During the most recent Republican presidential debate, Ann Coulter sent an obscene tweet about Jews. P. J. O’Rourke takes her comment personally:
[F]irst, my contempt is moral. Anti-Semitism is evil. . . . For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that you are not . . . an anti-Semite. . . . Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.” . . .
[But also], Ann, it really is personal. . . . When I was growing up, Toledo was a factory town, a magnet for the immigrants you deplore (both foreign and from Kentucky). . . . The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.
I was raised in a house without smart. My mother may once have had a life of the mind. . . . But being widowed, raising kids, marrying a drunk second husband, and having cancer distracted her.
One night at the dinner table, when I was about thirteen, my stepfather called me a skinny little smart-ass show-off for asking what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was about. Of course I was showing off. What it’s about is self-evident. I was smugly savoring the fact that I was the only person in the family who knew the title and author (if nothing else) of such a tome.
But I bet the conversation wouldn’t have gone that way at my friend Barry Cantor’s house. There would have been a discussion. Perhaps with a tactful elision of how it was all the Christians’ fault. Or at least somebody would have looked up Gibbon in the World Book Encyclopedia. The Cantors owned the complete set.
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