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MEDIA WHORES: COURTESANS AND CHARLATANS OF THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT
by Vox Day
Copyright(c)2005. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE: Building the Brothel
Vir qui amat sapientiam laetificat patrem suum qui autem nutrit scorta perdet substantiam.

The Buggles were wrong. Video didn’t kill the radio star. The truth is precisely to the contrary. Video not only made the radio star huge, it also made him a best-selling author and, more often than not, a pop icon to boot. Radio, television, cable, the internet and even traditional newspaper and book publishing have insensibly merged into one massive and amorphous entity, known to its consumers as simply “the media”. But it too is a consumer; it is a voracious beast, devouring all that come within its grasp, and only the strongest, most single-minded parasites can survive and thrive in its acidic maw.

With the gradual transformation of what was once news into infotainment, the requirements for the talking heads who serve as the primary conduit from the beast to its beholders changed too. In the early days of television, talking heads were reporters who had spent years in the field, researching, interviewing, writing and recording their own news stories. Murrow, Cronkite, and even the recently retired Dan Rather are examples of this sort. They feigned an Olympian objectivity, hid their political affiliations and projected the sort of deep and immobile gravitas that made the term “network anchor” seem so fitting.

As the producers became more sophisticated and technologically adept, it became less and less necessary to have an experienced reporter reading the news or even writing original stories in the newspaper. Gravitas went by the wayside as attractive, focus-tested women were added to the mix, and with the exception of the primary network news broadcasts – the majestic second triumvirate of Brokaw, Willams and Jennings – the two-headed bi-gendered news team came to the fore. Teleprompters and professional writers meant that the talking heads were no longer required to write or think, allowing producers to concentrate on what matters most to the television viewing audiences, namely, looking at attractive men and women.

This second generation of television news brought to the forefront men with chiseled jaws and names like porn stars(2), accompanied by blondes with journalism-lite backgrounds consisting of acting credits and tasteful nude photography(2). This model quickly became de riguer for the local news format, which is now such a matter of rote that one cannot easily distinguish between the ABC affiliate’s newscast in Minneapolis and the CBS affiliate’s newscast in Albuquerque. The basic cast is always the same; the forty-something neo-patriarch with a full head of hair touched with gray at the temples, the thirty-something blonde co-anchor, (ethnic optional in cities with large Black and Hispanic populations), a weatherman who is either a sexless androgyne or a beta blonde, and last and least, the roguish sports anchor.

The first cable channel, CNN, was largely content to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, although its expansion of the news spigot from one to 24 hours daily would insensibly make its effect known over time. However, the shift from journalism-free journalists to full-blown infotainers accelerated quickly with the appearance of the Fox News Channel, which like Athena sprang fully accoutered for battle from the head of Roger Ailes, wisely eschewing the leftist slant hidden behind the condescending pretense at objectivity of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.

Infotainment had long been present within the cabal, of course, but it was kept on the sidelines by an embarrassed media elite, in the context of crossover shows like 20/20 and Today. Barbara Walters became the unquestioned queen of the quasi-news with her infamous interviews on ABC, The Barbara Walters Specials, where she enlightened the American public by eliciting answers to insightful questions that no one else had ever dared to ask of international figures and celebrities.(3)

The terror of creeping infotainment at the networks during the early Eighties was such that Ms Walters managed to hold a co-anchor spot at ABC only briefly before being banished to matters arboreal. But it returned with vengeance in 1996, when the Fox News Channel burst onto the scene and in less than seven years, not only overturned the existing order but turned the cable news ratings war from a horse race into something bearing closer resemblance to a prison rape.(4)

The brilliance of Roger Ailes was two-fold. First, recognizing the iron law of supply and demand in a country evenly divided between what passes for “liberal” and “conservative” in the political spectrum, he offered a taste of what had hitherto been absent from the television screens of America. Where CNN was self-consciously international, Fox News was proudly patriotic. Where the ABCNNBCBS cabal inordinately consisted of those supporting Democrats(5), Fox dared to put self-proclaimed Republicans on the air without the accompanying soundtrack of The Imperial March(6) or pairing them with a polar opposite providing instant counterpoint.

