Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. is Awesome(O). Atlas Shrugged, Not So Much.

I've heard of this guy before. Ace of Spades has a serious Ewok crush on him. But I didn't know he had a blog. But it's going on the roll now, because this...

Don't get me wrong, though; I miss Olbermann. Dylan Ratigan, the reject from the "Young Turks" website who replaced Keith, is a complete tool. Ratigan has an apropos last name and a non-telegenic face. His voice is grating, and he can't form a coherent sentence. A humorless jackass with a two-bit haircut and a one-bit brain.
Don't even get me started on Lawrence O'Donnell and Ed Schultz. They always look like they are sucking on lemons and announcing the apocalypse. Lawrence O'Donnell stares into the camera with all the fake gravitas of a hypnotist who learned his craft off the back of a cereal box. Give it a break, losers.

...made me laugh harder than any blog post in a while. Then he gives the new Atlas Shrugged film, and Ayn Rand's prose a much needed rogering:

I read her books when I was in high school, then college, and I thought they were pretty bad even back then. As I re-read her tortured and miserable prose today in preparation for this review, I could only hear Eric Cartman's "Awesome-O Voice" saying "I. Am. John. Galt. I. will. bore. the. collectivists. to. death. and. save. the. world. with. lots. of. words. saying. the. same. thing. over. and. over. With. Uhm. Adam. Sandler."

That there's funny, I don't care how Objectivist you are.

When All Is Said and Done....

... I gotta hand it to Brietbart. The guy's made himself an empire, whilst being completely unafraid and unapologetic. So if the title of his new book sounds a little precious, so be it.

The Essayist #15: The Real Da Vinci Hoax

Last night Family Guy had a minor minor sub-plot involving DVC, as sure a sign as any that we've hit the coveted point of over-exposure and will beging jumping sharks. What was interesting was how tame the gag was; Lois raves to some un-seen girlfriend over how much she loved it, Stewie grabs it, spends the night reading it, and falls asleep into his porridge. That's it. Gag at the people who denounce the book and then get sucked into it? Probably. But hardly a commentary. We leave that to South Park.

An entire industry has arisen in the wake of DVC by devout Christians into refuting its historical claims: that Constantine "invented" the divinity of Christ at Nicaea, that the Bible as we know it is a purged text, a fiction imposed by Constantine, and, most incredible of all, that Christ was husband to Mary Magdalene and fathered children with her, and that his descendents include the Merovingian kings of France. To this I will add no further input, except to point out that secular historians place the authorship of most of the so-called "alternative" or Gnostic Gospels as no earlier than the 2nd century, AD, and the authorship of the canonical Gospels in the latter half of the 1st century. Beyond that, the debate seems pointless.

But this is not the "Real" Da Vinci Hoax to which my title alludes. The historical claims of Brown's book are, as I said, as old as the 2nd Century, and they have had recurrences in the past, as with the Cathars in the Middle Ages. It's an enemy the Church has to deal with from time to time, in its struggle with the identity of Christ that has been with it since the beginning. Somehow, the Church finds a way to put it down.

No, the real hoax being perpetrated on the public is that Dan Brown is a good author, and that the Da Vinci Code is a good book. I cannot find an explanation for how otherwise intelligent people would not only accept this premise, but willingly transmit it to others, raving about the wonders of it. Admittedly, I came in biased, and perhaps hyper-critical, but even I was at least prepared for Brown to give me a ripping good yarn, a page-turner, if a theologically pulpy one. He did no such thing.

I could find not one element of good writing in this book. The dialogue is hackneyed, the characters one-dimensional, and the plot entirely predictable. Even the Twist at the end surprised me not at all; I had predicted it approximately halfway through the book. The main character, Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard, serves no purpose other than to be a mouthpiece for the Brown's views of Christianity (and they are his, for he writes a sad little statement of "Fact" for a prologue, contending that the Priory of Sion exists, and thus, all the other claims of the novel are to be taken as true). Hardly a chapter goes by without Langdon, in answering a question from stock-ingenue Sophie Neveu in multi-paragraph form, until Brown stops even the pretense of dialogue and removes the quotations, lecturing directly to the reader with all the smugness of a bored adjunct professor. Nor is it ever explained how a symbology professor knows so much about the supposedly secret Priory of Sion without himself being a member. The whole novel seems to believe that the Deep, Dark, Secret Truth is something all educated people are aware of (Sire Leigh Teabing, Langdon's tag-team partner in babble, states this rather baldly) which rather undercuts the drama.

