Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Fiction

I am not convinced that Ann Coulter is actually the devil, even though she is wearing a blue dress on the cover of her new book, but I do believe that she knows the devil, or at least has been to a dinner party with the devil. (O.K., O.K., so it’s not a blue dress, it’s a blue leather bustier. Could she be any more obvious?) To the writhing hordes of other reviewers who blindly scream “Ann Coulter is the Devil! Ann Coulter is Satan!” I say: “Perhaps, but will your tummy be that flat when you get cast out of Heaven?”

In this review, I use the word “book” loosely, because although Ms. Coulter’s offering has the physical shape and feel of a book, I believe that there are deeper, more complex forces at work in this so-called book. For example, when I first picked up the book I noticed that the entire bookstore suddenly became dark and very cold and that a deeply sensuous female voice began speaking inside my head, mostly talking about tax shelters and liberal media bias, but mixed in were occasional suggestions of a more sexual nature. A very deviant sexual nature. After spending a few moments in the trance-like state induced by the book I felt my soul trying to leave my body, so I put the book down and went to complain to the manager of the bookstore. He was less than helpful, however, and after dismissing my complaint he immediately began trying to secretly hypnotize me, so I left the store.

In the sixth grade, my English teacher was named Mrs. Coulter. She was about 92 years old, but when I recently looked in my old sixth grade yearbook I could clearly see the resemblance around the eyes and mouth. I have become convinced that the old woman who taught me Shakespeare in sixth grade, and the outspoken but misguided spokesvixen of the conservative right, are one and the same. As alluded to earlier, I do not believe that Ann is a demon herself, however, I think that at some point in her career, while seated at the right hand of Lucifer at a fancy dinner party, Ms. Coulter traded any sense of altruism or public decency she ever had for the ability to transcend the ravages of age. It’s too bad she couldn’t get a better deal, i.e., lop off a few more years and pump up that chest a bit, but my guess is that the devil kept getting distracted by Sean Hannity’s zany food antics at the same dinner party. (“Ooh, ooh, look at me, what am I? What am I?” Sean yelled at the devil while smearing brown gravy on his lips and chin. “I’m a third world orphan with a serious case of cholera! Get it? Get it?”) I miss my sixth grade English teacher, and am saddened by her Faustian dealings. What cuts especially deep is the fact that it was that old Ann Coulter who first introduced me to the literature of the Faust legend.

But enough about Ann’s religion, you say. What about the book itself? Well, there is this kind of funny chapter where she makes fun of how nobody in the liberal media gets her jokes. Like whenever she says things like “Babies should carry guns and be trained to shoot tree-hugging environmentalists in the groin,” everybody thinks she’s so serious, when really its just a joke, and it should be obvious that you need the eye-hand coördination of at least a toddler to land a good groin shot. But other than that one chapter, most of the book is crap. Actually, in retrospect, that chapter is crap, too.

In conclusion, I think I’m going to go back to the bookstore and pick up Ann Coulter’s book again. I’m not going to buy it, of course. You’d have to be an idiot to do something like that. But I did enjoy the disorienting connection with the underworld that touching the book induced, and I want to experience it again. What’s more, I had an erection for almost 24 hours afterward.