Want to laugh until your head explodes?
OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. Still, with that new Dan Brown book on the loose, people here in Washington, D.C., are jumpy. We could all use a laugh.
So, for your reading pleasure, I offer what may be the most ridiculous thing that I have read in a major newspaper in a long, long time (and folks, that’s saying something). We are, of course, talking about a story linked to the public-relations gambit that Brown has taken to the bank millions and millions of times. The New York Daily News serves up a pretty standard pop-culture earthquake fluff piece about the secrecy surrounding the book until we hit this:
The little that is known includes that “The Symbol” again features Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, this time unraveling a mystery that has everything to do with the Freemasons. The action takes place over 12 hours in Washington, D.C. (washington.org/lostsymbol steers visitors to the presumed sites in the book).
While the publisher has been tweeting clues, they all refer to author’s life. Brown himself is a man of mystery. Since “The Da Vinci Code” became an international phenomenon in 2003, Brown has hidden himself away from the world.
It was partly Catholic church’s reaction to “The Da Vinci Code” that drove him underground. The novel put forth that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and begot a line of lesser royalty in the south of France. That thinking wasn’t original, but it was still incendiary and didn’t sit well with many Catholics up to and including the Vatican.
Certainly Pope Benedict XVI is no fan. His first book as pontiff was “Jesus of Nazareth” and was seen as a corrective to Brown’s heretical depiction of the savior.
Don’t you just love it when mainstream journalists write in passive voice?
This is, of course, the amazingly flexible grammatical device that allows a reporter to claim that Pope Benedict XVI — after decades of work as a theologian and after writing shelves full of books, both scholarly and devotional — actually sat at his desk one day and exclaimed, “Behold! This Dan Brown guy is a threat to the faith of the apostles and the martyrs! I had better write a book real quick to do something about this dangerous man.”
How would a reporter source such a wild claim, other than by making use of a small puff of grammatical fog? Who is being quoted here? Can anyone find a single voice of authority in the Vatican or perhaps a major scholar who has studied the work of Pope Benedict XVI who would make such a claim?
It’s hard to Google such a concept, because the search terms are so, so, popular. Go ahead. Do a search for “Jesus, Dan Brown, Benedict XVI” and have fun doing some surfing for relevant material. If you find anything that backs up this factual statement in the Daily News, something that is not written in passive voice, please let me know.
Hat tip? Diogenes, of course.
 | Posted at 2:39 pm |  Print
| Permalink | Trackback |
Comments (19) |
September 15, 2009, at 4:13 pm
Is the writer actually insinuating that Dan Brown feels physically threatened by the Catholic Church or maybe Benedict?
Point 2 - Maybe he should have read some of the articles written by Catholics and speeches from folks at “the Vtican” critical of the DaVinci Code. The problem was the ficticious history of the Catholic Church that he was putting in the mouths of experts in his story that is critiqued. The Mary Magdalen bit was just nuttiness that most Catholics I know and read brushed off as inconsequential.
Point 3 - He should glance through Benedict’s book on Jesus to point out for his readers where he refutes the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.
Good thing I put my soda down before I read this post.
September 15, 2009, at 4:18 pm
Dan Brown = Salman Rushdie (for Catholics). I guess he no longer travels in countries with large Catholic populations…….like the US……
very funny……
September 15, 2009, at 4:35 pm
Comments for the both of you…
Julia, I am sure you would admit that “most Catholics I know” is not a typical spectrum of Catholics. The book was manna for ex-Catholics and inactive Catholics, I would imagine.
Chris, based on press coverage, I assume that most of the population of New Hampshire is Episcopal.
September 15, 2009, at 4:51 pm
Take a look at the list of stories this intellectual juggernaut writes and you’ll begin to see what kind of “journalist” she is:
http://www.nydailynews.com/nydn/form/searchResults.jsp?site=news|boroughs|sports|entertainment|latino|gossip|lifestyle|money|opinions|travel&sort=date:D:R:d1&q=inmeta:nydn%252estory_byline~Sherryl%20Connelly
September 15, 2009, at 5:26 pm
Should not have used that phrase out, it was rather Pauline Kael of me. But most Catholic writers and speakers were angered, if angered is the right word, at the misrepresentation of history. They might have spent some time refuting the Magdalen lineage and the murderous, albino monk, but that was just dopey stuff.
Ergo, if Brown was going to get clobbered by an angry Catholic it would be for the history speeches and disquisitions to his side-kick. There’s enough real bad things in church history, no need to make up stuff.
Yup, the ex-Catholics and non-church-going Catholics loved it, but so did some Catholics in my choir! They didn’t think anybody would believe the garbage history, but my law partner did. She said it wasn’t anything she hadn’t learned in Presyterian Sunday school.
