Pastor Terry Jones. So we have this pastor in Gainesville, Florida who wanted to stage a public burning of Korans. This is the Rev. Terry Jones, who had declared this Saturday, September 11, as "Burn a Koran Day."
My first gut reaction was pro-Pastor. I nurse a strong romantic affection for the old, weird America, the America of grifters and medicine wagons, freak shows and traveling circuses, blind fiddlers and Mr. Bojangles, strange cults and charismatic preachers, sinister goings-on in rustic hollows and dark secrets under the magnolia blossoms. Pastor Jones is right out of that milieu.
In fact when I saw his picture it brought up the mental image I've been carrying around in my head for fifty years of the King in Huckleberry Finn. Remember that? Huck falls in with these two grifters, a young one and an old one. They tell Huck they are exiled European royalty. Then they cook up a scheme to put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet at some riverside town. The young grifter wants the old one, the King, to play Juliet. The King protests, quote: "If Juliet's such a young gal, Duke, my peeled head and my white whiskers is goin' to look oncommon odd on her, maybe." The Duke replies: "Don't you worry; these country jakes won't ever think of that." Which, I have often reflected, could be the motto of the Obama administration.
Anyway, here's this Pastor Jones, a real back-country American original. Any time I get to thinking that the old weird America has been killed off for good by the lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats and developers, paved over so we can have more strip malls and big-box stores ["Welcome to Costco …"] and liberal arts colleges and wind farms, every time I get depressed thinking that, the news turns up some character like Terry Jones to tell me it ain't so. My first gut reaction was therefore to raise a cheer for Pastor Jones.
Then my childhood training kicked in. One of the ground rules for good manners when I was a kid, along with keeping your elbows off the table and not picking your nose in public, was not to insult another person's religion. So then I felt a bit guilty for having cheered on Pastor Jones, who is, in that respect, being ill-mannered.
But then, reflecting further, I remembered how difficult it is ever to get that particular injunction right. Keeping elbows off tables is pretty straightforward; but how do you know when you're insulting someone's religion? It's not easy. You need to have some clue how touchy the religious guy is. When I tell creationists they've got their biology all wrong, and evolution is about as firmly established as the orbits of the planets, they accuse me of insulting their religion. Seems to me I'm just correcting them on a point of fact, but that's not how it seems to them. People can be more or less touchy about what constitutes their religion.
Muslims, let's face it, are way touchy. I know a lot of Christians, but I'm pretty sure not one of them would be out in the streets of New York protesting if Reuters reported that some mosque in Baluchistan was having a burn-the-Bible day.
The difference undoubtedly arises from the huge inferiority complex nursed by Muslims, none of their civilizations having accomplished anything worthwhile since the ninth century while the Christian world was busy inventing critical philosophy, science, technology, higher mathematics, vaccines, symphonic music, fifteen different styles of architecture and two hundred different styles of dress, the novel, drama, the industrial revolution, representative democracy, constitutional law, team sports that don't involve mutilated goat carcasses, distilled liquor, monogamy, rock'n'roll, gay rights, and a couple of hundred thousand other things of various degrees of amenity.
Not insulting the other guy's religion is hard to stick to when the other guy gets to say what's an insult. For Muslims, pretty much anything short of full submission and conversion seems to be an insult.
So at this point I'm wavering in the middle of the issue: Should I support the Pastor out of old, weird America, just for the personal satisfaction of poking the new, bland America in the eye; or should I strive to live up to the precepts my parents worked so hard to instil in me?
Then the government people started chiming in against Pastor Jones. General Petraeus said the Koran burning would get the ghazis all fired up, fouling our mission in Afghanistan. To which my reaction was: If that's all it takes to foul up our mission, our mission is even more futile than I'd been supposing. Then on Wednesday we got Eric Holder, who took a break from feeding our Constitution into that shredder he got on loan from the New Black Panther Party to call Pastor Jones' little stunt, quote, "idiotic and dangerous."
