BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I have a little different take on the plans of the Rev. Terry Jones to burn Korans on Saturday.

          I disagree with the President that it is a teachable moment.

          I disagree with Mayor Bloomberg that it is protected under the First Amendment and should therefore be tolerated.

          I disagree with John Feehery that it may reflect another step down the path of “religious intolerance, hatred and extreme sectarianism.”

          I disagree with P.J. Crowley at the State Department that this is a provocative act.

I disagree with Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrrick that ‘religious leaders cannot stand by in silence when things like this are happening.”

          I disagree with Howard Fineman, who is among those who brought down Newsweek, that more politicians ought to speak out on the issue.

I disagree with the editors at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Washington Times, who concluded that the rantings of a sick human being in Gainsville, Florida, are somehow newsworthy anyplace else but in Gainsville, FL.

          I strongly disagree with the executive producers and anchors at CBS and ABC who actually concluded that this desperate grab for attention by a single, diluted, delusional, dimented human being was more important in the lives of their viewers than wildfires in Colorado, floods in Pakistan, rising taxes, insurmountable public debt, war in Afghanistan, failures in education, crises in health care and immigration, and, oh yes, a national infrastructure that is crumbling under our feet.  They actually led off their broadcasts with it Sept. 7.  What were they thinking?

There are many many more people with whom I disagree – mostly because all of them are engaging in a conversation that Terry Jones wants.  They are serving his purposes and making way too much of someone who should not have been given a platform in the first place. 

         I agree with the Rev. Jones, who said that the publicity he got exceeded his expectation.  He got what he wanted and the burning probably won’t even take place, anyway.

          It is astonishing that one 58-year-old religious fanatic with at best 50 followers, standing outside a broken down building in front of a truck tailor covered with a homemade sign, can produce frenzied, sustained national media attention for ten solid days while cancer societies, Alzheimers associations, diabetes foundations or any number of causes worthy of our national attention, couldn’t accomplish that with an army of professional flacks.

          The media have become fixated, obsessively so, with the idea that that the whole of American society is infected with “religious intolerance.”   And they want us to believe that the Rev. Mr. Jones, and a silly survey claiming that 20 percent of Americans think the President is a Muslim, plus  the construction of a Muslim religious center in Manhattan are sure signs that there is a cancer of religious bigotry growing in America.  The media have a stake in it being so, commercially and ideologically. 

What is it about religion, race and Social Security that turn sensible journalists into a pack of predators, toying with emotions, inciting anger, creating divisions, fomenting hysteria among us and then with a straight face and serious inflection cover what they themselves created.

          Our society and our political process cannot tolerate this lunacy for much longer.  We are not a society of religious bigots.  We are a society of mostly tolerant, calm, common sense and compassionate human beings.  We are less bigoted, less racist, less angry and less radical than the politicians and media pundits who try to portray us that way.  We are no more reflected in the circus acts of Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow, or the rants of Eugene Robinson and Ted Nugent.  And our country is not on the verge of constitutional crises or a breakdown in the First Amendment.  This crap will pass faster and with less sustaining power than Hurricane Earl.

          We are a society of people just trying to make it from one day to the next, amid all the noise and distractions and nonsense that have come to typify the political process and the press that cover it.  We are a society of individuals who come together in family and community for common purpose, but we are not a society in which all members of any one group or organization can be branded with the same label, or defined like a herd of cattle.

Most of us believe in the words of Elie Wiesel who said, “No human race is superior, no religion’s faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong.  Only racists make them.”

          I would suggest that the Rotary Club of Gainsville gathers up a bunch of fire extinguishers from their small businesses, go to the burning event and put out the fires as Rev. Jones lights them, and when he is out of Korans everyone can go home and we can move on.

          Then we can focus on real problems like the incredible irresponsibility of the media and political hysteria that fomented this incident in the first place.

 Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.