Protesting Ann Coulter’s UCLA appearance only feeds her media persona

Ann Coulter will be speaking at UCLA on Wednesday, still beating back flames from her recent row in Canada.

Coulter’s speech at the University of Ottawa was canceled because the threat of snowballs hurled at her person by “IQ: 0″ (her words) Canadian students was simply too great. But while protest might have seemed like an appropriate response to Coulter’s mouth up north, Bruins shouldn’t take her quite so seriously.

Also nonkosher for Coulter were the warnings that her trademark hate speech might, under Canadian law, be grounds for prosecution. Her complaint was that all this vitriol was being directed at something she “might do in the future,” implying that she would have preferred to remain ignorant of Canadian law and get arrested for “stirring the pot,” as she likes to say.

But spewing unsubstantiated one-liners is not something Coulter “might” do. As she has more than 100 of these college lectures under her belt, one can predict with reasonable accuracy that Canadian students would have had something to protest after her University of Ottawa speech. Hate is what Ann Coulter sells.

One can guess that UCLA’s response to Coulter won’t be quite so dramatic, and it shouldn’t be. Canada may be testy about hate speech, but to America, the censorship of even an Ann Coulter is frightening and Orwellian. Contrary opinions, especially when they espouse the idea that Muslim countries should be invaded and made to bow before Jesus, are part of a complete political discourse breakfast. A volatile right-wing polemicist will keep us from becoming too comfortable and too sedate in the liberal bubble that is, sans OC, Southern California.

These are, at least, the arguments that the smugly open-minded would put forth in favor of Coulter’s UCLA appearance. But there’s a better reason for us to welcome this nearly platinum blonde to our campus: She’s cheap entertainment.

In fact, she is only cheap entertainment, and her speech will contribute nothing to intelligent political discourse. Let’s be honest: If UCLA wanted a speaker who might actually challenge and reshape the opinions of left-wingers, it would have hired a Dennis Prager or a Tucker Carlson or another conservative who wouldn’t immediately alienate all but the most belligerent of students with hateful candor.

Coulter will be here only because she was available and, most pressingly for the budget-minded University of California, essentially free. Her fees are covered by the Young America Foundation and Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

This is the point in the column where a liberal writer might cite multiple Coulter quotes and exclaim that there’s something amiss, logically, about saying that the government should spy on every Arab and make torture a spectator sport. Coulter would argue, as she did on a recent episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” that this is an old quote and not representative of what she plans to address at her college talks, but both Coulter and her opponents miss the point by discussing the content of her commentary like this.

Coulter isn’t about to modify her tactics or admit she’s wrong simply because her logic has been refuted. To do so would be to compromise the persona that gets invited to college lectures, goes on talk shows and sells books.

A protest against Ann Coulter’s UCLA speech would be like a defamatory sign waved by a rabid World Wrestling Entertainment fan because The Rock told someone to “know their role.” The WWE fan, though, knows that his sign feeds into a larger entertainment. The University of Ottawa protesters didn’t seem aware that their contempt of Coulter fed into her media persona and, worse, treated her rhetoric as serious stuff.

Violent protest and the disruption of speeches would be expected if Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir were to make the North American campus rounds. But al-Bashir has been accused of genocide, and political action against him could have real consequences.

This isn’t to say that public speakers need to be guilty of an al-Bashir-level atrocity to warrant disruption, but they should at least be more relevant, politically, than The Rock. Coulter isn’t al-Bashir. She isn’t even Sarah Palin because, while both ladies appeal to conservative fringes, Coulter won’t be holding public office anytime soon.

Coulter said that most of the hateful comments she’s criticized for have been jokes, but it’s her ridiculous persona that’s laughable, not her comedy. And no matter her defense, she is, in the end, just another actor in the dichotomous culture of U.S. politics.

The title of her lecture is “Ann Coulter: Why Liberals are Wrong About Everything.” She will not attack issues, but if your values so happen to categorize you as “liberal,” you will be attacked. It’s not of benefit to Coulter that you accept one or more of her arguments. What is important is that you buy into her persona because she loudly opposes some vague label you’ve been trained to hate.

If liberals want to truly disrupt Coulter this Wednesday, they can do better than the University of Connecticut students who chanted loudly amid her speech, or even the North Michigan University students who walked silently out on her in protest.

UCLA should treat Coulter like the entertainer she is. The way to talk to Coulter, if you must, is with irony and humor.

But if you find yourself unwilling to feed her persona and a silly left-versus-right yelling match that will go nowhere, apathy and nonattendance might be better courses of action.

E-mail Dosaj at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].