Burn, Baby, Burn

I was just catching up on the news and a video came up about Terry Jones. For those who don't know, he's the pastor of a holy roller church here in Florida. Terry got about fourteen of his fifteen minutes in the spotlight last year with his plan to burn a bunch of Korans as part of a celebration commemorating September 11th. Apparently,Terry called off his little shindig last year because of a pretty major amount of media coverage and the resulting public backlash. However, once the furor had calmed and the media moved on, Terry resolved to do his thing, and on March 20th of this year, he gathered up some copies of the Koran and a few of his closest friends and they had their bonfire. According to NBC, this is newsworthy because there have been riots in Afghanistan as a result of all this, and even General Petraeus, commander of one-half of America's military clusterfuck in the Middle East, has spoken out against Terry Jones, basically condemning his actions as detrimental to America's continuing efforts in Afghanistan.

What's amazing to me about all this is that Terry Jones is essentially a nobody. Just a regular Islam-hating workaday asshole. He presides over a small church (Dove World Outreach Center) in Gainesville, Florida. A church that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY outside of Alachua County had even heard of. At least, he was just a regular asshole until NBC et al. took his story and ran with it. Boy, they ate right out of his hand and they still do. In a pre-internet age, this guy wouldn't have made page three of the local news section of the paper in his neighborhood, but thanks to the intense media saturation that's at least partially engendered by the advent of e-news (yes, I am aware of the irony of using a blog to rant about the declining quality of media content. Blow me.) people like General Petraeus are aware of his existence and his stupid fundamentalist weenie roast really can have an impact on world affairs.

Fact is, if this dildo really wants to burn some books, well, he can. As odious as his particular brand of hate speech happens to be, he has the freedom to do as he wishes. In fact, I sincerely hope that Terry and his congregation paid for the books. If they paid for them, they're tacitly supporting the very thing that they seek to symbolically destroy. What dicks.