The fringe tickles our imagination. It fascinates because we either hope or worry that it will become the mainstream. In the best of cases, we entertain the fringe to knead and stretch our sense of the possible; in the worst, as with the attention paid to the would-be Koran burners, we try to tell ourselves a cautionary tale about what the future may hold.
This time, however, the tale backfired—and our attention transmuted into a kind of Heisenberg propulsion system.
When the New York Times beefed up International Burn a Koran Day into “a bonfire of Korans” (there were fifty members of the pastor’s flock; at one Koran each, a campfire, at best) their readers’ curiosity fanned the flames of the very blaze they would have preferred extinguished. When Pastor Jones at one moment called the burning off, the Times asked whether the media might have contributed to the problem, quite as if the Times were not the media itself, as if they were not the country’s paper of record.
What even Pastor Jones knew is that the media is only an organ, and, like fire, organs remain silent if nothing breathes air into them.
Fire represents change, the way things shift from one form to another; and the mainstream, like actual streams, also has a tendency to change. The Koran burners, whose rhetoric was as incendiary as their stunt, would like to instigate change, to fight fire with fire, and we unwittingly armed them. It was a “norm” that got burned.
Ablaze with information, we have yet to figure out what we ought to ignore.
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