An Ann Coulter opportunity

Reading Ann Coulter reminds me of watching MTV. I didn’t want to watch MTV, but I felt like I had to, because when my kids were 10 and 15, it was a way to find out what was going on in their world.

Ann Coulter’s point of view is way too out of balance to the right to interest me as reading material, but it would be a way to find out what is going on in that world. She enjoys quite a constituency, I am told, and based on what she is writing and they are buying lately, that world is worth keeping an eye on.

I won’t read her if I don’t have to, and apparently there are sufficient reviewers, critics and other political writers to do that heavy work for me. In several places this past week I have seen reviews and commentary on what Coulter has to say, in her new book, about women who lost their husbands in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“These broads are millionaires,” she writes, “lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.”

She says that like it is a bad thing.

By coincidence, last night on television was a 1990s docudrama (based on real events) about a woman whose husband is killed and her son gravely wounded in December, 1993, by a man walking down the aisle of a Long Island commuter train, firing randomly from a 15-round assault weapon.

At the instant their names are known, the widow-mom, whose name is Carolyn McCarthy, becomes a celebrity. The movie makes a point of the media following her everywhere. She resists her celebrity, insisting she be allowed to focus on her grief, and her son’s survival and, later (she is a nurse), his recovery. She refuses entreaties to become part of a movement to get a bill through Congress banning 19 types of assault weapons.

Finally, though, confronted by the damage a single crazed person can do, when he is armed with an assault weapon, she joins the movement, lobbies hard for it in congressional corridors, lobbies and offices, and uses her celebrity – she is no fool – at every media opportunity. The bill passes. Later it is repealed, by – the movie maintains – Republican legislators lobbied hard by the National Rifle Association.

The movie ends with McCarthy switching parties, from Republican to Democrat, running for Congress against an incumbent Republican, and winning. McCarthy is now in her fourth term in the House of Representatives. Among her honors: Newsday's 100 Long Island Influentials, Long Island Business News' Long Island Top 50, Congressional Quarterly's 50 Most Effective Legislators, Redbook Magazine's Mothers and Shakers, Ladies' Home Journal 100 Most Important Women, and Advertising Age's list of "Most Impact by Women in 1999," and The American Organization of Nurse Executives' 2003 Honorary Member Award. McCarthy’s son, Kevin, is married and has two children.

Watching the credits roll, I felt like I had just been reading about her. It was the Coulter quote. Carolyn McCarthy’s profile matches those of the Sept. 11 widow-moms. The way their husbands died made them all instant celebrities, stalked by grief-arrazis, and lionized on TV. They may not have liked it, but there was nothing they could do about it except beg to be left alone.

At that point, they had a choice: sink, or rise. All bereaved people, whether celebrities or anonymous (beloved husband and father, maintenance supervisor, dies of prostate cancer), arrive at that choice. Most choose to rise, move on, find a new life where waits meaning and enjoyment of some kind. I have made that trip myself in the last six years, and I can tell you, it is the only way to go. I have emerged into a life that is overflowing with meaning and enjoyment.

Celebrities of the McCarthy and Sept. 11 caliber are, by their circumstances, automatically anointed with power. It is their choice to let that power sink, or rise. McCarthy chose rise, and so did the Sept. 11 women that Coulter mentions: Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza, all from New Jersey (Coulter lumps them as “The Witches of East Brunswick”), all familiar in D.C. politics now for advocacy and accountability related to the way their husbands died. Karen, my wife, makes a point worth considering: it is not the women, but their power, that Coulter attacks.

Would they prefer to be home with their husbands? Ask any Sept. 11 survivor: it is a moot point. This world is this world, and in it, you sink, or you rise. Coulter’s business model is so well-known, like MTV’s – be outrageous, sell product – that her words about the widows lose meaning in their transparency, at least out here in Balanceville. This blog is not about her. It is an opportunity provided by her, for a survivors proxy to give a nod to all survivors who choose to rise, that is too good to pass up.