I spent a good portion of the day in the air, working my way back to you, babe. No, no, that’s not right. Working my way to the ACCS convention in Covington, KY. And, as is my wont on airplanes, I got a goodish bit of reading in. The book I finished today was Ann Coulter’s Godless, about which I may have more to say at some future date. I was interested to see the broader context for the now infamous 9-11 Jersey Girls comment, which, as it turns out, ought not to have had people breathing into paper bags as much as they were. If I get a chance, I would like to post something later about Coulter’s rhetoric, and what it is about her writing that seems to whip mild-mannered people into a froth. In writing about this, I would, of course, comport myself with modesty and decorum, and not contribute to the anguish of these mild-mannered people myself. Or at least, not any more than is necessary. What is it that makes some people believe that salt and vinegar potato chips are a sin? You don’t have to eat the whole bag, and it is all right to get something out of the fridge to drink if you like.
Anyhow, that is a subject to develop at some future date. For now, I will just leave the mild-mannered milque-toasts to lecture Coulter, the multiple NYT bestseller writer, on how she needs to adopt their “effective secrets for effective communication” if she really wants to “get her point across.”
The point of this post is that I wanted to register my very pleasant surprise over the fact that the last four chapters of this book were a full-throated assault on Darwinism, and a very able presentation of the central ideas of Intelligent Design. Why is this significant? Given the sales of this book, and the wide readership that Coulter has, this is a truly significant anti-Darwin publishing coup. The Darwiniacs have an effective lock-out established for all “approved” communications (which they defend ferociously), and the creationist literature, while robust and voluminous, is largely limited to a creationist subculture. Coulter has seen to it that many of the basic (unanswerable) arguments for Intelligent Design will be read by a lot of people who would not otherwise see them. Look for waves on this one. The fracas over the Jersey Girls was just a distraction.
One favorite line was this: Taking on microevolution, Coulter said that calling variation within species “microevolution” was like the Flat Earth Society pointing to the Sahara as a model of a “micro-flat earth.”