Ailes’ logic was impeccable, demonstrating that alone among the executives of the media industry, only he understood the lessons of the talk radio phenomenon. Of the 105,405,100 votes cast in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore and George Bush both received about 48 percent of the vote(7). But not only does the ABCNNBCBS news cabal market itself entirely towards the pro-Gore 48 percent, it is joined in doing so by PBS, MSNBC, and, to a lesser extent, CNBC. This abandonment of the opposite 48 percent equated to a wide-open market of epic proportions, which Ailes has exploited with ruthless abandon. The motto is “fair and balanced” and while the actual slant is only vaguely rightward, the symbolism is much more strongly so. Liberal-minded CNN cast-offs, such as Geraldo Rivera and Greta van Susteren, are forced to keep their inclinations firmly in check, while moderates are spun as conservatives at almost every opportunity.

Second, the Fox News chairman wholeheartedly embraced the concept of being the humble servant of the marketplace. The media has long had an inflated view of itself; it is nearly impossible to listen to a mainstream journalist recite a ponderous description of his ever-so-weighty responsibilities without bursting into laughter. The elite journalists see themselves as the Fourth Estate, asking the tough questions and dedicated to afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. If you have ever seen a journalist performing a Monica on a big celebrity get in what is apparently supposed to pass for an interview, it’s not hard to see that the media are not only deluded in this regard, but are also incredibly ill-suited to accurately observe human events.

Due to this delusional self-regard, executives at the ABCNNBCBS cabal have long considered themselves above the dirty and unpleasant realities of the market, while government-funded PBS actually is free to ignore the wishes of great unwashed as it fulfills its sacred mission of allowing liberals to pretend they are intellectuals and loftily look down their noses at those who prefer entertainment that offers a frisson of divertissement. Fox News, on the other hand, appears to have an interest in making money, which in a capitalist society tends to involve paying a certain amount of attention to what the consumer wants.

And what the cable news consumer wants, apparently, is pretty girls, in-depth coverage of murder trials, missing children(8) and car chases. Only eighteen months before the launch of the Fox News Channel, the famous O.J. Simpson car chase(9) and subsequent trial took place, and apparently it left an indelible impression on the soon-to-be Fox News Channel executives. It could be seen, in retrospect, as the per
fect Foxian trifecta, combining a celebrity, a car chase and a murder trial. Had there only been an Amber Alert involved somewhere in the mix, it would have been the perfect story. And although the quattrocephalic news cabal flogged the O.J. trial mercilessly, no channel drew more useful conclusions from it than Fox News.

In the eight years since it made its debut, Fox News has covered 416 car chases, 42 missing children and 11 murder trials, which is approximately 469 more stories of the sort than PBS has covered(10). On a directly related note, the O.J. trial also marked the launch of the instant news celebrity. Greta van Susteren, Marcia Clark and Gloria Allred are now inescapable, appearing with wearisome regularity on the screen like the haggish handmaidens of Big Brother, three Erinyes convinced that Orestes is to be found hiding somewhere in a television studio.

But if O.J. got the ball rolling, it was the Monica Lewinsky scandal that cemented the instant news celebrity in the public consciousness. Not only do we owe Miss Lewinsky a linguistic debt(11), but without her and Paula Jones we would not have come to know and love Lucianne Goldberg, her lovable teddy bear of a son, Jonah, Ann Coulter, and interchangeable Republican Barbie.(12) But it was not only these perma-guests that were made by the scandal; shows such as the O’Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes also saw their popularity explode.

The reason was simple. There was continuing interest in a story in which very little was known and almost nothing was happening. Even if the ABCNNBCBS cabal had been inclined to cover the self-destruction of a Democratic president – they weren’t – there was very little that a show even half-heartedly committed to hard news could cover. Bill Clinton wasn’t talking, Monica Lewinsky wasn’t talking, Paul Jones wasn’t talking, and even those who weren’t directly involved in the two cases were claiming legal considerations that prevented them from speaking with reporters.

But it wasn’t possible to simply ignore a story that had more compelling elements than any three Hollywood movies. Was Bill Clinton’s penis really crooked? Were we really supposed to believe that a notoriously horny old dog would hook up with a ripening young 38DD and keep his hands off her most prominent assets? Had he really done THAT with a CIGAR… with Yasser Arafat was waiting in the next room? Add a bad rhythm guitar and a moustache, and you practically had a 70’s porn flick in the making. No wonder the world was captivated.

