Media Circus: The Book Burning That Never Was

In my first post on this topic, I said that what we have here is a tale of two provocations. I also said that they are not equal in weight. I covered the first and weightier provocation--that of building a new mosque at Ground Zero--in my first post. The counter-provocation, if counter it was, came when the media created a circus around an obscure Florida Church.


Pastor Jones, who preaches at rural church of 50 members, let the media know that he intended to burn copies of the Koran on the ninth anniversary of 9/11. The mainstream media took the bait. And Pastor Jones sat back and counted off his fifteen minutes of fame. In watching the predictable reactions, one has to wonder who was taking whom for a ride to the old fishing hole.

In the more sedate newspapers here in flyover country, such a story only gets a few lines in the National Round-Up' --if it even gets that. And gets it only if the event actually occurs. It is a curiousity, not news. But the national media, ever eager to jump on anything that confirms its prejudices about ordinary Americans, worked itself into a frenzy over the bookburnings that never were. And after he had gotten a sufficient amount of attention--including interviews with international leaders, a call from the President of the United States, and a free trip to New York to act out his vision of himself as a high-level negotiator--Pastor Jones announced that the Koran burning was off. Apparently, he had gotten the attention he was looking for. Pastor Jones-1, MSM-0.


Apparently, too, the MSM succeeded in creating moral equivilency between the construction of an expensive mosque-cum-community center at Ground Zero and an obscure Florida pastor from the hinterlands threatening to burn books. This is unsurprising, because the media "elites" no longer ask if a story will "play in Peoria"; they ask if the story confirms their prejudices about the American heartland. This story did just that, allowing them to portray ordinary Americans as narrow-minded bigots that are all eager to be caught on film burning books.

For the record, most Americans are opposed to the wanton destruction of burning books, flags, or anything else. In the heartland especially, a certain polite rectitude unknown inside the beltway creates a certain restraint, and people that live in the towns of flyover country tend to be friendly to one another and the stranger within their gates. Most people in this country are not salivating to hate their neighbors; they are too busy working to fulfill their dreams, to feed their families, to educate their children, to make of their communities and towns good and pleasant places to live.

That the media was willing to fan the very tiny spark of one unimportant pastor of a small church of 50 people threatening to burn a Koran in rural Florida is telling. It is telling in the story that is not and never was. The story that the MSM was dying to find. The story of hundreds of thousands of Americans ready to take up the torch and burn Korans in great bonfires across the country. There were 50 people. And some others on the internet, not really engaged, who tried to fan the flames of the book-pyre that never was.

Also telling is the story of the reaction of Muslim clerics and leaders worldwide. The threat of rioting in the streets and violence against Americans and Christians, if the Koran was burned. In an interview with CNN, for example, he Imam of the Ground Zero mosque, Feisal Rauf had this to say:

O'BRIEN: Then why is it hard to back up and say, and now that we've done it, let's undo it, let's just say we won't. Let's pick another spot that's been offered?

RAUF: As I just mentioned, our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this, how we speak about it, and what we do. It is important for us now to raise the bar on our conversation--

O'BRIEN: What's the risk? When you say "national security," what's the risk?

RAUF: As I mentioned, because if we move, that means the radicals have shaped the discourse. The radicals will shape the discourse on both sides. And those of us who are moderates on both sides -- you see Soledad, the battle front is not between Muslims and non-Muslims . . . The radicals actually feed off each other. And in some kind of existential way, need each other. And the more that the radicals are able to control the discourse on one side, it strengthens the radicals on the other side and vice versa. We have to turn this around.
(CNN Transcripts, Larry King Live, Sept. 08, 2010, retrieved Sept. 20, 2010 from http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1009/08/lkl.01.html).


The point here, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, is two-fold, according to Rauf. First, is the implied threat that if Rauf actually has the sensitivity to American values, manners and mores--that is if he respects the values of the country in which he lives--and moves the mosque to a more politic location in lower Manhattan, then Muslims somewhere will make some violent move against the United States. This is the threat of an act of war, placing our national security at risk. It is an veiled threat that if not made by the Imam, was at least delivered by the Imam. If the Imam knows of some substantial threat to the United States, then it is his duty as a citizen, on pain of treason, to deliver that knowledge to the government of the United States.

Secondly, Rauf is making the same claim of moral equivalency that the MSM invented for this drama. He is claiming that Pastor Jones and his misguided congregation of 50 people is morally equivalent to radical Islamists. Certainly threatening to burn the Koran is an imprudent act, and in my mind a morally offensive act of wanton destruction. But it is not a crime. It is self-expression protected in the US by the First Amendment. Jones and his church members are hardly on the same moral plane as radical Islamists who turn passenger jets into instruments of wholesale murder, strap bombs to the bodies of children to kill civilians, and have attacked the United States Navy in peacetime at a neutral port.

