I give up. I thought for sure American politics had hits its local maxima for ridiculousness at several points this past year, but now we’re having a national debate over book burning. I know. The President has dispatched some shuttle diplomacy down to the Confederacy in order to negotiate a pre-emptive cease-burning with an itinerant preacher and his congregation of 50. Read that last sentence again.
Honestly, my feelings on book burning are similar to Carl Shurz’s thinking about slavery: this is a practice so obviously and utterly beneath a liberal democracy that trying to oppose it through logic or reason serves only to legitimate the ridiculous and make you a fool. Anyone participating in the practice is, almost by definition, not going to listen. So either gather the votes, or get the guns. If you don’t have the former and you can’t stomach the latter, then leave them to their pathetic selves until you do. But whatever the case, don’t engage these idiots.
Still — and not to go all Who IS IOZ? on you, but — there’s something surreal about President Obama lecturing everyone on how burning a Koran in Florida is going to ignite hostility in the Muslim world towards American and American troops while he himself is presiding over the dropping of explosives onto the heads of Muslims every day. If you don’t want Muslims to think America is at war with Islam, stop bombing, invading, and occupying their countries. I’m talking to you, Mr. President.
And yet, I have a few practical thoughts about book burning:
(1) My sense is that, once upon a time, book burning was functional. That is, to say, it was a method of suppressing knowledge. Think Nazi bonfires, or Fahrenheit 451, or even the massive burning of Beatles LPs in the Baptist South after John’s “bigger than Jesus” comments. But there’s no sense in trying to suppress knowledge now via book burning; it’s just not the key medium any longer. And therefore, all book burnings are inherently symbolic, regardless of how many copies you can destroy. Which makes me wonder if they are less of a concern than they used to be, or just ten times more stupid. Probably both.
(2) How anti-climatic must an actual modern book-burning be? I say “very.” Think about it: as mentioned above, we’re going for symbolism, so we’re not going to have a mountain of books. More like one. That also means no huge torches soaked in gas. Without a bonfire, it probably won’t happen at night. Double that because you’ll want good press for it. So it probably amount to this one lunatic standing on stage with a Bic lighter that keeps going out in the wind, trying to get a couple of pages started, but continually failing. Basically the opposite of everything you’ve ever seen in Indiana Jones.
(3) Where is the ACLU and the rest of that crew in all of this? I thought for sure when I first heard about this that is was going to be the modern equivalent of the Nazi march in Skokie, IL in the 70’s, but that doesn’t seem to have panned out.
