THE WANDERER, JUNE 1, 2006
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Ron Howard, the bald and bearded director who used
to be little Opie of Mayberry, promised that his film
version of THE DA VINCI CODE wouldn't be watered down. It
isn't. All the vicious and absurd lies of the book have
been preserved, even expanded and amplified.
The audacity is almost unbelievable. We see Silas,
the deranged albino "monk" of Opus Dei, murdering several
people, including a nun, while praying and scourging
himself bloody. Author Dan Brown insists that the
"factual" background of the book is thoroughly researched
and accurate, and apparently Howard believes him, though
the simplest check would have told him that Opus Dei
doesn't have monks (and of course has never even been
accused of murder).
I don't suggest he is ignorant of this; obviously he
is deliberately lying. So is Howard.
But the movie's smash worldwide opening, along with
the novel's tremendous sales, shows that there is still a
huge market for lies about the Catholic Church, as there
has been since the days of Nero. Even the reviewers who
have panned the film have been far too gentle, as if its
only flaw were ineptitude.
Howard, like Brown, is a modest talent, and maybe we
should be grateful that he has made an utter mess of
material that was incoherent to begin with. Brown did
supply him with a surefire plot device: the hero, a
Harvard scholar named Robert Langdon (implausibly played
by Tom Hanks), who must solve the baffling murder he's
accused of before the Parisian police, determined to
frame him (Opus Dei controls them too, by the way), can
find him.
But any excitement dissolves in chat, not only
tedious but inaudible to boot. Langdon is assisted by a
young cryptologist named Sophie Neveu, played (just as
implausibly) by Audrey Tautou, who is cute as a button
but barely speaks English.
The chat sinks to its lowest level when Langdon and
Sophie consult an "expert" on Christian history, Sir
Leigh Teabing (Sir Ian McKellen), who explains that Jesus
was just a human sort of fellow, a married father in
fact, whose divinity was never believed in until it was
thought up by the Emperor Constantine in AD 325 and
promulgated by the Council of Nicea. (Howard even
supplies a flashback of the council, with rowdy bishops
screaming at each other.)
Somehow the learned Teabing, Brown's mouthpiece, has
never run across the opening of John's Gospel. Nor does
this occur to the learned Langdon. Or to Brown, or to
Howard. Folks, this is a seriously goofy movie. In that
respect it is faithful to the novel.
I trust I'm not spoiling anything for you when I say
that if Brown, Teabing, and Howard are to be trusted, the
Church has been covering up the real story for 2,000
years. Naturally, this has entailed a bit of homicide.
The Church has tried to wipe out those who knew the
truth, as well as the underground "royal line" of Jesus'
descendants. (Sophie herself turns out to be one of them.
Brown is not shy of positing coincidence.) In modern
times, the Popes have delegated the mayhem. When someone
needs to be whacked, Opus Dei handles it.
Anyway, Leonardo Da Vinci was in on the dangerous
secret, and had to sneak it into his paintings, where it
could be deciphered, centuries later, by Harvard
professors. This is just a rough outline; I've had to
leave a lot out, but Brown and Howard, alas, don't.
One more sample of this bizarre history. During the
Middle Ages, the Church burned five million innocent
women for witchcraft. That's a lot! Why don't we hear
about this in our Western Civ classes?
Brown's history, in fact, reminds me of the
elaborate delusions of intelligent psychotics I used to
hear when I worked in a mental hospital. The big question
is why so many seemingly normal people believe it.
Mugged by Reality
Harold Meyerson of the WASHINGTON POST takes note of
a deep irony in the history of neoconservatism. The
movement began in disillusionment with the Great
Society's urban policies, which led to riots, crime, and
decay, aggravating all the evils spawned by the welfare
state; to this day, the black family hasn't recovered
from the devastation.
In Irving Kristol's famous aphorism, "A
neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by
reality."
But today in Iraq, Meyerson observes,
neoconservatism itself has been mugged by reality. The
neocons urged war on Iraq with all the naive optimism the
old liberals once brought to the American inner city. Now
they too are facing -- or refusing to face -- the
"unintended consequences" of wrongheaded government
action.
Baghdad is in total chaos, with religious fanatics
on a murderous rampage even worse than anything our
cities saw in the sixties. Neoconservatism used to stand
for a pragmatic adaptation of ideological conservatism.
Now it has become an ideology as far out of touch with
reality as the liberalism it reacted against.
A New Home for Conservatives?
What with immigration, war, and spending, President
Bush is now rapidly losing conservative support. Every
day now, WMAL, Washington's biggest talk-radio station,
is flooded with furious calls from people who say they
have been "betrayed" and "sold out" and vow never to vote
Republican again. Yet most of these callers wouldn't
think of voting for a Democrat. They are refugees from
Republicanism, in search of a new home.
So this should be a propitious year for a third
party, one radically opposed to the Big Two. For more
than a decade, Howard Phillips has been working
tirelessly to build a truly conservative organization,
the Constitution Party. Just getting on the ballot is a
labor of Hercules, but this party has done so in 40
states, fielding candidates for Congress as well as
president.
Though we've had our disagreements, Howard is one of
the most principled men I've ever known. He just doesn't
budge from conservative convictions; he's neither a
neocon nor a pseudocon. And for all the Constitution's
flaws, I'd much rather have a government restrained by it
than the kind we've had under the Big Two.
The time has surely come for America to take one
bold step in the right direction. Or we'll be very sorry
we didn't.
+ + +
"When people talk about our two-party system, I
think my fellow Americans must be seeing double" --
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