Time Slip by John Parker Oughton

Time Slip suggests that the past is worth remembering, as it may be the present.

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Many undeservedly famous people deserve ridicule – bimbos of both sexes, celebrated only for their substance abuse, flagrant overspending, run-ins with the law and disastrous relationship choices – or the reality TV “stars” who are ordinary in every way except for their overinflated egos.  However, I’m going to focus on a recently much-discussed figure who has achieved fame solely for expressing a notoriously stupid idea. People all over the world have stupid ideas, so why does Jones attain celebrity for his? Florida’s Dove World Outreach Center pastor Terry Jones  --no relation to the Monty Python actor, who is both funnier and a clearer thinker --  made himself known around the world by proposing to burn copies of the Qu'ran in response to the anniversary of 9/11.   Now he’s backed off from that vow, but no doubt is considering plans to open a Dove Word Theme Park in which books and icons from all other world religions can be defaced, flame-thrown, or blown up real good by right-thinking visitors.

Rev. Jones seems in truth little more than a boneheaded fanatic trying  desperately to expand his tiny congregation despite his being  unaware of  the Bible's messages  after the part about “an eye for an eye."  As far as book burning goes, his suggestion is small potatos, important only symbolically;  the Qu'ran has sold at least 800 million copies, is available in many languages and editions, and has been memorized in its entirety by an estimated 10 million huffaz, so burning a few copies will hardly deny its teachings to anyone. The idea is so obviously flawed that even Sarah Palin has criticized it.

I would argue that many others are far more deserving of fame for their book-burning efforts (technically termed biblioclasm or libricide)  or more general destruction of culturally-important properties. This form of intellectual violence is all too common in history.  Whoever burned the Great Library of Alexandria, for example, is now in some circle of Hell deploring the fact that historians still can’t agree if Julius Caesar, some Caliph or persons unknown were responsible.   The Mongols who invaded Baghdad in 1258 destroyed all the city’s libraries, including the House of Wisdom,  then the leading centre of scholarship in the world.  The Tigris is supposed to have run black for six months from the ink of books thrown into the river.  Alexander the Great, with one casual order, caused the obliteration of much of Persepolis, then the capital of the far-flung Persian culture.  I read somewhere of  a French traveler whose claim to fame was being the last person to visit certain monuments of antiquity, because he travelled with a team of workers who would then demolish the site.

However, the historical person who really deserves the fame temporarily accorded Rev. Bonehead is Bishop Diego de Landa.  What?  You’ve never heard of him?  Landa, once the Bishop of the Roman Catholic docese of the Yucatan, made his mark by ordering in July, 1562, the destruction of all Mayan written records – bark books (codices), calendar wheels, inscriptions on buildings and the like – in the Yucutan. He was not the only Spanish religious figure to do to Mayan culture what Spanish soldiers did to the indigenous people they encountered, but his order probably had the greatest negative effect.  Much of what we might have learned about the remarkable Mayan civilization went up in flames and shards as a result.  Ironically, the Bishop himself wrote a book, Relación De Las Cosas De Yucatán,  attempting to summarize the culture and religion of the Maya (this publication  now survives only in abridged form).  So, despite this hint that he  found some interest in the culture he was erasing, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that de Landa was to cultural scholarship what Pete Townshend was to the preservation of electric guitars. 

Forget  Jones;  remember de Landa.