You have perhaps heard this story, about the nut-jobs in Florida (so many of them are in Florida) who are going to have a “Koran burning” on 9/11. See, for example, “Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions” from the New York Times from a couple weeks back. At least three things occur to me, each of which has something to do with my line of work (well, sort of at least):
- If it were not for Web 2.0/social media and the 24/7 news cycle, no one would have ever heard of these crazy people. In other words, this is a highly “immediate” rhetorical situation, as I discussed in the Diss oh so many years ago, and it is yet another example of how technology directly impacts the ways in which rhetorical situations are processed by rhetors, audiences, and messages themselves. Technology gives much, but it also causes bat-shit crazy stuff like this. In any event, one wonders what would happen if this whole thing had simply been ignored, if we thought more carefully about the exigence for this situation, if this would even be possible before cable news, etc.
- I am reminded of the flag burning debates of a few years ago with all of this. Sure, this has a distinctly different flavor in the shadow of 9/11 and “war(s) on terrorism,” the non-issue of the Burlington Coat Factory turned mosque/community center somehow vaguely near “ground zero,” and just a sort of general ill-placed fear of “Islam,” which is at least as diverse a religion as “Christianity.” But I am also reminded of a Miss Manners article way back when, in which the always delightful writer Judith Martin pointed out that there was no point in legislating against flag burning because the reason why someone burned flags was to make a point by being terribly rude. Of course, this is extra-über rude, but still.
- Finally, this once again speaks to the extreme importance of the materiality of the book, and by “the book,” I mean the old-fashioned codex book, paper pages, pagination, a cover, the whole nine yards. I don’t mean the Kindle or the iPad, and I hasten to add here that I really do like (love might be too strong) the reading experience on my iPad a lot. I’m reading a couple of books on it right now, and I am going to be preparing for a day of getting some articles I’m teaching on my iPad after I finish this post. Obviously, electronic reading and writing has an incredible power (see observation #1).However, if these crazy people got together and said “hey, we’re going to burn this here Kindle with the Koran on it,” or “we’re all gonna bring our laptops and erase our copies of the Koran all at the same time,” no one would have given a shit about that. Not even a little bit. What’s got everyone all excited is that these things are the actual and material thing that was previously the only definition of “book,” and they really will burn and give off flames, smoke, and heat. Never mind that there are millions of other copies of the Koran, so it’s not like these people will have any real potential to damage the religion.
Along the lines of your thinking, Jack Shafer at Slate closes his piece “The Fallen Status of Books” with:
Can you imagine throwing a book party for a friend who wrote an e-book? As attendees bought the e-book, what would the author do to personalize and commemorate the event? Sign their Kindles?
http://www.slate.com/id/2266734/
If you organized a mass Koran (Quran) deleting on the EMU campus, I bet it would get some coverage (The person that organized Draw Mohammad day on Facebook is now in hiding.). Although, I think burning the Koran is a vulgar and fruitless act, it does speak to who is winning the conflict: irrationality. If this were the burning of any other religious text, would there be the same level of concern over the response of the offended? I think there might be misunderstanding in Afghanistan if Americans were to use electronic means to deface or destroy the text of a Koran but I think the power of the act is that it is a direct challenge to the magic of the words. Or to reduce it further, the blasphemy of the act of desecrating the words of God.
That we are worried about the response over burning a book shows how little the hearts and minds have changed after 10 years of occupation and trillions of dollars spent.
I also know that this situation can be ignored. Just stop reading and watching the news. This was one of the more transparent manufactured news stories of the summer. Also, how would he media powers have reacted if this had been atheists burning the Koran instead of Christians? Were they more concerned about the motivation for the burning, the intentions, or the response of Muslims? I am actually surprised that it took so long for someone to organize a public Koran burning. I actually expected this to occur shortly after 9/11.