AKMA’s Random Thoughts

What She Said

In yesterday’s New York Times, Laura Miller laid out The da Vinci Code for the fraud it is. I’m going to save the whole article, but among other pertinent observations, she said, “''The Da Vinci Code'' is one long chase scene in which the main characters flee a sinister Parisian policeman and an albino monk assassin, but its rudimentary suspense alone couldn't have made it a hit” (my emphasis) and “ The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy, it seems, is our desire to believe in one.” I only wish they’d allotted her more space, or perhaps printed Margaret Mitchell’s comments alongside and that they’d elicited from Harvard a firm repudiation of the nonsensical, pedagogically-tonedeaf sorts of pseudo-scholarship that the main character represents (with the tacit imprimatur of that storied institution).

I have one or two da Vinci Code gigs coming up, and have turned down others — so I have to admit that Dan Brown is putting some money in my pockets. But liberty in the extremism of [intellectual] vice is no defense; Brown profits from the confusion he engenders between hoax and history, between bogus “symbology” and critical history-of-religions research, but (for all the pious rhetoric of “encouraging free inquiry”) he short-circuits the quest for truth by capitalizing on his readers’ credulity.

Perhaps what hurts most is that even after some serious, thoughtful people read the uncontroversial explanations of why the book’s theories don’t even ascend to the status of crockery, those readers still want to think there’s something to it.