Monday, January 17, 2011

Pastor Jones Thinks This Rant Is About Him

[from 9/15/10]

Last week I went on honeymoon with Anitra “Kisser Ichiban” Freeman. I say this like I had a choice, like I could have gone with Lady Gaga, or maybe Larry King. Anyway, I enjoyed it, which meant I couldn’t enjoy it.

I need rant material! How can I be happy if I’m too happy to rant?

After we got back, things picked up a bit. The Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn a bunch of Qurans (spelling optional). I could envision an entire column consisting of paragraphs beginning, “How stupid is Pastor Terry Jones? He is so stupid that... “

A taste: Pastor Jones is so stupid he hates a book he’s never read. Pastor Jones is so stupid he closes his eyes when he drives through a Muslim neighborhood. Pastor Jones is so stupid, every morning he burns his pancakes, because he prefers toast.

By the way, the word pastor comes from the Latin expression for “he leads us to pasture.” Some pasture it is, that’s warmed by bonfires of burning books. “Hey! We need more pitchforks over here!” “Is that sulfur I smell? How pastoral!” We were going to let him burn books on the grounds that we have freedom of speech in this country. Free to write books, free to read books, free to give books away, and with all that freedom Pastor Jones is so stupid he would rather burn books.

Meanwhile, a 23 year-old in Texas sparked debate on this very issue of free speech by skateboarding up alongside another would-be Quran-burner and snatching his Quran from him. Did he violate the Quran burner’s right of free speech, by depriving him of his fuel?

I’m reminded of the law in Seattle that prohibits taking, say, cut flowers from a dumpster behind a florist, because, the legislative reasoning went, they aren’t yours. As I recall, when the law was applied to an actual dumpster-flower thief, the judge fined the miserable thief one dollar, and then ordered the florist to pay all the court costs, because the judge said it was frivolous to go to court over a “theft” of something rejected and tossed away.

There are those who say that when they throw anything in the trash, it’s still theirs. A former acquaintance, when he had to get rid of a TV, smashed it before tossing it in the alley. “This way,” he said, “at least if they steal my TV, they won’t get any use out of it.”

The trouble with applying this extended ownership theory is that if you can extend your ownership forward past the point at which you have thrown a thing away, that opens up prior claims on the same property. In this case the former acquaintance had actually retrieved that very TV from someone else’s trash, so by his own theory, his TV was not actually his, and therefore it was not within his rights to smash it.

The way I see it, if there’s such a thing at all of violating someone’s freedom of speech, there has to be such a thing as violating someone’s freedom of speech in a frivolous and inconsequential manner. And specifically, that thing would be, snatching a Quran away from someone who was only going to burn it.  

Exercises to Facilitate Auto-Entertainment

1. Pastor Jones doesn’t read Arabic. Outline the pilot episode of the sitcom based on that fact. Hint: Jones buys what he thinks are 500 Qurans for a BBQ, but his happy-go-lucky Arab neighbor “Ahmed” can see they are actually Arabic New Testaments. As Ahmed debates whether to tell him, comedy unfolds.

2. Since 1999, we haven’t had freedom of speech. We’ve had free speech zones. Where should we put the free Quran-burning zones?

3. Take two pieces of paper. On one, list all the rights we’ve been denied because “we’re at war” and “it’s a post 9-11 world”. Feel sad, don’t you? OK, now on the other one, write “meh can burnz Qu-ranz, LOL!” Feel better?




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