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I'm sure that the right reverend Terry Jones is as surprised as everyone else at his instant celebrity. The celebrity business is a wild and crazy business. to be sure, perhaps the only organism that can sustain itself by means of nursing at it's own breast. Once a note is played in the media echo chamber, its natural decay is prevented and the story itself often becomes a story and what began as an unnoticed earthquake at the bottom of the ocean can show up as a tsunami by the time it reaches the shore. It's all about the Wave Effect.
Of course Jones' antics would in other times have gone completely unnoticed by the eye of the media. This kind of nonsense has been going on forever. Isolated nuts have been known to wear sandwich boards for any whack cause you can imagine. They are sounds in a vacuum, nobody cares, it's not news.
What made this demonstration any different?
First there is the atmosphere or medium in which the tremor took place. In this case it is an atmosphere of viscous tension caused by a perceived conflict between two of the world's great religions. Not that the conflict/rivalry between Christianity and Islam is anything new, but today's Crusade mentality is aggravated by real military presence of US soldiers in regions of the world that many believe are and should be under the Crescent, not the Cross.
Then the multiplier effect begins when a very well-meaning General Patraeus said words that really needed to be said about the exercise of our rights tempered by prudence. Add that to the already sore situation surrounding the mosque in NY and dump about 72 professional talking heads pretending to be virgins into the mix and voila you get riots in Pakistan and pointed attacks on our soldiers in Afghanistan, which Are legitimate news.
This is all quite independent of Mr. Jones and any shameful lust for fame that he may have had. What we see is evidence of many colluding factors not least among them America's inclination toward prejudice and xenophobia. It continues to embarrass us because regardless of what intolerance and injustice we are opposing, we know that we are somewhat less than perfect in this area ourselves. Thus Mr. Jones either cleverly or through dumb luck creates a seat for himself as the egg that everyone is afraid to crack.
Lightning Rod is a Dallas poet and writer.
Read more of The Poet's eye here: http://www.thepoetseye.wordpress.com
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