Ann Coulter's Barbarian Crassness Paved The Way For Devious Donald, Spineless Flip-Flopper
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/05/did-ann-coulters-barbarian-crassness.html
Excerpt: "Widespread public knowledge of her privileged upbringing would compromise the tough-talking, take no prisoners, anti-elitist image she cultivates so lucratively. While the Coulters were not then among the most affluent in New Canaan, a more elitist social environment does not exist. Here are a few facts: 2007 Median family income: $231,138/yr, the highest in Connecticut. Median home sales price: peaked at about $1.85 million in 2006."
Ann Coulter garners more attention than she deserves, but as a public service allow me to share some tidbits about the town where she grew up. At the least this will provide a basis of understanding, as in "how did she grow up to be such nutjob?" to borrow Al Franken's useful term.
I don't have the answer to that question. I don't know if she's crazy. But I may be able to offer a few clues to her public personna with a few facts and ancedotes about the special place she called home before making the big time. It ranks high among the richest communities in the nation, a statistic you can look up. It would also rank somewhere high on any list of those with the most family dysfunction, if such a list could be found. In short, it is full of batshit-crazy rich people. I should know, I grew up there too, in a family crazier than most.
Follow me below the fold to the simply splendid town of New Canaan, Connecticut, which bills itself as the next station to heaven, whose motto is grow or go.
New Canaan lives in the shadow of its more famous neighbors, Westport, former home of Martha Stewart and the late Paul Newman, and Greenwich, home to notorious hedge fund managers. Its citizens, many of whom are CEOs and other high level executives of major corporations, like it that way. These folks include Coulter's father, who was an attorney for the Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company known as one the leading air polluters in the United States, and potentially responsible for 13 Superfund toxic waste sites. There is also some serious semi-old money there too--Texaco, RJ Reynolds, IBM, among others. They all cherish their privacy, guard it zealously, and have the means to pay dearly for their privileges of high-quality schools, exclusive clubs, pricey shops, and seclusion. The town even has its own branch extending from the New Haven commuter train line. Nice.
Yet New Canaan has also served as a refuge for low-key but highly accomplished artists, musicians, thespians, intellectuals, writers and architects, most notably architect Philip Johnson. He lived there for 55 years in his famous Glass House. This is a town so secluded that he could live comfortably in a see-through house until he died there in 2005 at the age of 98. In a New York Times article he did have one complaint: people would trespass on his 47-acre estate to gawk at his Modernist masterpiece. His gardener would have to chase them off.
Coulter rebelled from this rarified and sheltered social environment to actively pursue a public life of extraordinary visibility. What she did acquire from this privileged setting is a profound sense of entitlement that allows her to say pretty much whatever she wants with no apparent fear of negative consequences.
I'm not aware that Coulter has ever talked or written much about the town where we both grew up. Nor do the Wikipedia or a quick review of celebrity bio sites reveal much about her childhood. Her own site says only that she's a Connecticut native. I have not read her books in any depth. I get my fill with her uncanny ability to remain in the spotlight of elite news/entertainment media and elicit seemingly endless reaction.
Nonetheless, my take is that widespread public knowledge of her privileged upbringing would compromise the tough-talking, take no prisoners, anti-elitist image she cultivates so lucratively. While the Coulters were not then among the most affluent in New Canaan, a more elitist social environment does not exist. Here are a few facts:
2007 Median family income: $231,138/yr, the highest in Connecticut.
Median home sales price: peaked at about $1.85 million in 2006. Has become a downward moving target since then. My guess is that the house Coulter grew up in would now be in the $750,000 range. It's very nice, but not extradorinary for the area. One benefit is its location: about halfway between the high school and the compact downtown core.
Of course, maybe some work has been done on it since I last saw it 30 years ago. Tearing down relatively modest houses to build McMansions is a problem in New Canaan, according to the New York Times. Indeed, some noteworthy Modernist homes have met this fate. The Glass House, it should be said, is now a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public for tours.
Racial/ethnic composition: 95 percent white, 2 percent Asian, 2 percent Hispanic/Latino, 1 percent African American.
Forty percent of New Canaan High School graduates are accepted to "top tier" colleges, according to the New York Times. That same article has a realtor noting that the town sees itself as less clubby and more churchy than its neighboring communities of Wilton and Darien.
Coulter was a grade behind me in high school, but I can remember only one encounter with her. Granted, it was 30 years ago, but I don't remember her as standing out in any way. We did not cross paths at parties or in classes, and we belonged to cliques that avoided each other. My clique hung out in what was known as the "veg lounge" so named for the paintings of oversized vegetables that adorned the walls. As far as I can recall, she must have hung out in the "fruit lounge" so named for the oversized fruits on its walls. Maybe Matt Lauer can check on this the next time she's on the Today Show.
The running joke was that the vegetables represented the stoners who hung out in what was formally called the south lounge, where cigarette smoking was allowed. I kid you not. It was filthy but we liked it. Such a policy was unusually permissive even for the mid-70s, when most high schools that tolerated smoking on campus had outdoor smoking areas with no seating.
