KISS, bad ideas are reason enough

God bless Anthony Lane who in his recent review of The Da Vinci Code, both the book and the movie, points out the most fundamental and best reason to ignore the book, it is quite simply badly written.  And, the movie can be ignored for the same reason since in the director Howard's own words it is a faithful adaptation of the book.  All the press about the premises of the book, which are laughable at best,  immediately turned me away from any attempt to read it.  Like Lane I was able to see the movie fresh without being contaminated by the book experience, and like Lane I found the movie a complete waste of time except to have been well received as an entertaining outing by my mother-in-law, a retired librarian, who has read the book and found both lacking in merit.  I am sick to death of all the Christian hand wringing over the Brown's book and Howard's movie and amazed, if not envious, about the cottage industry that has grown up debunking the book.  Oh! Should I be so smart to write either the bad book or one of the debunkers.  Forty million copies, who knew? 

 

All of this hullabellew leads me ponder Lane's idea

Should we mind that forty million readers - or, to use the technical term, "lemmings" - have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text?

a bit more deeply as regards the blogosphere.  Brown's work, at least from what I've seen in the movie resembles nothing so much as an extended blog entry from one of the tens of thousands of blogs claiming to have the truth about everything from Hiroshima to hemorrhoids.  Bad ideas, and from what Lane says just plain bad writing also, are more than reason enough to ignore a book like Brown's.  In the same way much of the blogosphere can also be ignored.  Lemmings, perhaps like the poor, will always be with us.  Watch the lemmings carefully and quietly move quickly out of their way.  Hell hath no fury like lemmings blocked from their journey to the edge.  Oh, by the way, did I mention the mid term elections are coming up.  Lemmings anyone?