Fear is my co-pilot.

Some of you might remember that recent flashpoint of American conservative angst, the dreaded Ground Zero Mosque.  Perhaps you don’t, and in no way is that a bad thing. In fact, if you can’t remember, then stop reading right now – it’s not my place to remind you. Go back to checking Facebook or watching squirrel porn.

Are they gone? Alright.  Let’s proceed.

To me, the mosque fracas was a hollow story, a paper giant intended to frighten Americans by the size of the shadow it cast, even though it posed no threat.  Despite this, the issue tied everyone up in knots, including Barack Obama.  On a Friday, the US president reminded everyone that in America, people are free to practice their religion however and wherever they want.  Then the very next day, Barack walked it back and said his fierce defense of religious freedom should in no way be construed as rendering an opinion on the location of the mosque.  It was flip-flopping at its flip-floppiest.  About the only person who probably struck the right tone in this whole mess was Jon Stewart.  The subtext of his comments, in cased you missed it, was simple: the people who started this story are fuckheads, and you are a fuckhead for getting upset about it.

What made this story especially pernicious was just when you thought it was over, when you thought pundits had found some new way to make Americans shit their pants, or some fact exposed the controversy as a farce (that the mosque is actually several blocks away from Ground Zero, that there’s a mosque even closer to Ground Zero that has operated for years, that the principal investor in the mosque was also a principal investor in Fox News, that the mosque isn’t even a mosque) something happened or got said to keep it alive;  a xenophobic rally in downtown Manhattan, a fringe pastor decides to burn Korans, “revelations” about plans for activities in the mosque, or a new blogger late to the story writes about it (oops). The Ground Zero Mosque frenzy survived well past its sell-by date and promised to continue indefinitely, a festering boil on the ass of public discourse – not life threatening per se, but really fucking ugly, and uncomfortable for anyone who tried to sit on it.

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