September 15, 2009, at 5:33 pm
It’s every novelists dream: one of his or her books ignites millions and spawns TV shows & movies. I would like to give an appreciative chuckle about it, but the reflection that part of this uproar is due to ignorance on the part of so many stops me.
September 15, 2009, at 7:28 pm
I would like to hear in greater detail about Mr. Brown’s attempts to elude the Jesuit Black Ops. Nothing that would compromise his security, of course, but at least it would be nice to hear him reflect on how it feels and why he bravely chooses to continue his work anyway.
September 15, 2009, at 8:02 pm
Stephen King I think in 2005 was at the university of Maine and he was giving a talk at which he said something like, ‘If I come back here in 2011 and I look on your bedstand and see that you’re reading the latest Dan Brown book, I am going to chase you down your driveway and scream after you, ‘Where are your books!? Why are you subsisting on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?!’
I try to avoid judging Mr. Brown, although his historical claims are essentially of little value.
With relation to the blog post It’s hard to believe how the media comes up with the sort of stuff. I find that this is fitting though that the NY daily news would print an article like that on the 3rd anniversary of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech which received similarly fair and accurate treatment by the media.
God Bless,
September 15, 2009, at 8:08 pm
He is the great and powerful Dan Brown!
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain….:-)
September 16, 2009, at 3:04 am
HI, thank you for posting this blog and the video. I am a huge Dan Brown fan, but I’m always amazed at how serious many people take this.
September 16, 2009, at 3:50 am
Sorry, tmatt, I think the paper has managed to save its blushes by using the weasel words “was seen as”.
It’s not saying Papa Benny wrote it *as* a corrective, it’s saying it was *seen* as a corrective. Seen by whom, we’re not told; doubtless, we may assume it was so viewed by the corps of albino assassin friars sent out by Opus Dei to do away with the monstrous threat
Though I am impressed that, although this time round it’s the Freemasons’ toes that have been stepped on by Danny boy, they still managed to drag the Church into the story.
September 16, 2009, at 7:16 am
Martha:
That’s the point of the post — the passive voice construction as a way of avoiding actual reporting. That’s bad all the way around.
September 16, 2009, at 7:18 am
You know, now that I think about it, where DID the Daily News reporter get that idea? It had to come from somewhere.
I wonder if that is in the book’s PR materials.
September 16, 2009, at 11:05 am
Dan Brown’s nicer to the Freemasons than to Rome because his depiction of people who believe in God yet who don’t fight over the definition of that concept fits his apostate ideals.
That depiction too is a lie because the York Rite and Knights Templar are explicitly Christian.
But when did facts matter to Dan?
September 16, 2009, at 11:37 am
I can’t wait for Dan Brown’s expose of the history of Unitarian Universalism…
September 16, 2009, at 12:07 pm
I believe he’s going to reveal how the UUs are operating out of a secret moonbase.
September 16, 2009, at 12:14 pm
It’s hard to see how any journalist would would “see” “Jesus of Nazareth” as a corrective to “The Da Vinci Code” given that the amount of media attention given to “Jesus of Nazareth” was approximately 1/100th of 1% of that given to “The Da Vinci Code.” Unless I missed it, “Jesus of Nazareth” was not reviewed in the Sunday New York Times or at all in the Los Angeles Times.
Of course what “Jesus of Nazareth” is a corrective to is the scholarship that has sought to cast doubt on the Gospels. As books are published in that line of scholarship they also receive much more press attention than was given to “Jesus of Nazareth.” (See, e.g., coverage of Bart Ehrman.) It strikes me as fairly sensational for a sitting Pope to enter the fray. But the press just didn’t seem interested.
We have a sitting Pope who is one of the great thinkers of our times. He merits much more serious attention than he is given by the press. I urge his “Introduction to Christianity” upon anyone who is interested in the great intellectual debates of our times. I believe it be one of the great books of the 20th Century.
September 17, 2009, at 10:34 am
Dan,
You are right about Introduction to Christianity.
September 18, 2009, at 4:16 pm
Along the same lines, the Daily Telegraph published the 20 worst lines in Dan Brown’s books. It’s absolutely hilarious. My favorites:
14. Angels and Demons, chapter 100: Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World - The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata.
The Rio de la Plata. Between Argentina and Uruguay. One of the major rivers of the Old World. Apparently.
The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué.
A keen eye indeed.
13 and 12. The Lost Symbol, chapter 1: He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.
The Da Vinci Code, chapter 17: Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office.
Oh – the Falcon 2000EX with the Pratt & Whitneys? And the Manurhin MR-93? Not the MR-92? You’re sure? Thanks.