Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006 by Gene

Argument in favor of state-sponsored neutering
Britney Spears is pregnant again

You know what I look forward to? I look forward to the day when she is no longer news. Not that she won't continue to make news, but that she will be unimportant enough that news about her does not become a national headline. It happened with Whitney Houston, right?

Opie takes on Opus Dei
Both Opus Dei and the Catholic church have geared up for a large counter-campaign in anticipation of the movie version of The DaVinci Code, and you know what? They should.

The argument that "it's fiction, so no big deal" is valid, but only to a point. The problem has to do with they way Dan Brown wrote his book in the first place. He used what he thought was a work of historical research, but what was actually a work of pseudohistory. (When it turned out the writers of his source book made all of it up-- and then, quite comically, sued him for plagiarizing their made-up facts-- he was probably as surprised as anybody.) Thus he framed his book so that it appeared his fictitious characters in a fictitious plot were regurgitating factual information. Claiming later that "well, it's fiction so whatever" is being disingenuous as best.

The same problem arose a few years back with Oliver Stone's film JFK. Stone freely took real people and made them say things they didn't say, or did say but thirty years later, or said but in a different context. He re-invented William Garrison as a zealot for the truth with gobs of evidence that was ignored or hushed up, which was a tremendous leap. In other words, he selected what he wanted to emphasize and ignored what he needed de-emphasized, then filmed the entire thing as if it were an historically accurate re-enactment of true events. And when people said "hey, Oliver, wait a minute: it didn't happen that way" he defended himself with "it's just a work of fiction".

Pseudohistory seems like a good field to get into
If you're unscrupulous, or have an agenda to push, and you're at least a little bit creative, the field of pseudohistory is definitely for you. All you need to do is take a snippet of history, research the hell out of it, pull out the parts that agree with your thesis and throw away the rest, and start writing your book. It worked with Roswell, and it worked with the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs, and it is also the same approach that is used to convince people the Holocaust never happened.

So anyway, my point? The church has a legitimate beef.