Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Crap

This is a piece I read at an open microphone event tonight.

This is the first time I've tried anything quite like this on St. Croix, and I'll tell you, it's kind of frightening. When I was deciding whether or not to do this, I thought, “Am I willing to risk making an idiot of myself.” In response to that, I thought, “Sure, there's nothing unusual about that.” Then I thought, “Do I have the courage to go up in front of a group of people who I like and respect, who I consider my peers and members of the community to which I belong? A group of people whose opinions I value?” And I thought, “No way.” So I decided to try it out in front you guys instead.

I appeared on this very stage at a show very much like this sometime last year. On that occasion I decided to do something highbrow, so I read poems by William Butler Yeats. I read, Easter 1916, Byzantium, and Sailing to Byzantium. And I'd like to tell you that I got a great reception from the audience. I'd like to tell you that, but it would be a lie because my poetic renditions went over like the proverbial lead balloon. I'll tell you, I just died out here. For all of the audience reaction I got, I could have been reading aloud from the instructions on the back of a box of Cream of Wheat. So I thought long and hard about why I had bombed so badly and I realized that it was because I had ventured into territory that was unfamiliar to me. I'm not a poet, so I don't know poetry. This time I decided to stick with what I know. I'm a lawyer. So I got the names of every single person who sat in the audience at the last show and watched me die here on stage, and I'm going to sue every single one of the bastards. Don't laugh. If I don't get the reaction I want tonight, I'm going to sue your asses, too.

I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. There will be no poetry and no William Butler Yeats from me this evening. However, I really do love to read, and love to talk about books. And speaking of books, there's one recent book that seems to have become an American phenomenon, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Has anyone here read it? Did you enjoy it? Did you think it was worth reading? You did?

Well, then, that's pathetic. Obviously I will never bother to read a book that you recommend.

I slogged my way through The Da Vinci Code, partly because a number of my friends said things to me like, “Oh, you like history, so you’ll really love it.” “Love it” probably isn’t an accurate phrase. Having read it, and looking at it as objectively as possible, I think I can say without any exaggeration that it sucked worse than any book in the history of the world. I think books about the pathology of genital warts must be more entertaining. If Leonardo Da Vinci had known that his fame as a painter would have caused his name to be associated with this piece of literary garbage, he would have become an interior decorator instead.

Consider how it begins. At the beginning of the book, a giant psychotic albino with a piece of barbed wire tied around his thigh shoots the curator of the Louvre, who proceeds to write an incomprehensible message with his own blood before he kicks off. Right away I thought “We are not in the presence of Great Literature.” The shooting happens within a few pages. Lots of other things happen later, mostly for no apparent reason. The book has been praised as “fast moving,” which is absolutely true. It moves very fast, without pausing for a moment to make a lick of sense.

But H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people, and nothing proves him right as much as this fact: The Da Vinci Code has been on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for more than three years. In fact, even though it’s now out in a US paperback edition, it was still the bestselling hardcover book in the United States two weeks ago. This brings to mind another famous quote, from P. T. Barnum, who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute." And this year all of them own hardcover copies of The Da Vinci Code. I mean, wise up people. It’s an airport book at best. Buy the paperback instead of the hardback, save a few bucks, use it to get a copy of The London Times Literary Supplement, and bring some culture into your sorry lives.

If you’ve read the book, you know that it’s a mixture of wrongheaded historical speculation about the Medieval Order of The Knights Templar, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Holy Grail, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene. It’s become quite controversial because its themes go directly against the beliefs of more orthodox forms of Christianity, Roman Catholicism in particular. It’s so controversial that there is only one thing that real historians agree upon, which is that it’s a load of manure. Despite this, a lot of people think that it really is a profound book. These are the same kind of people who used to think that I Love Lucy was real. There’s no doubt in my mind that the author, Dan Brown, knows what a mass of historical horse pucky the book is. In fact I can see him being interviewed now:

Interviewer: Mr. Brown, is there any historical truth to the themes of your novel?

Brown: Of course not, it’s simply a work of fiction that…

Brown’s Publisher, Offstage: Dan, you’ve made the bestseller list because people think it’s real!

