The World at the Mercy of an Idiot

The world at the mercy of an idiot. Of a Baptist pastor whom no one had paid attention to for 63 years, so much that in his church the faithfuls were little more than the pupils in a primary school. The daughter of this man, who two months ago was overwhelmed by the proposal of one of his followers to commemorate 9/11 by setting the Koran on fire, thinks that he just “went crazy.”

In short, we’re speaking of a madman living in a town deep in Florida where you’re compelled to pass through if you want to go to Georgia or Alabama. A crazy man who’s able to hold the breath of the White House, NATO, the Pentagon, Interpol, U.N., armies and police forces across the world, humanitarian organizations and charities, churches mosques, synagogues and a lot of tourists.

How can this obscure reverend in the mood for provocations become a global phenomenon, instead of being pitied by his countrymen? The answer fully involves the world of media that have turned him into a star, that besiege him for days with microphones, cameras, tape recorders and notebooks, and have placed around his trailer dozens of satellite dishes. In order not to miss anything, to revive as soon as possible every incendiary syllable and perhaps even the image of the final fire, that fire of holy books of Islam that would have the immediate effect of lighting up another plethora of idiots who are just waiting for this to happen, at all latitudes. The cause-effect relationship is showed by the two pictures we published on the front page.

They can be read from left to right — or on the contrary, in the sense that neither is justified by the other for its behavior: the burners of Korans and the burners of flags with stars and stripes are of the same thing. They’re both just idiots.

The question then arises by itself and we ask it ourselves: Why did we give him space and visibility? We could just ignore him, as it’s often suggested to do in front of crazy people or children who misbehave. It would be the right choice, but this global wheel turns too fast: movies, photos and statements bombard us incessantly.

You can choose to ignore the pastor, but how can you ignore the fact that in the meantime the Pope, the Secretary of the U.N., the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and President of the United States are launching appeals to that pastor and his tiny congregation?

You can decide not to put anything on paper, but by lunchtime the agencies launch the Interpol statement that speaks of “a likelihood that violent attacks on innocent people would follow.” In a few minutes an anti-American demonstration is set in Kabul and there’s the first death.

So you would think that if you decide to take the paper out of this, it would seem like you are the idiot, or at least an insufferable snob, and that it would all be useless. The great agency Associated Press decided not to distribute any pictures, but we know that it takes only a kid with a cell phone and a home computer to blow up the Internet and get to every house in the world. There are many examples from the last years — think of the photos of Abu Ghraib or even the movie with the disabled kid beaten by his schoolmates.

Yesterday morning, in the East Room of the White House, someone asked Barack Obama if he would have done better by ignoring the pastor Jones instead of giving him importance. The president replied that he had to deal with “that individual down in Florida” — he did not want to give him the dignity of a name — to avoid serious consequences against American citizens and soldiers, that he could not do otherwise.

So we are all prisoners of this “reality show,”* as the director of the New York Times Bill Keller called it, which ultimately dictates the overall mood and is guided by it.

But is there really no way out of this degeneration of the media society that puts everything on the same page, emphasizes a particular until it becomes a universal phenomenon and offers all sorts of idiots to their minutes of global fame?

One thing we could do: a road exists, but it doesn’t pass through censorship or silence — instead it requires the effort of returning every image with its true colors, replacing it into its context. We must do more journalism, not surrender to the avalanche of fake images or slogans.

All the newspapers in the world have talked about the “mosque at ground zero” and many in the world are outraged: Perhaps the effect would have been different if everyone had written that the prayer hall should be built three blocks from the site where the Twin Towers were, and that four blocks away another mosque (which nobody has ever dreamed to close) already exists.

We need to do quality journalism in order to lower the fever of sensationalism: It means that we need to look for data and statistics to give the due weight to our concerns, whether it is the number of crimes, the illegal immigrants, the number of people with swine flu or of mosques with a minaret (in Germany there are 206, in Italy three). It means that we need to give voice to those entitled to speak and not just to the ones who guarantee to make more noise or to put up a show.

To do journalism in this way is difficult, but it is the only road we have to save ourselves from the invasion of the false and the likely, to try to understand something in this global chaos.

But the political and civil society could do something as well to return the due weight to gestures and words: the delirium of Pastor Jones should be answered by one hundred reverends praying with rabbis and muftis in front of Ground Zero. The image would have a stronger emotional and evocative meaning and the good grass would drive out the bad.

Is it really so hard to imagine ourselves not giving up and deciding that our lives can not be taken hostage by the last image that passes before our eyes?

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.