And yet, there was still really nothing to say. No one actually knew anything new until Matt Drudge unveiled some shocking tidbit of information, at which point everyone learned about it at the same time. But the camera abhors a vaccuum no less than nature, and thanks to the 24-hour cable news channels, more time than ever required filling. Enter the new talking head, who substituted wisecracks for written copy, who was quick enough to think and spar on her feet, and was entertaining enough to allow people to forget that they were no more informed at the end of a show than they were at the start.(13)

Conservatives excelled immediately at this game, partly because years of being shut out of the mainstream media had prepared them for an adversarial relationship with the television hosts, and partly, as was previously mentioned, because they were seldom permitted to appear alone on a ABCNNBCBS show without being accompanied by a liberal(14) Greek anti-Chorus. The fact that many of them had some degree of familiarity with the brutally combative arena of the conservative talk radio ghetto meant that they were seldom thrown off-balance when a deceitful host tried to set them up for an ambush or a bait-and-switch.(15)

In short, they were ready to rumble. And audiences fell in love with hand-to-hand combat long before the first gladiators were shouting “morituri te salutamus!”(16) No blood is shed in the televised arena, but the news shoutfests bear far more similarity to a gladitorial combat than to the somber pronouncements of Walter Cronkite. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; certainly it is vastly preferable for half of the viewing public to see someone championing their point of view instead of being forced to sit through pompous neosocialist lectures condemning the many evils of their bourgeous perspective. Give and take will always hold the attention longer than a monologue, Shakespeare’s excellent soliloquoys notwithstanding.

However, there can be little question that despite the divergence of views on offer, the end result provides far more entertainment than information. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, for as novelists as diverse as Umberto Eco(17), Rigoberta Menchu and Dan Brown have all discovered, few things sell better than a product that makes its consumers feel smarter. You may not actually be in possession of a single iota of new information after watching Bill O’Reilly thump his chest and shout down a guest or seeing Tim Russert delve into the minutae of the House Appropriations Committee with a congressman, but you will nevertheless be left with the vague impression that you are better informed than if you had instead tuned in to the third re-run of Friends that evening. After all, you’ve been watching the news!

FOOTNOTES:

1. Can’t you see Stone Philips fronting the list of names starring in “I Know Who You Did Last Summer”? Okay, maybe it’s just me.
2. “I did pose for ‘Black and White’ magazine, a prestigious, artistic publication, several years ago.” Former CNN Headline News anchor Andrea Thompson in The New York Post. In 2002, the Washington Post reported that the CNN anchor had also performed “clothing-challenged work for an Australian magazine and an Italian erotic flick….”
3. She reached the apex of her unique brand of unintentional comedy in 1981, when she asked actress Katherine Hepburn the question: “If you were a tree, what kind would you be?” It seems Kate saw herself as an oak. I think I’m more of a birch. But a really tough-barked, hard-core birch you wouldn’t want to mess with, you know what I’m saying? A son of a birch, if you will.
4. The August 11, 2004 ratings showed that Fox News Channel’s prime time ratings averaged 2.058 million viewers, almost double the ratings for CNN, MSNBC and CNBC combined. Fox’s top show, The O’Reilly Factor, almost tripled the viewership of its top rival, CNN’s Larry King Live, with 2.666 million viewers compared to 985 thousand. Hang onto that soap, Larry.
5. 89 percent of 130 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents reported voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, compared to 7 percent for George Bush, the elder. Twelve years later, it is still almost impossible to name a single anchor or reporter working for the cabal that does not openly or implicitely pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party.
6. Or, as it is known in the colloquial, Darth Vader’s Theme.
7. Al Gore received 50,999,897 votes, or 48.38 percent of the popular vote, while George W. Bush received 50,456,002 votes, 47.87 percent. However, since the United States of America is a constitutional republic and not a pure representative democracy, Bush’s 271-266 victory in the Electoral College made the popular results irrelevant. That’s all completely beside the point here, but it’s best to get it out of the way anyhow.
8. Missing children who happen to be pretty little girls, anyhow. I have no evidence that Fox News has a detailed system wherein a missing child is assigned 2 points for being white, 4 points for being blonde, and 10 points for having an attractive mother, but I am suspicious. And is it truly only little girls who go missing? I’m just curious.
9. The O.J. car chase was the greatest moment in live news history. Listening to “Robert Higgins” telling Peter Jennings in an outrageously fake black accent so obvious that only a lobotomized Canadian could think it was real: “Oh
my Lord, this is quite tenses… Ah see… OJ! Ah see OJ, man!” was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the ultimate in news entertainment. We were screaming with laughter almost from the start. The best part was how Jennings had no idea that the caller was a prankster until Al Michaels explained it to him. Yeah, they’re real sharp, our media elite.
10. Yeah, like I watched and counted. If you harbor a strict accuracy fetish, simply substitute “a lot” for each of the categories mentioned.
11. I would argue that she must be credited, not only with her inadvertant eponymous contribution, but also for popularizing the concept of “obtaining one’s kneepads” as a synonymous alternative.
12. Ann Coulter, Barbara Olsen and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick nee’ Conway were the original three. Since then, Laurie Dhue, Linda Vester, Rita Cosby, Heather Nauert and Michelle Malkin have followed in their footsteps, but none of them have yet demonstrated the unique combination of savage intelligence and eye-rolling, hair-tossing nonchalance of the original.
13. Being blonde and looking good in a miniskirt didn’t exactly hurt either.
14. For simplicity’s sake, I use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in the sense of being largely synonymous with “Democrat” and “Republican”. The former indicating an orientation towards the political left, the latter indicating an orientation towards the political right. As the two major parties have merged into a single bi-factional big government ruling party, these terms have become increasingly meaningless. See Appendix B.
15. Thomas Sowell explained why he turns down 90 percent of his TV and radio invitations in an April 2004 column, entitled “Bait-and-switch media”. After being invited on the program to talk about his book on affirmative action, he found himself being grilled by a third party about minimum wage laws. The old lion, familiar with the trick, left the host in the lurch live on the air by simply hanging up the phone. Booyakasha!
16. “We who are about to die salute you!”
17. I once asked Dr. Eco about the characterization of his novels being extremely successful, but often unread. He replied: “I must confess, there are books that I love very much, and I didn’t read them completely. It happens. When “The Name of the Rose” came out, so difficult and full of Latin quotations, and it had the success, it started the legend that it was an unread book. I am content.” And yes, we were actually hanging out at a monastery that day… because nobody kicks it like the real old skool.