The fruits, well, you have probably guessed what they represented to the adolescent mind. In retrospect, it was pretty homophobic, but not in a particularly hostile way. Fruit was really just slang for uncool, sort of like how "gay" is bandied about today. Still indefensible, though, just like allowing teenagers--and forcing custodians and foodworkers, for that matter--to inhale tobacco smoke for hours a day.
One of my favorite teachers was Warren Allen Smith, who thanks to Wikipedia, I now remember is a noted author and gay activist from way back in the day--he was part of the Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village. Everyone seemingly knew he was gay, and one time some jerks who I can imagine now working on Wall Street walked out of his creative writing class when he "got all queer". I think he had been talking about going to a Broadway show with his partner.
All the same, in its staffing and course offerings, the school was liberal in many ways, with a large number of "cool" teachers. Most of them were highly qualified and competent, many with Ivy League credentials and genuine passion for a difficult and underappreciated job. I know of only a few who could afford to live in New Canaan on their salaries--most commuted more than half an hour.
Yet the school also had a remarkably permissive, if misguided, attitude about teenagers making their own choices and dealing with consequences, and not just with cigarette smoking. It had an open campus for all but freshman, a limit routinely ignored. Skipping classes was laughably easy. A decently forged absence note would do. My guidance counselor was particularly lame, and would focus on pressing issues like my body language and the importance of being well-rounded. Pot smoking between classes, during what was called "free time," was commonplace, even among some top students and jocks, and largely overlooked. Not until my senior year was there a clampdown of any sort, and only after a tsunami of cocaine flooded the town.
So I have a theory: in her impressionable mind, young Ann Coulter conflated this over-permissiveness with liberalism, causing her to seethe with righteous anger and moral indignation. I think she kept those feelings bottled up, saving them for the day she could exploit them for personal gain.
Now back to that brief encounter. I palled around with her brother, a serious partier. One night a friend and I let ourselves into the Coulter's kitchen to pick him up for yet another night of adolescent debauchery. Ann was making a snack, as I recall, when I asked something like "Is Jim home?" She did not so much as acknowledge our presence, and retreated somewhere to eat in privacy. That's it--she was just an ordinary, somewhat awkward teenager who snubbed her older brother's friends. Nothing special there, and certainly no hints of her future in-your-face greatness. It's tempting in retrospect to think she snubbed us because she detested our hedonism, or saw us as her brother's corruptors, but that's just a guess. We never exchanged so much as a glance.
Jim and I would have spirited political arguments at the frequent keg parties, where he would denounce Jimmy Carter for being in the pocket of organized labor, as naive for emphasizing human rights, and traitorous for "giving back our Panama Canal" and so on. I can reasonably conclude the Coulter family was pretty solidly right wing, aggressively pro-corporate and anti-union, and favored expansionist foreign policy. Those authortitarian values were successfully transmitted to at least those two children, though I don't have a clue about her other brother, the eldest.
Any discussion of New Canaan is incomplete without mentioning the movie The Ice Storm, based on a novel by New Canaanite Rick Moody. Indeed, it was filmed there. Much of it rings true to me--the erosion of social norms, heedless experimentation with sex and drugs, and moral ambiguity. But I think it failed to convey any of the town's extraordinary elitism. And I sure as hell can't remember such rampant adultery or anything about wife-swapping "key" parties. Not very New England, you know. I mean, New Canaan produced Anthony Comstock, the author of the 19th Century Comstock Law, banning obscenity and contraceptives through the US Mail. A road there is named after this man, who anarchist Emma Goldman called "a moral eunuch".
Hey, such a swinging party could have happened. Crazier things did happen, and I could write about those, but I'm not looking to sell this story.
Moreover, the lack of parental supervision and emotional neglect as the parents struggled to escape their prisons of ambition is dead on. I believe that every child in New Canaan has the same core existential problem as those in The Ice Storm--how to find your way in the world when the town you are growing up in is so unlike it. Sometimes escape is the only way to retain or regain sanity.
So my solution was to head west almost immediately upon graduation, and I have seldom gone back, and couldn't wait to reinvent myself as anything but a preppie. In a twist on the town motto, I had to go to grow.
Contrary to Coulter, I had learned to conflate over-permissiveness with laissez-faire capitalism and wealth disparity, and liberalism with acceptance, diversity, fairness and decency. I still do. That said, I'm grateful for the fine education I received there, and I did have more than my fair share of fun.
Ann Coulter, it must be said, also grew up successfully under absurd conditions. Whether or not one approves, in our culture her world view and way of being works rather well for her, so there's little reason to believe she'll change.
I've been in touch recently with one of my old buddies who has lived in New Canaan since high school. While a good guy, he has drifted way right on fiscal issues. He says things like social security is doomed while his business interests, which are linked to the town's fortunes, are in the septic tank. He talked to Coulter for half an hour in early 2008 at her dad's funeral, and had this to write: "I could not tell if it was a cultivated character you have seen on TV, or if it's really her." He also thinks she's hot.
In the end, Ann Coulter is just another lost soul who found her voice and hasn't shut up since. And she won't until our culture finds the strength to stop rewarding those who feel entitled to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
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