Clowns purposely set out to amuse and entertain.
And even though they remain in character during their performance, they acknowledge elsewhere it's just a character and just a performance. They don't try to claim they
really have big feet and large red noses. Nor do their acts trample upon the graves of accomplished men recently deceased -- in Onizuka's case, in the line of duty.
Nor is Burns' book the least bit entertaining. As I wrote initially, it's a painfully tedious recitation of an unremarkable life, populated by flat caricatures, and punctuated only by pompous exaggerations of the author's prowess. As putative fact it has been proven to be a deliberate fabrication. As fiction it simply sucks.
Burns does it by dint of being stupid and obtuse.
And downright distasteful. As I mentioned, if he had stuck to distant historical figures for his ghost stories, practically no one would care whether they were true. Where instead he deals with the recently dead and with historical events within most people's memories and -- in some cases -- squarely within some people's occupational and professional expertise, running around calling those people liars and frauds is just not funny. Burns is a "clown" with no talent at it, and no sense of humor.
People who fear obscurity more than ridicule have no problem being laughed at and scorned, so long as that attention is directed at them. Fringe claimants don't care that their critics ridicule them. They revel in it, wrongly believing that everyone sees them the way they see themselves, and see the critics as sheeple who are being rightly ruffled by these "new" ideas. Once you propose to write off criticism and refutation as merely "emotional" responses to having been exposed to fringe claims, you can justify ignoring its content.
Both he and his bestest buddy in the whole world have logged in today, no doubt to congratulate themselves.
Of course. I didn't expect them to be able stay away for long. Someone with Burns' bottomless ego can't abide for long the notion that someone might be talking about him. They'll continue lurking for quite some time, congratulating themselves on having generated so much ridicule.
