honorable men and I think America recognizes that."

Mmmmm-hmmmm. Sometimes, like, when you leave a party ashamed and powerless? Don't remember it forever, or in a newspaper I sometimes write for. Please.