Two weeks before Donald Trump entered the presidential race, Ann Coulter’s book Adios America was issued in bookstores nationwide. The contents of the book represent a level of fear-mongering not attempted since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Trumpster called it “a great read,” though I don’t know if his unsavory and unfair use of the label “rapists” for Mexicans came from Ms. Coulter’s copious and colorful synonyms for the word that she used in her book. Like Bill O’Reilly of Fox News (faux news), Ann Coulter likes to stir the pot, turning gullible and already angry Americans into forces of mob mentality akin to those carrying torches in Frankenstein movies.
With little to no dependence upon facts and statistics, Ms. Coulter careens her way around every cornerstone of decency, compassion, and fairness to demonize immigrants and would probably sell tickets to the tarring and feathering of the illegal ones. She even suggests that in a few years we will all have to move to Canada (becoming immigrants too?) to escape the raping.
Ann Coulter is, at least to me, just a skinny Rush Limbaugh with long hair. She is, like Limbaugh, a sensationalist whose blowhard style of bullying and decimating her liberal adversaries is like the shameless tactics of tabloid rags that entertain or frighten the uniformed and simply embarrass the well-read. She is the National Enquirer of pop culture, but there are too many disconnected folks, already furious with the government, who actually take her seriously, as though she were The Washington Post or The New York Times.
There is perhaps no better peddler of panic to be found anywhere else except perhaps in the Trumpster himself. The problem is that her followers see her as sagacious, when she is really nearer to being seditious in her going against every image and value we have left of America as a nation that welcomes the tired and poor, a country founded upon diversity and equal opportunity. Perhaps I’m being puerile when I admit that I have a satisfying mental picture from a favorite childhood movie that I summon whenever I hear or read Ann Coulter. The image is that of someone dropping a house on her. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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