The NYT on paternity testing>:

In the most recent case to make headlines, Ms. Frey went to court to set aside the paternity judgment against the man who was paying child support for her 4-year-old daughter and attached the results of a DNA test that showed the girl’s father was actually someone else. Gloria Allred, the lawyer for Ms. Frey, said her client had believed “in good faith” that the man paying child support was the girl’s father and argued that while women obviously have the responsibility to establish who the father is, so do men.

“Any man who’s alleged to be the father of a child born outside of marriage is entitled to take that DNA test” to establish paternity, she said. “If he did not take the test, then he needs to take responsibility for his failure to do so. He shouldn’t blame the mother.”

Of course, if men did begin taking paternity tests as a matter of course, the caterwauling of women afraid of having to support their bastard children by themselves would probably lead the feminist-fearing politicians to pass laws declaring that the first man whose shadow fell upon the child will be held financially responsible for it.

I find it more than a little ironic that despite the constant feminist declarations that a) women are fully equal to men in all ways, and b) fathers are an unnecessary child-rearing option, that the administrative family “courts” inevitably find that a man, any man, regardless of his relationship to the child, is required to provide financial support.

If we as a nation ever decide to get serious about the darkening demographic future, both divorce and abortion will be banned, a social stigma will be attached to women working and all children will be tested for their paternity at birth*. This won’t happen, since our quasi-democracy is an inherently reactive system, so the inevitable collapse of the Equalitarian Society will likely lead towards something significantly less protective of potential mothers and more exploitive and controlling of them.

*This will likely happen first, as the insurance companies will surely demand it in order to aid their genetic screening.

From Editor & Publisher:

Just days after it ran an editors’ note–under pressure from outside and within–that sort of admitted it had erred in a blast at Fox News’ Gerald Rivera during the Katrina tragedy, The New York Times finally ran a full correction on Sunday, on its editorial page, for a miscue by columnist Paul Krugman, while announcing a new policy on noting errors on that page.

Krugman had three times previously admitted getting wrong part of his Aug. 19 column about media recounts of the 2000 Bush-Gore race, but critics kept claiming that he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins wrote on Sunday that it had turned into a “correction run amok.”

After publishing his third correction on the Web, Krugman asked Collins, she wrote, “if he could refrain from revisiting the subject yet again in print. I agreed, feeling we had reached the point of cruelty to readers. But I was wrong. The correction should have run in the same newspaper where the original error and all its little offspring had appeared.”

