So some “Closing of the Evangelical Mind” “preacher from Footloose” wants to burn the Koran or something.
American Protestant clergy are notoriously tone deaf about these things, usually not quite getting it. They burned Beatles albums too, remember? (Who can forget? The footage has been recycled in hundreds of lefty documentaries for forty years.)
Then when they try to be “cool,” it comes out as The Cross and the Switchblade and Hell Houses and cringe-inducing Christian “rock” “music” of the “Jesus is my boyfriend” variety.
Look: I tend to support deliberate provocation on principle. It’s fun.
But there has to be a teeny tiny, even accidental particle of sophistication about deliberate provocation, even if the provocateurs are acting purely on instinct and can’t come up with their version of a Situationist manifesto until twenty years later.
The Mohammed cartoons were an act of creation in the name of liberty.
But burning a book — any book — is a fascist and destructive.
Admittedly, this distinction may be too subtle and artsy for Reverend Stereotype to figure out, since he probably thought “WWJD?” was as “deep” as stuff gets.
The only destruction was carried out by Muslims in reaction to the cartoons.
Let Muslims retain their reputation as the ones doing the burning.
That’s the trouble with so many “conservative” critiques of the Ground Zero mosque; you’re saying the same thing as the anti-Mo-toon people said. We can’t pretend to suddenly care about “sensitivity” or forget about the Constitution.
The critiques of the Ground Zero mosque are being too subtle for their, and our, own good.
Building the mosque is wrong because they’re the bad guys and we can’t let the bad guys **** with us.
That used to be a good enough reason for pretty much anything, until men stopped being men and started becoming lawyers instead.
Muslims are giving us the finger and we need to respond by biting it off, not by playing “what if they put up a Ferris wheel at Dealy Plaza?”
Who?
****ing?
Cares?
We all know what they’re doing.
They just need to prevented from doing it. At some point, “conservatives” will need to abandon “intellectual” methods of prevention — which are just mental masturbation — and switch to physical ones. And I don’t think they have the balls to make that move.
I don’t see how burning a Koran keeps the Ground Zero mosque from being built.
But while wrongheaded and even fascist, burning a Koran is infinitesimally less fascist that building a mosque at Ground Zero, or creating a Ground Zero in the first place.
This Koran burning doesn’t “prove that all religions have their crazies.”
It proves that even our crazies are one-million times less crazy than yours.
If burning a book nine years after two giant buildings and 3000 people burned is THE most violent domestic reaction an everyday American can muster…
I know I should be reassured and even proud of that fact, but honestly? Not so much.
