Now that phony Christian mustache-fetishist Rev. Terry Jones has discovered that he can suck his own dick, the rest of us just have to shake our heads at his pretzeled limbs and say, "Dude, just 'cause you can do it doesn't mean you should." That said, being American gives us the unique burden of defending Jones's right to self-fellation. So, fuck, sure, if Yosemite Sam wants to go to the Books-a-Million and purchase a cut-rate Koran, put it on trial like it's not a mass-produced, inanimate object, and then sentence it to death by burning while wearing a judge's robe (no, really), well, playing dress-up ain't just for little girls.
It was a total dick move, but, then again, so is burning an American flag in a protest here. And, if you get down to it, so was the Declaration of Independence, if you were a loyalist. That's why "free speech" doesn't get rated on a scale of benign-to-dickish, no matter what Republican Lindsey Graham whines about needing to cut back on all that freedom during "a war" (or three). You guarantee in the most tempestuous times or you risk losing it altogether.
Of course, you know, it's far worse when you're so deluded by poverty and war and religious fanaticism that you think that a backwards ass country fuck gettin' his barbecue on with a mass-produced, inanimate object that just happens to say things you think your prophet said gives you cause to go apeshit and kill people, as scores of Afghans did last week. Sorry, but in the scheme of things, your murder is way worse than anyone's book-burning. Then, like Jones, Afghan President Hamid Karzai added fuel to the fire by calling on Congress and the President to condemn this inbred buffoon.
It ain't brave to say that beheading UN workers is a bad thing, no matter what the cause. And it ain't brave to talk about limits to free speech that have nothing to do with anything other than fear of people not being able to control themselves. But what we're seeing in Afghanistan is also an excuse for a revolt against Americans (and other Westerners) for the endless war, for a decade of nonstop death and destruction, for a generation there coming of age knowing little other than war. So, yeah, Terry Jones can do his little flame show. He's just a publicity-hungry narcissist, a Donald Trump without a microphone. He doesn't even rise to the level of Christian extremist 'cause he's so fucking stupid. But extremism and extremist reactions flourish when, frankly, there's nothing else to do. Look at that picture up there. Why the fuck do all those people even have the time to hang out and burn a Florida yahoo in effigy? Could it be because of the infinite war? And the one with the Soviets before us?
Nobody's clean. Nobody's ever clean.