This game of moral equivilancy is the stock and trade of those who play the victim to get what they want. Rauf has planned an act of extreme insensitivity towards the families of those murdered on 9/11, a provocative act toward the people of New York City and the United States, who were attacked that day, but by this claim he wishes to convince us that he is the moderate by making Pastor Jones and his wingnuts the moral equivilant of trained killers who are well financed by various Islamists polities and organizations. Please! As Mark Twain used to tell us: "Saying so don't make it so."

The planned mosque is a great provocation to the people of the United States, and by his protests that he can't change its location without violence from unnamed but very real organizations in the Moslem world, Rauf is engaging in moral blackmail. And more. He not only wants to force the issue of the mosque upon us, he wants us to give our moral sanction to it in the name of tolerance. But blackmail is wrong: it is force, and a violation of another's liberty. And the threat of violence against innocent Americans and their allies the world over, people who may or may not hold any opinion about this mosque, is purely evil. To tolerate such evil in order to placate terrorists is injustice. No matter how much he protests otherwise, Rauf is not moderate, he is a spokesman for terrorism. He deserves no hearing, no sanction from us.

And Pastor Jones? He is a wiley operator who saw the opportunity for a brief moment of martyrdom by editorial, and took it. He understood well the old saying that "no publicity is bad publicity." He deserves to fade back into obscurity, as he will when the performance is over. The Koran-burning that never was became a media circus, a small provocation that was supposed to be used by the media to incite division and violence. It didn't. It wasn't even news.

You Tube Censors "We Con the World"

Perhaps You Tube employees agree with the following speech by Obama. According to our Messiah in Chief, information is a distraction. Especially when information tends to contradict what the BO wants you to believe is true.




After three million views, did they really think nobody downloaded the parody? You Tube claims that the original publishers asked for it to be pulled. But parodies are not considered violations. And does You Tube censor anti-Israel propaganda? No. That stays, but Latma's clever black humor must go.

Fortunately, after 3 million views there are plenty of people out there who have reposted "We Con the World" to their own You Tube Channels. So here it is, and I will edit it back into the original post:

R3volution: Don't Mess with ABQ Patriots

Yesterday I posted an entry about the continuing bad reporting and derogatory names directed at the ABQ Tea Party. Thanks to my friend Corky, and another blogger named Joe, screen shots and pdf files of the original story at KRQE News went out to patriot groups all across the country. The original headline was subsequently changed.

This morning, an anonymous commentor reported that KRQE had removed all of the comments from the webpage that housed the story. When I went to that page to verify this information, I found that the entire story had been removed. This was KRQE's second mistake.

The arrogance of the media is without bounds. When confronted with their first mistake by numerous commentors, KRQE management should have publically apologized to the Albuquerque Tea Party, the Tea Party Express and to the citizens who attended the rally for calling them all a sexually charged derogatory name. But instead of doing so, and instread of firing or at least disciplining the reporter who thought that using that kind of language was cute, KRQE opted to try to pretend that such an insult never happened. That's like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Oops!

Given this further arrogance, it is likely that the local patriots will continue to turn the dial away from channel 13 and inform the station's sponsors about why they are doing so. This is not some boycott engineered from some national organization. Local, hard-working individuals in what is derisively called "flyover country" by the national media are simply tired of having their intelligence and hard-work continually insulted. Personally, I see my boycott of KRQE as similar to my boycott of the Olympics last summer. I am not organizing a boycott. I am simply tired of being put down by arrogant reporters who have far less education and life experience than I. I refuse to support such businesses further.

KRQE ought to put these so-called reporters through a refresher course on the difference between reporting a story and editorializing. Further, some business education might benefit both the employees and adminstrators of the station. Normally, businesses do not go out their way to bite the hand that feeds them!
Twice.

Finally, KRQE's craven removal of the story has told us one thing. They know that we know what they are about.

It's a start.

KRQE: We are paying attention and we will act.

Don't mess with Albuquerque Patriots!

R3volution: We're Caring Americans, Thank You Very Much!

As I said yesterday, on Tuesday I was at the Albuquerque stop for the Tea Party Express.

The event was actually held at Rio Rancho's Haynes Park, just to the northwest of ABQ.

As has been their habit, both the Albuquerque Journal and KRQE News 13 got it wrong.

KRQE News 13 showed up at about 11 AM, two hours before the event, and reported that the Rio Rancho DPS stated that 300 people were there. The Journal must have got their news from the TV station. Such great reporting!

