Speaking of Cement

They all want to say it, but they know how it would sound. So they have to find someone willing to say it out loud, to act as the lightning rod, to make the statement that, if enough people buy into it, would cut a strong leg out from under their opposition.

Enter Ann Coulter, who vomits invective with no hint of humanity and no concern for truth. Those for whom she speaks make noises like they are aghast – simply shocked! – that anyone would say things like that about those who have lost loved ones. Secretly, they are grateful to her for saying it. They know it’s not true, but that is irrelevant; they hope enough people will find in the statement something to grab onto, something to feed their hatred, to justify the fact that they resent so much that the widows are, irrefutably, right.

It’s been hard – really hard – to remain loyal to Bush lately without seeming untethered from reality. Oh, if only someone would throw them just a morsel of righteousness to restore their mindless fealty to their clueless leader. Doubt just kills them; they can’t stand uncertainty or complexity. They must have simple talking points and clear parameters or their little lives just come all unglued. They want to be loyal to Bush, to be so sure that they voted for the right guy. But there are the widows.

Oh yes, we must not demonize widows, we cannot without looking, to most of the world, like unfeeling monsters. It would be like kicking bunnies. They are at least rational enough to get that. But they have Coulter, who sells books to her minions with exactly that kind of venom. They have Coulter, who gives them license to beat up on widows and orphans.

The widows do, of course, have the ultimate right to ask why their husbands died. They have the right to demand an investigation. And if the investigation leads them to think that it was the policies of the White House, the incompetence, if not complicity, that caused their husbands’ deaths, they would be disloyal to the memory of their husbands to not speak out. Coulter says that doing so is “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.” How moronic.

She is right in one aspect, however; the widows are a tough act to beat. Their husbands are, after all, dead. They now must face the task of raising children alone, while leading the effort to uncover the roots of our national tragedy. What an awful burden on these women. It is hard for anyone to not feel sympathy for someone in that circumstance (well, almost anyone). The widows are every bit the sympathetic figures that Coulter complains they are. She finds it somehow wrong that when the point is made that something the White House did – or didn’t do – caused terrible tragedy, the point is made by someone who actually suffered great loss in the tragedy. “No fair,” she cries, “that they use their status as widows, their grief, the fact that they lost a husband, to make a political point, while keeping anyone from responding.” She calls it the liberal “Doctrine of Infallibility.” Does she really not see the connection between the fact that someone has lost someone and their desire to speak out against the cause?  

But the fact is they did not, despite her claims to the contrary, “inject themselves” into politics. They were thrown – slammed – into politics. They did not ask for their role; it was thrust upon them. Their husbands are dead – and their deaths were due to the incompetence of the bunch that occupies (stole) the White House. Yes, the widows of 9/11, the Cindy Sheehans who lost children to Bush’s pointless war, the veterans who lost limbs and sanity and families…it would be hard to look at them and not feel sympathy and understand that if anyone has gained a right to demand answers, they have. No wonder the Ann Coulters of the world find them so threatening.