Minor characters are no better. Perhaps the most ludicrous idea in the Da Vinci Code is that there is any such thing as a devout Catholic in Paris. Brown proceeds from the notion that in France Christianity is more than a religion, it's a birthright, and as the stand-in for this notion gives us as the stubborn police captain Bezu Fache, a figure out of Beau Geste, who inexplicably says English idioms like "do something right for a change" to fellow Frenchmen.

Adding to this catalog of Don'ts for Novel Writing is the fact that Brown seems not to have done his homework. When one writes a novel about uncovering great secrets of history, it behooves one to get ones historical details accurate. Brown seems not to have bothered with simple fact-checking. For example, he describes Godefroi de Bouillon, the supposed founder of the Priory of Sion, as a "French king." He was no such thing. Godefroi the Bouillon was a count, and a leader of the First Crusade, and by all accounts a pious man. He is counted among the Kings of Jerusalem, but he did not himself bear that title, because he disdained to wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. Instead, he made do with the style of Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. To call him a French king is entirely misleading.

Another howler occurs when Brown/Langdon has the Knights Templar established by knights of the Second Crusade, after recieving their permission from Baldwin II of Jerusalem. That would have been a neat trick, inasmuch as Baldwin II(r. 1118-1131) had been dead for fifteen years when the Second Crusade (1147-1149)happened. Both military orders (Templars and Hospitallers) did come about during Baldwin's reign, true, but it had nothing to do with the Second Crusade. If Brown had taken a momentary glance at a few history books, he would know this, but as he seems to believe that the history he writes is possessed of more "truthiness" than contemporary records, he gets basic, verifiable facts wrong. All of which leads one to take all other ideas with a grain of salt.

But the final insult is the way the entire story becomes much ado about nothing at the end. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say that the rug gets pulled from under the readers, and the promised Holy Grail towards which the novel has been aiming evaporates into the morning mist. Such is de rigeur in Grail lore from time immemorial, of course; despite their suffering and holiness, the seekers rarely get their hands on the Grail at the end. But when it happens in Parzival it's a commentary on the sinfulness of man, and when it happens in Monty Python, it's a parody. Brown's post-modern transformation of the Grail from a world-shattering secret cache of information to an esoteric exercise in neo-paganism ("The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one.") is nauseatingly hollow, and a literary cop-out unseen since the days of Henry Miller.

To sum up: dull characterizations, bad dialogue, stupid factual errors, and a lame climax. And he's sold millions of copies worldwide, raided Hollywood, and been name-dropped on trendy shows.

All because we just can't accept a celibate Savior.

Kurt Vonnegut Has Become Unstuck In Time

Lileks takes down a target that's been deserving it for years. Smart people whose opinions I respect tell me I should read more Vonnegut, but after sloughing through Slaughter-House Five in high school I never had any interest in it. Maybe I just didn't get the joke. Douglas Adams, whose books describe much the same universe, works because he employs the Guide device for his explications of true insanity: a traveler's resource from Hell, pointing out with chirpy optomism how there's nothing to be optomistic about. That, plus secondary characters who are memorable because their creator actually gives a damn about them instead of using them as archetypes. I freely quote Zaphod Beeblebrox and have referenced him in music reviews; I couldn't remember the name of the Italian wanker who promised to whack Billy Pilgrim if you paid me.

But the real meat is this:

Which is more likely: a book review that says Vonnegut’s criticisms of the Bush Regime must be considered in light of the author’s support of suicide bombers, or a review that says Vonnegut has made statements lauding bombers, BUT he brings up troubling issues / confronts the hypocrisy inherent in Washington / speaks truth to power / speaks Hindu to houseplants / etc.

What's depressing is how beyond parody this all is. It's like I keep expecting a cutaway to a series of explosions with "We'llllll meet agaaaaaaaaain/Don't know wheeerrrreee/Don't know wheeeennnnnnn" on the soundtrack, or "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong or something, but it never does. Instead, all I'm left with is this feeling of impeding doom and the desire to slap the snot out of people while yelling "What the is wrong with you? At what point do you stop making excuses for people who kill civilians for its own sake? At what point do you start making fun of their supporters with half the fervor that you make fun of the President? What's it gonna take, a car-bomb in a Buddhist Temple in San Francisco during Gay Pride Week with accompanying billboards that state: WE WANT TO KILL ALL OF YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE UNHOLY KAFFIRS, AND SO THAT WE CAN RULE THE WORLD?"