When the Tea Party Express Caravan arrived shortly after 1 PM, I estimated many more people than that. Using grid method of estimation common to field biologists (I am a trained field biologist), I estimated at least 900 people. Pretty good for a Tuesday, work-day afternoon.

But we do not have to rely on my crude count. Organizers of the Tea Party were placing sticky dots on people's shirts, so that they would have a pretty good estimate of the crowd.

They began this practice after the local media woefully underestimated the number that attended the Tax Day Tea Party on April 15, for which the Albuquerque Journal originally said there were a few hundred--such great precision, that!--at least a half-hour prior to the beginning of the event. Do I detect a pattern of misrepresentation here?

In any case, the Albuquerque Tea Party organizers, prepared for about 1200 people, had purchased 1350 sticky dots. They ran out of dots prior to the end of the event, and people continued to arrive. So total attendance was more 1350 people.

The misrepresentation of the numbers was unprofessional, but what KRQE News did on their blog was positively juvenile. Here is the original headline (which was changed today--though so far they have not changed the numbers) screen-captured by my friend and fellow NMPA member, who was also an organizer for this event:

Tea Bag Express rallies protestors

This headline gives implicit insult to the people who were there, using a now well-known sexual innuendo to describe what is actually called The Tea Party Express. After a great deal of protest in the comments to their blog, found here, during the first 24 hours, KRQE changed the headline. However, the link continues to bear the derogatory term seen above.

As commentor and Tea Party organizer Gayle Bacon wrote yesterday:

"Tea baggers is an obscene and derogatory expression used by a biased media with a liberal agenda. You may yank this, because you ARE biased, but I must try. Your reporter showed up very early, before the Tea Party Express even showed up! We put stickers on everyone and counted the stickers beforehand, so we know we had well over 1,000 because they ran out of the stickers! People also signed their names. Too bad KRQE is missing out. That's the way to lose viewers."

And Pat, who was in charge of estimating the numbers wrote this yesterday:

"KRQUE [sic] showed up at around 11:00 when the event was just being set up. So if as you say we had 200 people there at 11:00 by1:00 we had count of over 1350 . We had purchased 1350 stickers to help with our head count and all were passed out. That is how we can say we had over 1350 people. If your news crew had come to report the news they would have showed up around the time the event started instead of before the event started. I am glad you removed the derogatory term, but it should never have been used in the first place."

Others who were there wrote to express their disgust about the derogatory language and about their frustration with the so-called professional media. My friend, Corky wrote:

"Lovely, just lovely. I am truly impressed with your reporting. Who's your editor? Bozo the clown? I loved the earlier wisecrack about the editor making poot sounds with his hands. LOL! I was there. There were well more than 1000 and you can bank on it. Well behaved, caring Americans, not Tea Baggers, thank you very much. I have a screen shot of the original headline which I'm sending to many patriots across the country, along with the station's contact info. You'll be famous."

Hey, Corky, I am doing my part to pass this on! Another attendee has captured a PDF of the original story and has passed it on to Glenn Beck. I wrote the following comment:

KRQE: Ours is another household that will boycott both your television station and your sponsors. The original article has been saved as a screenshot and a pdf, and patriots like Corky and Joe have seen to it that patriots all over the United States will see it. The derogatory title was inexcusable and the juvenile reporting is unprofessional. This may have passed in Pleasantville, but it certainly will not in the age of the internet. If this article is an example of professional media, no wonder newspapers and TV stations are failing by the thousands. Patriots Unite! If our opponent is this stupid, we should win handily.

Of course, those who wish to destroy the Republic and replace it with some version of collectivist statism are not that stupid.

But the media is. They have to use a neologism, "misunderestimated" us.

This story will be told no matter how hard they try to insult it and suppress it.

Nevertheless, we must out the media bias and bad reporting wherever we see it.

And one final word to the media: Don't forget, we older folks are the ones that buy the things your advertisers are selling. And we're the generation from the draft-card burners of the 1960's.

Don't mess with the Gray Champions!

John Stossel, Kids with AS, Middle School and the "S" Word

I am sure that I have mentioned that N. has AS, which is Aspergers Syndrome.

AS is an Autism Spectrum Disorder that involves difficulties with social interaction, non-verbal and verbal communication, and stereotyped obsessive behaviors. This sounds formidable, and it can be, but "Aspies" often look "normal" to others, although they seem to act just a little bit "different."

ABC Nightline and ABC News has been doing a series called Echoes of Autism about AS. Last night, Nightline ran a ten minute segment about the difficulties that students with AS have when they reach adolescence and middle school.

