A Book Burning! Everyone LOVES a bonfire, right?

A couple of years ago I went to a planning meeting for Pagan Pride. As I'm sure everyone here knows, one of the reasons to hold Pagan Pride is to foster good relations between Pagans and non-Pagans. The idea is that we show non-Pagans what it is we really do, and hopefully dispel the notion that we are scary freaks who sacrifice babies.

At this meeting we were discussing possible activities that could be held at the next Pagan Pride, and some of the suggestions were quite good – various games for the kids and adults, a bardic competition, and various workshops were all vetted. Then PBM spoke up.

PBM is one of the dimmer bulbs in this Pagan community. I will not reveal her name, but much to my amusement when I put her first name and an adjective describing her personality into an anagram site it re-arranged the letters to spell "Pea Brained Motion." She’ll always be PBM to me.

When it came her turn to speak she gave a long and enthusiastic speech about how we should hold a book burning at Pagan Pride.

A book burning!

At first I thought she was joking, but no – she was dead serious. Once we all got over the shock of the suggestion, no one present thought this was a good idea. After all, we were trying to get muggles and media people to attend Pagan Pride Day so that we could prove that we are not weirdoes. Most of us understood immediately that any write-up or pictures put in the paper by the local media would feature the book burning. We also knew that anyone, Pagan or not, would be irresistibly reminded of the Nazis and their book burnings.

When this was pointed out to her, PBM insisted any publicity was good publicity, that hardly anyone knew who the Nazis were (seemed to wonder herself - go figure), and argued that the burning would be part of a negativity-banishing ritual. She went on to explain that we wouldn't be burning good books - just what she called "bad" Pagan books which gave the “wrong impression” about Paganism.

Several people at the meeting then expressed the opinion that those attending Pagan Pride wouldn’t like a book burning, and she said, I swear, “Oh come on! Everyone loves a bonfire!”

Her pea brained motion was voted down by a huge majority (one or two of her friends refused to vote, as I recall) but PBM got pissed off with all of us who voted against her pet project, and continued to argue about it for at least an hour. Very little got done in this meeting because of her idiocy, but there was no book burning that year.

Recently I overheard her talking to someone at a Moot, again going on and on about how great it would be to have a public book burning at at upcoming public Samhain ritual. This is after at least two years!

I can't believe that even PBM could hold onto such a patently stupid idea for so long. It's not that people haven't told her it's stupid either - but opposition seems to make her more determined to force her views on everyone. I predict that she will continue to carry on about this until some fool lets her do the book burning, probably in an effort to get her to finally shut up about it.

If we’re very lucky, she’ll get pissed off enough to convert to some fundamentalist religion where she’ll do much less harm to Paganism.