Column: Coulter challenges the status quo

By Gwen Daniels
Aug. 26, 2008

In high school, I liked Ann Coulter. Please don't hate me.

I don't know why exactly I liked Ann Coulter. Maybe I thought I was supposed to like her: I was the outspoken Ÿber-conservative in my apathetic garden-variety conservative 10th grade English class, and I wanted David Kumbroch, my intensely liberal but ridiculously handsome classmate, to notice me. More than once, my back-and-forth banter with David led me to tears. In fact, David was later named the national champion of extemporaneous speaking.

I was a good blind disciple. Every week, I printed her column to discuss with my best friend - in David's earshot, of course. Our intense discussion usually ended with jealous remarks about her thick, long, gorgeous blond hair. Then I realized Ann Coulter was mean. And her hair was probably fake.

Is Ann Coulter a bad columnist?

Very, very frequently, Ann Coulter can be judgmental and venomous. Her extreme viewpoints seem more sensational than fact-based. Without justification, she often makes needless, vicious personal attacks against political leaders and, oh yes, everyone else.

But every so often, I still read Ann Coulter's columns. Despite her shocking claims and mean-girl attacks, Ann Coulter makes me think. Sometimes I think about her callousness; sometimes I think about her thick, long, gorgeous, fake hair.

And sometimes I think about what she has to say.

A good columnist should spark thought and conversation. A good columnist should provide interesting, fresh, less publicized and engaging perspectives on the very matters that interest or concern the world today.

With one good column, readers should be tested by the words of Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Columnists should offer enough fodder for you to be entertained, for you to research and consider multiple viewpoints, for you to discuss ideas with your friends or with your intensely liberal but ridiculously handsome classmate and for you to challenge your own beliefs and ideological status quo.

When I first stumbled across the Aristotle quote, I felt ridiculous. Because I am both naively credulous and faithfully trusting, a pathetic but pure-hearted combination that once led me to check for the word "gullible" in the dictionary, I would sometimes simultaneously entertain a thought and accept it.

Until one day, I started thinking about decline of crime in New York City. I enjoyed seeking multiple angles. (Aristotle would be proud.)

New York City crime dropped dramatically in the 1990s, after the crime rate had skyrocketed in the 80s and early 90s. Some experts credit heavier policing and gun policy.

Other researchers offer more colorful explanations.

In his book "The Tipping Point," psychologist Malcolm Gladwell attributes the decline of violent crime to the New York Police Department's efforts to crack down on petty crime. In his book, he cites the broken windows theory, first proposed by criminologists James Wilson and George Kelling: "In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder and aggressive panhandling," they write, "are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes."

Economist Steven Levitt linked legalized abortion to the drop in crime. Children born into broken, impoverished adverse family environments are more likely than other children to become criminals, Levitt maintains in his book "Freakonomics."

"And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade - poor, unmarried and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get- were often models of adversity," he wrote. "They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals."

But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't born, and they weren't growing up to commit crime.

Researchers, reporters and columnists have convincingly contested Levitt's hypothesis. All have provided fresh, less publicized and engaging perspectives that challenge the ideological status quo.

And maybe Ann Coulter has, too.

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Column: Coulter challenges the status quo

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