To those who couldn't get tickets to the much-anticipated Coulter/Maher debates Tuesday night: Rejoice! You just saved yourself from developing a shiny new ulcer.
The "smackdown" last night at the Wang between the very red Ann Coulter and the very blue Bill Maher wasn't so much high-stakes as high-stress. Microphones failed, audience members flipped out, hecklers raised hell, and a hapless moderator fumbled most of his questions. At the center of this imperfect storm were Coulter and Maher themselves, each spewing the exact rhetoric you'd expect them to spew.
The hectic evening marked the beginning of MSG Entertainment's 2009 Speaker Series--an event roster that will later bring the likes of Al Gore and Karl Rove to the benighted Bean. Subtitled "The Minds That Move the World," the series ostensibly exists to bring live discourse back to the forefront; the Citi Center rep who opened the night made grand declarations about free speech and democracy, even going so far as to compare the show to a town hall meeting.
Last I checked, you didn't have to shell out up to $200 (or for that matter, any money) to attend a town hall meeting. Perhaps a better subtitle for the series would've been "Free Speech: Freedom Isn't Free." 10 bonus points for, uhmm... patriotism? (And don't even get me started on the irony of Maher lampooning the bank bailout from a podium with the Citibank logo plastered across the front.)
As for intelligent discourse and spirited debate--you came to the wrong place, kids. What went down was packaged entertainment, pure and simple. Coulter and Maher both settled into their respective grooves so long ago, it's hard to believe they even care about what they're saying anymore. Their tactics were predictable. Bill Maher smirked, posed and made easy jokes, and Coulter spouted atrocities so fast that no one had the time to call them preposterous.
Coulter may be mixing up the Kool-Aid, but she ain't drinking it. Brittle and narrow-minded as the woman is, she's not an idiot. When she claims that scientists secretly hate evolutionary theory, or says that stem cell research exists "because liberals like Nazi experimentation on humans," you know that she doesn't really believe it.
As for Maher, he seems to at least care about backing his arguments with facts--even if he throws the lowest blows he can conjure. The amount of time spent talking about things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the relative merits of Dan Quayle demonstrates just how tired this form of "debate" is.
Of course, it would have helped a bit if the ludicrously incompetent moderator, William Oksner, had asked better questions--or at least spent less time hawking his subjects' books and DVDs. When Oksner asked Maher whether he would condone teaching creationism in schools, Maher held in laughter as Coulter snarked, "Have you met Bill Maher?"
The real indignation was brewing in the audience, where the increasingly restive crowd members took numerous opportunities to scream at the folks onstage. Sometimes it was to loudly disagree with their politics, and sometimes it was to gripe about sound issues. Either way, this audience was clearly comprised of people accustomed to shouting at their TVs, without expecting a response from the talking heads onscreen. By the time a fight broke out orchestra right, it was clear that whatever this night was supposed to be had completely swerved off the rails.
When the millionth heckler began shouting from the back of the orchestra, Maher had just about had it. "Shut the fuck up, you fucking asshole," he growled into the mic, and his real frustration was palpable. Amidst all the play-petulance and mock-indignation about actual issues (the economy, religion, science), this was perhaps the only flash of true feeling we got. Not that anyone was surprised; mix politics and pulp entertainment in the same stew, and all you'll get is slurry.
Bill Maher photo from Flickr user OtterFreak and Ann Coulter photo from Wikimedia Commons by Kyle Cassidy.
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