Author: Clayton

If you want to get media attention, saying you are going to burn the Koran does that just fine.  But it is wrong on so many levels.  Let’s count them, shall we?

1. It anger Muslims, as opposed to persuading them.  There are a lot of serious criticisms that can be made of the Koran and Islam, but burning the Koran isn’t a serious criticism.  It’s childish.  That pastor should have organized a daylong serious analysis of the Koran’s inconsistencies and the difficulties with reading its text that have been acknowledged by Muslim scholars since around 1000 AD.  Would it have converted many Muslims?  No.  But it would not have generated the…firestorm (yes, that’s the word) of passionate rage.  It makes America look stupid.

2. Book burning has become a symbol of fascism.  Even the Catholic Church, when it maintained its list of prohibited books, did not burn books.  Great: a Christian pastor uses a symbol of the Nazis.  What were you thinking?  Were you thinking?

3. It provides yet another example of an ignorant Christian pastor for the news media (which is constantly ignoring the many equivalent Islamic radical imams) to use to portray Christianity in a bad light.

4. It almost certainly increases the risk that some Muslim fanatic is going to kill some American somewhere–and there is nothing that we get in return for that increased risk.  If some action that we took actually increased the possibility of winning the war against Islamofascism in exchange for that risk, it might be worth considering.  But what does burning Korans buy us?  Nothing.

I hope this pastor enjoys his brief moment of fame.

I saw the ads when it came out, but my wife and I seldom go to movies.  While grading papers today, I watched it on Netflix.

Yes, grading student essays is not so difficult that I can’t watch a movie at the same time.  (One quirk of both my daughter and myself that just drives my wife crazy is that we can and often do multitask–doing several things simultaneously.)

Anyway, the essence of the movie (explained in the very well done minute or two opening so I am not spoiling anything for you) is that in the very near future, humans live their entire lives through robotic surrogates that give you all the sensations and experiences–but without the risks.  Many people never actually leave their homes–they rely on their surrogates to go everywhere, including doing their jobs.  Of course, the robots don’t age, or get fat, or ugly.  And if the surrogate dies, you can’t get hurt.  Or can you?

To say that this is an astonishing commentary on our technologically deranged society is quite clear.  I would blog some more about this–but blogging is perilously close to a surrogate form of social behavior!

There are so many cliched sci-fi premises that have been done again and again and again (such as time travel stories) that to really make it interesting requires a really astonishing piece of writing.  And to get some thoughtful social commentary at the same time?  Excellent!

Some years back, Idaho imposed a senior project requirement on all the high schools in the state, at least partly to make sure that graduating seniors could actually write.  I think it works.  In 2003, I was utterly floored at how few of the upper division history majors in my Constitutional History class could actually write at college level.  I had a student turn in a paper where 1/3 of the sentences–were not.  I had students tell me that this was only the second research paper that they had ever written–and did it show.  I would say that only five of the twenty-five research papers that I received that semester were what I would expect of upper division college students.

By comparison, these essays from the freshmen in my U. S. History class at College of Western Idaho (a community college) are gratifying.  They aren’t perfect, of course.  But so far, of the ones that I have graded, many are good and several are actually quite good.  Most students at least know how to write competent sentences; some students are combining competent sentences into well-structured essays.  A few students have not achieved sentence structure competency (or competency in capitalization, or punctuation), but nonetheless, have well-structured essays.

There is room for improvement for all of them, so far.  Still, many of them are starting with what would have been considered high school level writing skills when I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1974.