Burn the Koran Anyway

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do this. I really don’t want to, you know. I don’t want to comment on the whole Terry Jones, International Burn a Koran Day controversy that (thankfully) took all the media focus off the Teabagger’s little plans for a politically sectarian rally on Patriot Day.

But that’s a rant for another edition, maybe. I’m not even sure this article will get through.

Getting back on topic, Terry Jones and his little cult of Christers managed to steal the spotlight away from Sarah Palin just long enough to embarrass the entirety of Christianity and claim two innocent lives in some god-awful pile of tribal hatred that pretends it’s a country. And I’m laughing.

Seriously, I’m laughing at all of this because it’s all so silly to me, minus the killings. The death just makes me angry, but only because of the Afghani inability to get the joke.

I mean, seriously, the man was going to burn a bunch of cheaply made, mass-produced paperback books filled with moonspeak – but they were only books. Books that he purchased with his own money. Which is important, as these supposedly holy texts, words of God The 3rd, were his property. His property. Terry Jones’ property that he paid for, owned and could do with almost anything he wanted to. Granted, he wanted to destroy these books in the oldest Christian tradition, but it was his right to do so on his privately owned land.

And that’s why America is so awesome. Well, one of the reasons. Property and the rights to do with your property whatever you want trumps up what some hopped-up little sun worshipper (for example, praise Ra) half a world away thinks about it just because the object is stamped with a meaningless symbol praising the virtues of some ancient ghost story. It’s one thing for this great country of ours to dictate what can and can’t be property, we’ve fought wars of conscience for just such a concept. Brother has killed brother because the government threatened to deny its upper class some dark bauble. But, and this is important, it’s entirely another matter for this country to tell us what we can and can’t do with what is recognized as being our property, and a much more troubling matter arises when some other cesspit across the ocean suddenly thinks it can tell us what we can do with our things.

But that didn’t happen. Or rather, the right thing didn’t happen. Terry Jones the American citizen wasn’t allowed to be a narrow-minded little sociopath and burn a pile of poorly made books. Someone other than Terry Jones’ own conscience pressured Terry Jones to stop his plans.

For what reason, though? For safety? There isn’t a force on this planet that can seriously destroy the United State of America. For sanity? Well over eighty percent of the global population believes in fairy stories just because they’re old. For The Sake of Our Troops(TM)? They were and still are already in present mortal danger. To prevent handing our enemies a propaganda boon? We already know they’re a bunch of lying dirt-bags, they’ll just make something up and the illiterate masses will probably believe them anyway.

In Truth(TM), it was a pointless infringement on Terry Jones’ constitutional rights; namely his right to be a flaming nitwit. Granted, this infringement is being seen far and wide as keeping the world spinning, but the fact of the matter is that the planet would have kept on spinning anyway.

Though, I must admit, if it had happened we probably will have something more interesting to talk about than Justin Bieber. Who the hell is that guy, anyway?