And it ends like this: "POO-TEE-WEET?"

'Oo Won the Bloody War, Anyway?

Victor Davis Hanson has a new book about the Peloponessian War, in which he appears to run counter to some of the prevailing scholarship concerning what many consider to be the great folly of ancient Hellas. NRO has an excerpt from the tenth chapter:

Other observers, like the historians Theopompus and Cratippus, felt that the Peloponnesian War did not really end until 394, a thirty-eight-year war in all. In this view, hostilities actually ceased when the Spartan fleet was defeated by Athens at the sea battle at Cnidus (394). Then its expeditionary army was forced home to Sparta from Ionia to meet a new rising threat from Thebes, while the Long Walls of Athens were rebuilt, thereby ending once and for all the saga of the old fifth-century bipolar world of Athenian and Spartan hegemony.

Now this is the kind of revisionism a man can get behind. I'm putting the book on my wish list.

Ayn Rand, Hopeless Romantic

The woman who wrote Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and several other books and essays relating basically the same point would have been 100 years old yesterday, if people not belonging to the House of Winsdor actually lived that long. Andrew Stuttaford, who writes for National Review, has this assessment of her in yesterday's New York Sun (Hat tip: The Corner). It's full of the usual praises and criticisms well-known to Rand fans: she was the sterling defender of capitalism as a moral system, and socialism's most determined critic on both moral and practical grounds. She was also a bit of a screeching harpy, a semi-cult leader, and a rather sub-par fiction author. She's Annie-One-Note, whose stories have all the predictability of a medieval morality play. The good capitalists triumph without even lifting a finger, guarded by truth; the evil socialists devour each other and themselves like the legendary snake.

All of which has the virtue of being true, so far as anyone knows. But what many commentators ignore is that Rand was making an economic as well as a moral argument; that the people who clamor the loudest to soak the rich for the sake of the poor are untrained in managing the vast institutions that the rich do. Seen in that light, Atlas Shrugged becomes not just an ideological tract but a historical lesson in how socetal decline begins, one which is in line with Marx's writings on how it's always the middle class that unseats the upper.

Yet I come to bury Rand, not to praise her. She belongs to the 20th Century, and to the 20th Century, with its Verduns and its Buchenwalds, its Great Societies and its Gulag Archipilagoes, let us consign her. For she believed without question in one precept that the majority of the intelligensia of her age also believed: that sex was free, without cost, and without any purpose than physical satisfaction.

If any of Rand's fiction has a point other than "capitalism good, socialism bad," it's that sex ought to be liberated from the whiney demands of bourgeois morality. Dagny Taggart has an extended monologue about it in Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead begins its main romantic attachment with what bears many of the earmarks of sadomasochism, if not rape. Sex as a procreative act appears almost nowhere in her fiction; despite all the sex and all the marriages, nobody ever gets pregnant. There is a mention at the end of Anthem of what the hero will teach his sons, but Anthem was Rand's first novel, and it is the man who speaks of his future generations, not the woman, and he speaks of them as the future Warriors of the Truth.

Of course, such was de rigeur for most female intellectuals of Rand's century, but it fascinates me that this glaring omission from her own ideas has not received more notice. For Rand, physical reality was the only reality, and man's conceptual faculties were the masters of reality. A can be transformed into B, but not until you accept that A is A. Naming A to be B will not work. Yet the universal physical fact of human existence, the fact that we are all born of woman, is not regarded as relevant to Rand's ideas about the one act which leads to every person born of woman. Sex, to Rand, is a physical act with spiritual flavor, an act of will done according to one's aesthetic. The body demands it, but it feeds the soul, and there is absolutely nothing else to be said about it.

For a proud empiricist, this is little short of preposterous. Here Rand's rigid Apollonianism has made a hole for Romantic gooshiness to enter. Children, by nature, violate her dictum that no one must be made to live for anybody else. Therefore, the act that makes childrem must be re-imagined as something other than what it has been since eons before humanity ever engaged in it. The result of this re-imagining is every bit as esoteric, and has been every bit as harmful, as the faux-altruistic slush that Rand pilloried in every word she ever wrote.