One shudders to think how many trees would perish in the service of correcting Paul Krugman’s many errors were any of the New York Times editors to know the first thing about economics. I spotted six notable errors within the first three chapters of one of his books when I was researching the chapter on him for my profitable, but unpublishable Media Whores: Courtesans and Charlatans of the American Commentariat.

Actually, if anyone has an interest in that, I can post a chapter or two here.

Last Week: 10-4. Season: 27-19. Fantasy: 2-1.

W-Cincinnati Bengals over Houston Texans
W-Tampa Bay Buccaneers over Detroit Lions
W-Indianapolis Colts over Tennessee Titans
W-New Orleans Saints over Buffalo Bills
W-Baltimore Ravens over New York Jets
W-Atlanta Falcons over Minnesota Vikings
Carolina Panthers over Green Bay Packers
L-Jacksonville Jaguars over Denver Broncos
L-Seattle Seahawks over Washington Redskins
San Francisco 49ers over Arizona Cardinals
W-Philadelphia Eagles over Kansas City Chiefs
L-Dallas Cowboys over Oakland Raiders
W-New York Giants over St. Louis Rams
L-New England Patriots over San Diego Chargers

These picks are still subject to change. I’m not sure about Dallas over Oakland, I need to look into the Eagles’ injury situation a little more and I’ve probably got the Carolina-Green Bay game too low. I’ve yet to speak to my partner Chokechain too, and he’ll surely have some insane insights that I’d do better to ignore.

It seems to me that the lightweights have all but taken over the conservative media. Set aside the historical absurdities of Malkin and the overt inanities of Shapiro, consider today’s National Review Online. There are a grand total of twelve articles cum columns on its homepage. Of these, one is dedicated to the Grand Theme of the present administration, the war. Two are dedicated to Katrina. There is one generally silly piece that appears to deal with media bias and one long stream of rumblings – including some eyebrow-raising praise for the Old Left – from the resident curmudgeon, John Derbyshire. Two columns on Tom Delay’s travails, one solid piece disemboweling the logic of static tax models and no less than four (4!) television and movie reviews.

Furthermore, The Corner is filled to the brim with a discourse that is not remarkably deeper than what one might expect at an MTV-related blog, minus the vulgarities and nUsp33k. I was almost embarrassed to be reading it, and I regularly write about fantasy football!

Now, there are several possibilities here. As the Fraters Libertas-nominated official columnist of the National Organization for Women, I would be remiss if I did not point out that NRO now has a woman editor, and as everyone knows by now, I expect female intellectuals to be rather more interested in the latest revelations from the idiot box and People Magazine than in such small and passing matters as death, war and taxes. (Knowing that this statement will cause some inadvertant panty-bunching, I went back to look at who wrote what and discovered that the only three pieces written by women are those focused on – hold your breath – the Oliver Twist movie, the Truman Capote movie and the Geena Davis TV show. If I’m such a stupid mysogynist, then why are my baseless suspicions always confirmed so readily?)

However, I suspect that the embrace of silliness on the part of NRO is more than the current editing-by-chick from which it suffers. The more insidious problem is that conservatives have been betrayed by their standard bearer, so they are in a period of doubt as to what conservatism even means these days. Hence the coining of new modifying adjectives, the appearance of neo-compassionate, strong government, pragma-conservatives and inevitable falling away of the true conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter.

I find it very interesting that while the three most popular WND writers – Pat, Ann and me – regularly excoriate the Bush administration, the “leading” conservative publication is largely silent on the negatives, preferring instead to focus on the rapidly decreasing number of positives when it’s possible and blathering on about ephemeral trivialities when it’s not.

Or perhaps it’s too many years of weak opposition, after all, successfully engaging the liberal Democratic line these days doesn’t exactly require a mind honed like a katana made by a Japanese swordmaster. All I know that I don’t regret giving up my NR Digital subscription last year. I didn’t do it out of anger or even annoyance, it was simply the realization that I’d accumulated twelve weeks worth without once feeling the desire to read one.

My mind may not be clean, but at least it’s not full of fluff. Forget the Lesser Evil… Cthulhu in 2008!

Israel wants to put the US military in action:

The United States and its allies must act to stop Iran’s nuclear programs — by force if necessary — because conventional diplomacy will not work, three senior Israeli lawmakers from across the political spectrum warned yesterday. As a last resort, they said, Israel itself would act unilaterally to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms.