Wednesday, Hillary Clinton also stepped up to say, quote: "It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Fla. with a church of no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention." End quote. Just savor the condescension there. Would it have been less distressful and disgraceful, Madame Secretary, if the pastor's church had been in Georgetown, Beverly Hills, or the Upper West Side? Would it have been less distressful and disgraceful if his church had a hundred congregants, or a thousand? Who asked the world to pay attention to Pastor Jones, anyway? Would we pay attention to the aforementioned nutcase in Baluchistan? The Muslim world's paying attention because they greedily seize on any opportunity to take offense, as people with collective inferiority complexes always do. Confident, secure, psychologically well-balanced people don't take violent offense at the drop of a hat.
Then on Thursday the Apologizer-in-Chief spoke up. Said Obama of the pastor, quote: "I hope he understands that what he's proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans, that this country has been built on the notion of freedom and religious tolerance," end quote. So let's see: Here's Pastor Jones with his congregation of fifty, whose religion tells him that Islam is the work of Satan, and that burning its holy book is a righteous act. Total fatalities: 0. And here's the Muslim world with a congregation in the billions, whose religion tells a sizeable subset of them that flying passenger planes into skyscrapers is a righteous act. Total fatalities: 2,996. And Pastor Jones is the intolerant one here?
Well, once I knew that Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama were against the Koran burning, I knew I was for it. Burn that book, Pastor! I'll cut Petraeus some slack, as he's looking out for his guys, which is what I'd want a commander to do; though I'd think better of him if he'd tell his political superiors that if they want a general to direct a mission wasting lives and money to no useful purpose, they should find themselves someone else.
Anyway, bottom line here, By Thursday morning I was ready to stand with Pastor Jones — not to the point of writing him a check, but at least placing the tremendous moral authority of Radio Derb behind his proposed ceremony.
03 — Burning the Koran. Then things took an interesting turn. Pastor Jones turns out to play a mean hand of poker. He set up a meeting with some local Imam, and after the meeting he told the press the Imam would make sure the Ground Zero mosque got moved; and in reciprocation he, Pastor Jones, would call off the Koranicide. "Whoa, hold on there," said the Imam when he saw the news reports. "I said I'd talk to the New York people and try to get it moved." Pastor Jones turned up his ace. Speaking of the Imam, he told reporters: "We are just really shocked, He clearly lied to us." See, you just can't trust those Muslims! Boy, I'd be really careful about riding a raft down the Mississippi with this guy. Unless I was writing a novel, that is.
As Radio Derb goes to tape, it's not clear whether the Koran burning will go ahead. The whole episode has been educational, though. First off, we've seen all the panjandrums of our government telling a private citizen what he may and may not do with his own private property. Now the legal issue there isn't quite trivial. The old principle in Roman law is sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas — "use what is yours in a way that won't injure others." If Muslims in Waziristan, driven crazy by Pastor Jones's Koran burning, massacre local Christians. does Pastor Jones bear some of the responsibility? I'd say no. If you're talking loudly into your cell phone in a railway carriage and I'm driven so crazy by it I shoot dead anyone I can see with a cell phone, is that your fault? Not in law it isn't. If Muslims go nuts and do atrocious things, they should be punished by the authorities in their jurisdiction. If they go nuts and do atrocious things to us or our national interests, they should be punished by the United States Armed Forces.
And presumably Pastor Jones bought the Korans with his own money. That makes the whole business way more private than the Ground Zero mosque, which will be built with Saudi government money, though the lying hucksters fronting for the mosque of course won't admit it. Who else has 100 million dollars to throw around nowadays? Comparisons between the two situations are therefore highly dubious.
Now the Koran burning idea has caught on. People are announcing Koran burnings all over. Here's a guy named Duncan Philp in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who says he's going to burn a Koran on the steps of the state capitol. If the Capitol police won't let him, he says he'll just rip it up and stuff it in a garbage bin. Good luck to him. That's the spirit of America! — proud, unruly, contemptuous of authority, and always up for a fight. This country's not dead yet.
We're a tolerant people, but only on fair terms. Islam's entitled to respect, but no more respect than any other religion, and less when they try to use the actions of some lone crank with fifty followers as an excuse for murdering people. If Muslims want to live in the world with the rest of us, let them acknowledge that their faith is one among many, entitled to no less, but no more, respect than any other. If they can't acknowledge that, let's fence 'em off and keep 'em out.
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