I usually don’t do straight book reviews on this blog, but this week’s publication of Ann Coulter’s new book—Cannibals: How Liberals Kill People and Eat Them—is so relevant to some of the issues that I have been talking about that I have decided to make an exception. Cannibals is a book that people will be talking about for years, and I, for one, am happy to begin the conversation right here on Boys Named Tzu.Let’s face it: Coulter had some big shoes to fill in coming up with a sequel to her previous bestsellers Slander (2002), Treason (2003), Godless (2006), Guilty (2009), and Demonic (2011). Just coming up with a title alone must have been agonizing. Having already used most of the good words in the English language, she had to come up with yet another zinger while, at the same time, coming up with new ways that liberals are wrong about everything and are ruining the world. Given the laudable exhaustiveness of her previous critiques, this could not have been an easy job.
I am happy to report that Ms Coulter has succeeded. Not only is Cannibals a really neat word, it is a word that has been seriously underutilized in 21st century political discourse. It is now so common for politicians and radio host to accuse their political opponents of “slander,” “treason,” or “godlessness” that there seems little point of an agent provocateur like Coulter even bothering with such words. Even her penultimate venture—Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Ruining America—seems somewhat cliché in an age when more than 50% of the Republican electorate believes that it is either “likely” or “somewhat likely” that the President of the United States is the anti-Christ. But, until Ann Coulter, nobody had ever even thought to examine the cannibal connection.
Coulter remedies this situation immediately in her introductory chapter, "The Roots of Obama’s Taste for Human Flesh," which is part social anthropology, part evolutionary psychology, and all Coulter. Obama’s true birthplace, she argues, is not only the modern post-colonial nation of Kenya, but the ancestral home of the Korowai, one of the oldest and fiercest cannibal tribes in the world. “We are hard wired to enjoy the taste of what our ancestors liked to eat,” Coulter argues, “that’s how evolution works. It’s a way to make sure that children will eat what their parents are able to provide. For me, that means dark chocolate and very expensive cheeses. For Barack Hussein Obama neė Sotero, it means the flesh and the internal organs of human beings” (12).
In Cannibals, as in her previous books, Coulter is best when she makes historical arguments. In Demonic, she demonstrates that that the constellation of character traits we now call “liberal” have always been tied to irrational mob behavior. In Cannibals, she takes a profound, but actually quite logical step forward to show that these same characteristics have always been tied to the desire to eat other human beings. What is cannibalism, really, but just a very successful food stamp program that eliminates the middleman?
Throughout Cannibals, Coulter connects cannibalistic behavior to real evidence of liberalism in the past. She does this very effectively in her second chapter, titled “Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch with a Side Order of Bob.” In this chapter she looks at the primitive tribes of Amazonia and successfully demonstrates that they were 1) among the world’s most committed cannibals until well after the European redemption of the New World; and 2) that they did not own property and considered all tribal lands to be the common birthright of everybody—making them (according to Marx himself) “primitive communists.” Her argument is equally strong in “Babylon Babylon: Gay Marriage and Human Vivisection in the First Evil Empire.” The evidence in this chapter, however, really deals more with human sacrifice than with cannibalism--though the Babylonian priests admittedly did eat the livers of their victims in a post-sacrificial religious ritual that Coulter accurately describes as “kind of like a community-organizing session.”
Readers will find nothing about Cannibals to be politically correct. Indeed, I predict that her chapter “The Blood Libel Libel: Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Stop Kvetching” will be roundly condemned by all of the usual suspects in the New York Times-NPR-Huffington Post Axis of Evil. But people don’t read Ann Coulter for political correctness. They read her so they can learn about all the ways that liberals have been ruining the world since the beginning of time.
For such people, I believe, Cannibals might be the most correct book ever written.
