As a Canadian blogger, I hate to be drawn into the American Ann Coulter quagmire. She’s clearly a few verses short of a sonnet (this metaphor brought to you by Random Acts of Poetry Week), and God knows enough other progressives get themselves into a lather over whatever asinine comment she’s made this week.
But now she’s calling an incident last week where two doofi (doofi: noun, plural; see “doofus”) tried to hit her with pies “an act of terrorism”.
Now, I don’t doubt that Ms. Coulter was frightened. It’s always a little nerve-wracking being in the public eye, and if you’re the kind of person who publicly calls for the invasion of every Islamic country, the execution of their leaders and the mass conversion of the religion’s followers to Christianity, you may well spend more than the usual amount of time looking over your shoulder. (If only to see where the damn voices are coming from.)
And I happen to believe that pie-ing a public figure is dumb. Yeah, I know it’s political theatre and it strips the subject of their undeserved veneer of authority and counterpoints the surrealism of the underlying metaphor, but it also scares the bejeezus out of the victim and may well generate as much sympathy as ridicule.
But terrorism? Terrorism? (Given that these were tofu lemon pies, maybe making her eat them would have qualified. But then, my views on the vegan community’s dessert-making capacity are a little prejudiced.)
Suicide bombers killing commuters: that’s terrorism. Paramilitary gangs murdering nuns in Central America: that’s terrorism. Getting nicked by a pie? That’s a dry-cleaning bill.
Terrorism is a fine, useful and powerful word… and it gains that power because it has a very particular, horrifying meaning: the deliberate use of violence against civilians to achieve political goals.
Misusing a word like terrorism to describe what is, at worst, common assault saps the word of its strength, and leaves our language that much poorer. And it makes it that much harder to talk about an important issue with any kind of clarity and precision.
Then again, this comes from the kind of person who titles one book “Libel” (about how the American left is, sniff, debasing political discussion) and her next book “Treason” (about how the American left is a gang of traitors). So she’s pretty clearly on a one-woman war on the English language as it is.
In fact, it’s almost… terrorism.