Here’s the question. If a nuclear Iran is a serious and direct threat to Israel – and I’m not arguing that it isn’t – why is it the United States’ responsibility to deal with it? Israel clearly has the ability to deal with the threat, as its lawmakers readily admit, so why should the responsibility devolve upon Americans?

Blessing Israel, as Christians are called to do, does not involve blind obedience to Israeli lawmakers anymore than giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s requires paying taxes one does not owe.

The reality is that nuclear technology is very close to being beyond the control of the nation-state. While this is somewhat frightening, as chaotic periods of historical transition are usually quite unpleasant, the truth is that it is actually likely to increase individual freedom in the long term. As Carroll Quigly points out in his insightful Tragedy And Hope, the cheap and ready availability of military-level weapons technology to the masses has always had the tendency to decrease the ability of central governments to use force to oppress their people.

The problem lies in the governments’ inevitable attempts to retain the upper hand, which can often be quite violent. I do not think it is an accident that it should be at this time of a teetering status quo that the leaders of Australia, the UK and the USA should be publicly making noises about using their militaries to suppress civil liberties in their countries.

It seems we live in interesting times, unfortunately.

We apologize for the recent service outage. Although it somehow seems to escape nearly everyone’s attention, I do have a Real Job which occasionally necessitates blogging downtime. The reason I do not ever write about it is that, as with the Destroyer in Macroscope, the intellectual content would sear your brain, albeit from utter boredom instead of a conceptual mind-scrambler.

I did, however, spot a nice used Ferrari on offer today as I was out and about. It was an elegant grey beast, but not nearly flashy enough for my liking. Let’s face it, if you’re going to drive Italian, you’ve simply got to be obnoxious about it.

National Review reviews the anti-Hillary Clinton commercial:

In the glorious future, with the issues so perfectly framed, “Democrat” and “liberal” have withered away, and everyone presumably knows that their choice is between upright, sincere independents (like Allen) and icy, extremist Republicans. Ah, to dream.

Liberals are serious about human rights in this world too. Working out a subplot, Allen’s aides keep reminding her about the Nigeria situation: In accordance with sharia, Nigeria is about to put a woman to death for committing adultery. Allen is concerned.

Throughout, Allen is shown confidently ordering around generals and positioning aircraft carriers (see, this is why stereotypes are bad). And as Commander limps through its 38th minute, she brings the Nigerian ambassador to a Joint Chiefs’ meeting and proceeds to illustrate how the Marines will storm his country if the woman isn’t released immediately.

While many people labor under the idea that the world would be a more peaceful place if women were in charge, I have my suspicions that the opposite is likely true. I don’t think we should have invaded Iraq simply because the Ba’ath dictatorship got its kicks by going Fargo on its citizens, but there apparently there are more than a few women who fantasize about sending in the Marines because a country applies a law supported by one-sixth of the world’s population to a single individual.

Fortunately, Hillary will probably be too occupied with oppressing the American citizenry to bother playing Global Mommy, although it is true her spiritual godfather was able to invade countries and slaughter civilians at the same time. Perhaps her total lack of a maternal instinct will be one plus for the Lizard Queen as president.

Is there anyone here who actually plans to watch this show? I certainly don’t.

A Jay Nordlinger reader exposes Dan Brown yet again:

My colleague Christopher Howse has pointed out that you can tell that The Da Vinci Code is rubbish just by its name. Students of art refer to the man in question as ‘Leonardo’, ‘Da Vinci’ being simply the identifier of his town of origin. So Dan Brown’s title is the equivalent of a book about Jesus being called Of Nazareth. [That is much better than my “of Orange” example.] To be fair, though, these things do not follow a common rule. A friend of mine who had done a thesis on Correggio applied for an art history fellowship at a well-known university. One of those interviewing him for the post asked, ‘So where did Correggio come from?’ My friend replied truthfully, ‘From Correggio.’ He sensed at once that he should have spared his questioner’s blushes. He failed to get the fellowship.

I never consciously thought about it that way, but it might be one reason why I could never bring myself to bother reading The Da Vinci Code despite the fact that I’ll cheerfully plow through the complete John Norman or Patrick O’Brien in a matter of weeks. I’m no literary snob, but one does have to draw a line somewhere… although I rather feel as if I’m biting the hand that doesn’t exactly feed me, but does toss me a few treats now and then, considering that Pocket has amassed a fair amount of the coin of the realm thanks to Mr. Brown.