This Week's Attention Whore Award

The hardest thing about mob violence is the rock that hits you in the head. Mobs have brought us many awful things, like populist presidential candidates, communist revolutions, and the Sex and the City franchise (and at least populists and communists haven't pushed the $600 shoe craze). What great things have mobs of passionate people brought us? (Sound of crickets chirping)

That's why the latest planned bit of mob justice--the burning of Korans being organized by a church in Gainesville, Florida--is really not that surprising to me. Ask any individual member of a mob whether destroying a book considered holy by about a billion people worldwide is an appropriate measure to offend a small subset of that group which uses violence against us, and that individual would say "no, that would be absurd, sort of like beating up random Polish folks because you ate a bad keilbassa". But get a mob together and suddenly all reason and sense goes out the window.

And, just when Muslim mobs have a chance to show some reason and say "hey, that's in poor taste! How'd you like if we burned Bibles, jive fool?", a mob in Kabul, Afghansitan goes nuts and burns effigies of both the pastor leading the Koran-burning (Terry Jones, who I actually thought was a member of Monty Python so it's sad to see what he's doing in his post-comedy tour) as well as Barack Obama. The burning of Obama in effigy must be very confusing to the 45% of Americans who think our president is Muslim! How can a rabble in Kabul have more accurate information than so many Americans?

Of course, I'd suggest that Michael Palin (and his sister Sarah, for good measure), John Cleese and Eric Idle get together with their old comedy buddy and explain to him that perhaps instead of burning a bunch of Korans he burn some effigies of Ossama bin Laden. But then, Pastor Jones wouldn't make the nightly news and get his fifteen minutes of fame. For that, Terry Jones gets this week's "Attention Whore Award."