Books Don't Burn

Books don't burn.  This is a curious position to take, since books are very often extremely flammable as you can easily demonstrate with even the both basic of lighters.  Yes, the pages that a book is written on can be torn and torched, the ink can be washed away, and the entire object can be destroyed in countless ways.  However, the book itself is eternal.  Setting them ablaze will not make them go away.  This is why book-burners are always the most preposterous of the many lunatic fringes this world has to offer us.  Ideas live on, even if in just a minute cultural consciousness, and you, the burners, will be left more the fool for thinking you can trample thoughts you disagree with*.  In end, that's a battle you're going to lose, if not tomorrow then centuries from now.  If just one person remembers the words of your book, if just one of them writes it down, in even a fragmentary form, you've lost your battle forever.  The book burners always lose, and its only thanks to this that the modern world can exist at all.

When you torch a book, even if in the name of modernity or "moving the world forward", you castrate the very philosophy you're trying to protect.  No matter how pure your intentions may be, you will forever be known as ignorant, intolerant, and ultimately incredibly stupid - which is all true.  No matter how many people - or how few - people stand behind you, what government is giving you support, what religious figure has given you God's blessing, your cause is hopeless.  Because, again, books don't burn.

Pastor Terry Jones* is only the latest in a very long tradition of book burning that easily must go back as far as books have been written.  His scheme today was to burn several copies of the Qu'rans, essentially just to piss every Muslim in the world off.  He didn't go through with it, because the entire thing was a publicity stunt, perhaps saving him from the title of fool, but in turn opening him to the new title of fraud.  The sad thing is that Terry Jones is not alone in his lunacy, book-burning has an extremely long historical tradition amongst Christians:  simply look at the number of lost Greco-Roman and other pagan texts thanks to the religious fervor of the first Christian who call consider themselves "authorities".  He wasn't the first, he won't be the last.

On the other hand, our old friends from the Westboro Baptist Church, perhaps better called "the most hated people in America", actually will burn Qu'rans today and they have done so before.  Of course, not a single real Qu'ran has ever been burned, nor has a Bible, a book of Mormon, or even "Catcher in the Rye".  They simply do not burn, you can't do anything about it.  No matter how much it offends you, no matter how much you feel threatened by it, no matter how much you want to protect your children from it, a book cannot burn.

We all know that this rampant opposition to very idea of Islam (a disturbing phenomena which I fear will become a bi-yearly event coming and going with elections) is wrong and stupid.  But I suppose some people find solace in being wrong and stupid.  Its easy.  Its simple.  Thinking out a situation can be a difficult thing, moral ambiguity is a depressing place to stand.  But today's post isn't even about that.  Terry Jones could have threatened to burn Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" and I still would be here pointing out to him that "Green Eggs and Ham" is inflammable.  Muslim extremists burn books all the time, the works of Abu Nuwas, and Salman Rushdie are just two modern examples.

But those books didn't burn either.  Even if today every government on Earth were to join together and shout out:  in the memory of 9/11 we will burn every single Qu'ran in the universe - they would fail to burn a single one.  Its important we remember that.

Now is there a better way we can honor the memory of the 9/11 tragedy?  Or are we just going to let this idiot devour our thoughts today when we should be mourning those lost on that day nine years ago?  Light a candle, say a prayer, donate a few dollars, just do something other than worry about Terry Jones.  Let's move on.

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* When I heard the name "Terry Jones", I immediately though of this Terry Jones and hoped that the entire thing was some kind of elaborate real-world Monty Python sketch.  On 9/11 Jones would take off his ridiculous mustache disguise and we all would have a good laugh at being pranked.  Guess not.