Middle school. John Stossel called middle school "the scorched earth zone of American childhood." A psychologist interviews on the Nightline program said several studies show that up to 90% of middle school students with AS are bullied every day. Every day!

I knew this statistic. And we had already had problems with bullying in N.'s elementary school experience. There were times of intense bullying interspersed with relatively calm times throughout for him. Sometimes it seemed to us as though all of our energy was going to keeping N. functioning in school and that there was none left over for actual learning. In the beginning of 4th grade, for example, N. spent most of his day under the table.

The statistics. Warnings from other parents that you cannot work and have a child with disabilities in middle school. Our previous school experiences. All of this, as well as academic concerns, and concerns about too much testing, factored into our decision to take N. out of school and begin homeschooling. N. has made great progress and never looked back.

When I watched the Nightline segment, I was mentally congratulating myself on the wise decision we had made not to send N. to middle school.

And then John Stossel said that sentence. The one I wrote above. The one I will repeat again, in case you missed it. It is easy to miss, I think, because it fits the picture of reality most Americans have. He said:

Middle school is the "scorched earth zone of American childhood."

Think about that statement. It was said very matter-of-factly. And yet it is both profoundly sad and full of despair. John Stossel was saying that American middle schools are terribly unfriendly, stressful places and that this is "normal." It is what we can expect of our children at a certain age. Adolescents are naturally cruel to each other and nothing can be done about that.The only problem is how to help children who are different, children who have disabilities adjust to it.

Since we have taken N. out of school, I have had the opportunity to watch homeschooled kids interact in a variety of settings. At the grocery store. At the library. At "park day." At museum science classes. In all of these settings, the kids are interacting in multi-age groups with minimal adult supervision. And they are not cruel to each other. They gently tease sometimes, but they explain the jokes to those who don't get it right away. They seem to think independently and do not have that group "herding instinct" that teachers so often laugh about when discussing adolescents.

And it is not only homeschooled kids who are this way. We have been going to the skateboard park, N's newest "special interest," lately. (Very good to large motor coordination and proprioreception). There, kids from about mid-elementary age to high-school come to practice their 'boarding." They teach each other new "moves," discuss the fine points of velocity and balance, organize themselves so that there are no collisions--and there really are no collisions--and help each other out. There are no adults in the Skatepark. N-O-N-E. Adults are elsewhere in the park, or gossiping happily on the picnic benches, but no adults are supervising the skaters. And the kids are civil with each other, and more, they are friendly and engaged in something of interest to all of them. They want it to work out so they can become better 'boarders.

From all of these observations, I have concluded that they way kids treat each other in middle school is not "normal" for them. It is abnormal. They are as nervous and jumpy as lab rats raised in an impoverished environment. It is not "normal" for social mammals to be isolated from their community and raised in an age-segregated environment. Animal behaviorists know that this is a recipe for making an animal "mean to the bone," as the little guy with AS said when he described his bully to John Stossel.

So why do we accept the antisocial behavior of middle school students as "normal?" Why are older people often afraid of adolescent energy?

My hypothesis is that the problem lies not with the kids, but with the environment in which we force them to live and grow and learn. The environment is age-segregated,intellectually unstimulating, encourages competition for teacher time and attention, crowded, noisy, and has only poor nutrition available. It is definitely not the optimal environment for young mammals out to learn how to be social in their culture.

It is so interesting that the first objection I am met with when I tell someone that I am homeschooling is the "S" question. "What about Socialization."

N. has so much more energy to put into learning social skills now that he is not in an environment that stresses him so much that he can barely function.

He skateboards, he plays chess, he studies electricity and magnetism, he goes to astronomy club meetings. In all of these places, he interacts with people of a variety of ages, all of whom want to share a particular interest. He is allowed to talk to people naturally, thus he learns social communication skills in the environment where they are to be used. What a concept!

Now I want to be clear that I do not think that school caused N.'s AS or that it is cured now that he is not in that environment. Rather, I believe that when people interact in real social situations where they are together in the pursuit of a common interest or goal, they are happy to accomodate differences among themselves. It is natural for people to want to share what they love with others. AS kids are no different--they want that, too. All of those good things that contribute to "flow" in human social situations are present when people get together voluntarily to learn together: affinity, intellectual stimulation, joy. I have very rarely seen them in my years teaching secondary education. And yet it is these things that de-stress a difficult learning for kids with AS. Affinity, intellectual stimulation, joy. These are the components need for developing social skills in any human being.

My answer to people who bring up the "S" word is that school is the least likely place for optimal social interactions to take place. It is up to the schools to make changes that will provide our children with socialization appropriate to human children. If and when they do so, I will consider the school option. Until then, to use another "S" word" Sayonara.