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May 24, 2006
A Bit On The Da Vinci Code
I'll admit it. I'm a huge Arnold Ahlert fan.
Pretty much every day, I like to read the New York Post opinion page, just to shore up my beliefs in the exact opposite of whatever opinions are expressed there. Recently, I've become hooked on Arnold Ahlert, who writes two or three times a week. His columns are always very short, very predictable, and usually quite amusingly knee-jerk. But he looks like a nice guy in his picture (except I can totally picture him wearing a Yankees cap).
Yesterday's columnette was vintage Ahlert. The premise: There weren't riots about The Da Vinci Code, but there were riots over the Danish Mohammed cartoons, so we're better than them.
First of all, he acts like Dan Brown and Ron Howard are radical revolutionaries. All the theories in the book/movie are old theories (a post from a friend of Carpundit goes into good detail on that) and Brown merely wove them into a FICTIONAL NOVEL. The people who are outraged are either ignorant of this, or don't care because they like to feel outraged. Or both.
Secondly, the fact that there weren't riots over The Da Vinci Code doesn't exactly mean that outraged Christians are better than outraged Muslims, it just means they've had a little more time to get used to this kind of thing. Don't forget, by the Islamic calendar, it's the year 1427. Now, I just read William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire, a very interesting book about the transition from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.
So I can make a couple of (slightly) educated guesses about what would have happened if The Da Vinci Code had come out in A.D. 1427. Best case scenario: Dan Brown, Tom Hanks and Ron Howard burned at the stake over a slow-burning fire. Partly for blasphemy, partly for writing in a non-Latin language, which could conceivably ignite anti-Papal feelings in the unwashed masses (at least, the 5% of them that could read). Worst case scenario would probably be something like the Peasants' War, which set Germany on fire to the tune of 100,000 killed in 1524 and 1525. Kind of makes all those Danish cartoon protests look like not too much, huh?
But I guess if Arnold and the Post wants to congratulate their easily offended readers for not burning down every Loews in sight, more power to them.
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