And that’s not all Coates could remember from his first forty years of life. His memoir also included the celebrated story of how Coates let his little boy dawdle upon an escalator and then a white woman about to crash into the lad said, “Come on,” which is racist.
These two thrilling yarns have rocketed Coates to near the top of the college speaker circuit, where he makes up to $1,000 per minute on the nights when he can’t think of enough to say about White Supremacy to fulfill his contractual minimum speech length of 75 minutes.
Sailer helpfully links to the much smarter black guys who think Coates is a hack.
Indeed, Coates’ career is reminiscent of that of another well-paid autodidact: Glenn Beck.
Because Beck can’t remember anything for long, he’s always wildly excited by whatever book he has just read. It’s all news to him!
Coates says repeatedly that much of his own life is “a fog,” that he’s more grounded by stuff that happened before he was born.
You’ll notice that Beck, while surer of his own story, probably can’t account for all of it, due to alcoholic blackouts. And he’s also a history buff. Stuff in books is more real to him than his own life.
I’m like that too. I couldn’t name more than one of my teachers right now. I don’t remember graduating from high school. The only thing I vividly recall about a trip to Paris when I was a teenager was watching Psycho on the hotel room TV.
This is probably because I was clinically depressed and had a number of other (thankfully) untreated mental problems.
Is that what’s up with Coates as well?
