Book Desecration

Okay, I’ve tried to resist, but I can no longer remain silent.
I am a book desecrater.
I’m guilty.
Call up the Muslim Chamber of Commerce and the Library Police.
I have actually stepped on a book.
In fact, I once kicked a book across my bedroom floor after it viciously reached out and attacked my big toe on my way to the bathroom one night.
I once used a Bible as a coaster for my bedside soda in a hotel that was too cheap to provide a decent nightstand.
I have used books to level wobbly tables, hold up temporary shelves, and as weights to help expedite the glue-bonding process.
In fact, looking around my desk, I currently have about a half dozen of them laying on the floor in spectacularly un-sacred fashion.
(Two of them happen to be Readers Digest, which probably don’t count as books.)
To be honest, none of those books were the holy Quran, but that’s just because I don’t happen to have a copy of that highly-popular text stashed on my bookcase.
If I had a copy, it would get just as badly abused as my Bible, my Book of Mormon, and my paperback copy of Stephen King’s “The Stand.”
(To be honest, “The Stand” is the only one of the three that I’ve actually read cover to cover.)
I love books.
As a writer, I hold them more sacred than the average page-turner.
But I’m nowhere in the same zip code as those who think book abuse should be punished by blowing up real human beings.
The big story these days, at least until the Michael Jackson jury comes in, is the desecration of Qurans at the Guantanamo Bay prisoner of war camp.
Apparently, a sizeable portion of Middle Easterners have taken the kicking and maybe even flushing of these books as the okay to suit up in their favorite explosive vest (the ultimate in instant weight-loss couture) and head out in search of innocent women and children to blow up.
Oddly, they seem to make a habit of blowing up other members of their own religion instead of actually springing for low-fare tickets to Cuba on Assassin Airlines to try and take it out on those actually using their holy book as soccer placebos.
It might have something to do with the fact that those doing the kicking are armed, and will actually shoot back, unlike the easier victims like the nine-year-old in Baghdad who can now spend eternity in her casket without arms and legs.
But that’s to be expected from a collection of lowly cowards who make a weekly picnic out of burning American flags because Americans kicked Islamic text books.
(Is “irony” a foreign concept in the Muslim religion?)
This is not a free-pass for American soldiers to begin using the Quran as their Charmin substitute.
I think everybody gets it.
Desecrating somebody’s holy book is wrong.
I understand how dedicated fighting men could lose sight of this, as they are so desperate they are willing to use any psychological squeeze if it gets someone to give information that saves one life.
But, in another ironic twist, book bashing is bad press.
So we as Americans need to stop this particular insult and go back to making remarks about the captives’ mothers and camel sex.
(Come on, Larry the Cable Guy gets raunchier than that in the first six minutes of his act, and he’s rated PG-13.)
And Muslims need to get over themselves.
They need to understand that no collection of paper and ink, no matter how sacred or revered, not even an autographed first edition of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” is worth one drop of human blood.