Brown: As I was saying, yes, I think my novel explores some important historical and religious truths that have been long suppressed by the Christian churches.

Last week The Da Vinci Code was number 2 on the hardcover bestseller list. But that’s not all. The list is swamped by what appear to be clones of Dan Brown’s book. Remember, The Da Vinci Code is about, among far too many other things, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Holy Grail, and the Knights Templar. The following books are also on the hardcover bestseller list last week:

THE SECRET SUPPER, by Javier Sierra. Clues in "The Last Supper" reveal Da Vinci's heretical beliefs.
THE TEMPLAR LEGACY, by Steve Berry. A former Justice Department operative becomes involved in a desperate search for the long-lost treasure and secrets of the medieval Knights Templar.
THE LAST TEMPLAR, by Raymond Khoury. A coding device stolen from an exhibit of Vatican artifacts may hold clues to the medieval Knights Templar's long-lost treasure — and their secrets.
LABYRINTH, by Kate Mosse. A woman on an archaeological dig in France stumbles on the 13th-century secret of the true Grail.

Soon will come the self-help books and the memoirs: The Knights Templar Guide to Really Great Sex, Cooking with the Holy Grail, The Last Supper Diet, and The Messiah and Me: a Memoir by Mary Magdalene.

It’s almost impossible to go a day without hearing some mention of Dan Brown’s book, unless you spend the day in an isolation chamber, or listening to my law partner Todd Newman tell stories about the trialthlons he’s done (which is kind of like spending the day in an isolation chamber). For the last several weeks the media has been saturated with stories about a trial going on in London. It seems that Dan Brown didn’t come up with all of the themes in his novel by himself. He used several different sources, which are cited in the book. One is a book called HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. This is described as a book of “historical speculation,” a phrase which translates literally as “a crock of bullshit.” It advances the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child who traveled to France and became an ancestor of an early line of French kings. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. As Frank Romano would say in the television series Everybody Loves Raymond, “Holy Crap!”

The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have seen their obscure little book rise into the top ten of the New York Times paperback bestseller list after languishing in obscurity for two decades. To show their gratitude, Baigent and Leigh did what everybody does when their efforts assist another in achieving a notable success: they sued to try to get some of the money. The case, against Random House, which publishes both their book and Brown’s, was heard in London. It was a laugher from beginning to end. Baigent and Leigh were thrown out of court on their Holy butts, and now have to pay Random House’s legal bills, which ought to suck up all the money they’ve made because of the recent sales of their book. Maybe there is some justice after all.

And finally there’s the movie. It will feature Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, the protagonist of the book. It’s rumored to be Hanks’ most significant role since his regular appearances in drag in the television series Bosom Buddies. As if all of the pre-movie publicity wasn’t enough, many members of the Catholic clergy have told their parishioners not to see and and, if their parishioners are like everybody else in the world, it’s now all the more likely that they will. There have also been protests from the organization Opus Dei. “Opus Dei” means “God’s work,” and it is a lay organization of Roman Catholics, kind of like a really weird Knights of Columbus. In the book it’s portrayed as a society of obsessively secretive and occasionally violent fanatics, not unlike the Republican Party in America today.

In conclusion, everything seems to be breaking Dan Brown’s way. He’s now become the Bill Gates of the Holy Grail. I don’t know what he did right but it must have been really good. But take my advice: read some Henry James, read some Joseph Conrad, read a comic book, but don’t waste your time reading The Da Vinci Code.

But in parting I can’t resist the urge to do something highbrow, so here it is, the most intellectual joke I know. You’ve all heard of the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes. Descartes best-known feat is his effort to intellectually prove the existence of something, anything, and used the fact of his own mental processes to prove the existence of himself, saying “Cogito, ergo, sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” “I think, therefore I am.’

So anyhow, Descartes goes into a restaurant and sits down. The waitress comes over to him and says, “Would you like to try the soup?” He ponders for a moment and says, “I think not.” And he disappears.

PAUSES

I knew it. That highbrow stuff never works.
Good evening everyone.
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