Humor by John Christmann
Burn This!
I felt very reassured to start this week off knowing that hundreds of thousands of Afghanis were not marching in the streets of Kabul vehemently chanting Death to America because some wacko in Florida wanted to burn a copy of the Qur’an in protest on September 11th.
Instead, only thousands of Afghanis chanted Death to America in the streets of Kabul over the weekend. Thank Allah cooler heads prevailed!
In my personal code of ethics I don’t believe any sacred spiritual manuscript should be burned. This includes blasphemous works that are clearly the work of the devil, such as Dr. Seuss’s If I Torched the Library.
But throughout history man in his infinite, self-righteous wisdom has found it necessary to desecrate the sacred text of others. The Judaic Tanakh, Christian biblical canons, the Islamic Hadith, Hindu Vedas, Buddhist Sutras, and the entire box set of Harry Potter have all gone up in flames at some point or another.
Let me go one step further. I don’t think expressive media of any kind should be burned. Even if that media is only available on eight-track.
You see, I grew up with the Fahrenheit 451 generation believing that bibliocide was a direct attack on historical reference and freedom of expression by close-minded, oppressive regimes like the Nazis or the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Obviously, I have never burned a book in my life. Although once I started a campfire using a three-page chapter ripped from a Boy Scout manual entitled How to Start a Fire Using Two Sticks. At the time I only had one stick, and it was a match.
Of course, nowadays if I wanted to burn anything I would have to download it first then ignite my computer. Nowadays Ray Bradbury would have to rename his classic Fahrenheit 1351, because this is the temperature at which data centers ignite.
Then again, perhaps someone will develop a free, silicon-fueled conflagration application just for digital protesters. And I sincerely hope for the sake of scouts everywhere that the Boy Scout Manual is only downloadable on a flame retardant version of the Amazon Kindle.
But I certainly understand the significance of burning things in protest. And let’s face it; our democratic society is rich in incendiary protests.
For example, in 1968 radical women protesting the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City threatened to burn a trashcan full of uncomfortable brassiers. Although the undergarments were never actually ignited because they posed a fire hazard, out of the imaginary ashes the Woman’s Liberation Movement was born and burning bras became the rallying cry of feminists everywhere.
And what about the Beatles? Their records were set ablaze after John Lennon declared the Fab Four were more popular than Jesus! Of course Mr. Lennon’s words were taken entirely out of context. He actually claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and Harry Potter combined.
Even now there is the yearly Burning Man Festival held every year in the Black Rock Desert in which young people gather to celebrate communal radicalism by roasting a large-scale representation of a man reading a Kindle.
I am told the Burning Man Festival also involves recreational drugs.
And finally, in 1979, after two long years suffering through Saturday Night Fever and Disco Inferno, Chicago disc jocky Steve Dahl organized a Disco Demolition event in Comiskey Park during a twi-night double header between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Fifty thousand unruly fans burned marijuana in protest as a massive collection of disco recordings were ceremoniously blown up in center field.
For someone like me who abhors wanton conflagration of media by close-minded idealists, you can imagine how much fun this was. And in this particular case the protest had its desired effect. Soon thereafter Disco as a musical art form met its demise and gave way to the more sedate, open-minded punk movement of the 1980s.
Oh, and somewhere in this time period my mom symbolically cremated my collection of Mad Magazines by discarding them at the dump. I think she was ceremoniously protesting their voluminous space in her garage, but decided she didn’t want to accidentally set the car on fire.
So in the end, I am not sure whether I am for or against the right to incendiary protest. It would certainly be a whole lot safer if we could just douse the agents of our perceived oppressors with squirt guns.
But I think I would rather understand what people are trying to say before I start hurling cream pies at them. And we should never, under any circumstance, burn books.
But here is something I do know. Autumn is approaching, and I want to reclaim my right to revel in the pungent, memory-filled aroma of burning leaves.
Even if they must be ignited with text from Boy Scout Manuals.
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