JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2006

Your Ciphertext Is My Plaintext: Ignorance as Pseudo-Code and Pop Culture’s Fake Eurekas

Who doesn’t believe in reincarnation?

Perhaps bad people aren’t cursed to return in “lesser” forms—I’ve never encountered a worm as annoying as any given human being, anyhow. But surely, in the world of pop culture, good (the commercial-culture abbreviation for “vaguely interesting”) products are blessed to return in all sorts of forms, from page-a-day calendars to something with Tom Hanks in it.

Lo! Next weekend, “The Da Vinci Code” will transmigrate into something with Tom Hanks in it. (And hopefully also with a donkey and that Whitesnake guy’s ex-wife, for old time’s sake.)

Fifteen years from now, I’ll have to explain what “The Da Vinci Code” is, but right now it’s one of those things that everybody knows. I’m sure I’d have a lot to say about the original book, and my instinct is that would be largely negative, but the fact is I haven’t read it, nor much of anything about it.

Indeed, my whole point here is that I didn’t have to read it. I already know the story, and have for more than a decade.

Already knowing something before it turns into a water-cooler wonder is pretty foreign to most people—I daresay, repugnant. After all, pop culture mostly serves as a mildly diverting work song to natter on about while slaving in the mines to make the bosses richer. It results in conversation that is philosophically rooted in everyone involved not really knowing what they’re talking about. It is ritzy gossip. Thus, it is rude, even threatening, to actually know something or have an original idea to contribute. This arouses horrible feelings of guilt, inadequacy and responsibility in the hearers, who are likely to drag you outside, huddle against the cold, and burn you to death with their cigarettes in a designated smoking area.

Nonetheless, perhaps you can thrill to a glimpse of my alien culture. Mainstream America finally got around to being kinda interested in, say, what it’s like being black in the South. Why not what it’s like being intellectual in America—which is a far smaller minority experience?

As someone raised both Christian and rationalist, and with a natural analytical bent and fuck-you attitude, I’ve always been interested in historical investigations of religion. It was therefore inevitable that I would work my around to reading “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” a pretty preposterous alterna-history of post-Crucifixion Christianity that came out more than 20 years ago and plainly served as the basis for Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” (as he reportedly acknowledges in the book).

In brief, it claims that Jesus survived, married, moved to France (natch, anti-war peacenik that he was) and had kids. The “Holy Grail” legend is a secret symbolic reference to all of that. And, of course, the Roman Catholic Church knows it all and is covering it up…er, for some reason I can’t remember. It prefers gory S&M imagery to hanging out in France, fucking and drinking wine, maybe?

This is, incidentally, an obvious load of horseshit. The book did appear to demonstrate the existence of some kind of secret, perhaps even heretical, society within the Catholic Church (even that has been debunked as based on forgeries), but nothing about Jesus’ survival or ancient roots to the group. Some of the words I used in my just-for-personal-consumption review of the book I wrote at the time: “unfocused…ultimately unconvincing…weak exaggeration, speculation and other forms of enthusiasm gone overboard…propped up on blatant misinterpretation of Biblical passages and vague ‘traditions’…made a mountain out of a molehill (or out of a different mountain).”

So, OK, whatever, I don’t care if it said Jesus could sprout bat wings and fly at Mach 7. Its claims are not my interest here; my point is that by being merely mildly curious, I knew in 1994 what would become the “Da Vinci Code” story.

Before I flog away on mainstream consumption of pop culture, I must acknowledge that “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” is itself a moderately successful product of pop culture culled in large part from earlier books. However, its success has largely been in the subculture of conspiracy theorists—jackasses to save and talk about on another rainy day. Indeed, as a brand of assault on received Christianity, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” is exactly the kind of thing the mainstream would not touch, whereas a translation into thriller-ese such as “The Da Vinci Code” is fine. Most people want to be the fly buzzing around inside the glass, not the hand holding the glass upside-down.

“Holy Blood, Holy Grail” apparently innovated the idea in this tale of a French chapel having a message coded into its artwork. “The Da Vinci Code,” as it name makes clear, takes this idea much further. Speaking as one who is ignorant of the book’s details, yet far more knowledgeable at the same time (and recently subjected to the movie trailers), I find the idea pretty gross. Well, actually, I’m a sucker for Indiana Jones-type hidden ancient messages. But the pseudo-historical thriller genre of which “The Da Vinci Code” is part often seems like a hidden message of its own, revealing a middlebrow fear of not getting high art. It seems to simultaneously express a paranoid (and probably accurate) feeling that art is challenging an unequipped viewer with internal messages, while also defusing that feeling by providing a reductionist “secret message” that is discovered in the end.

At the same time, this whole discussion is just part of the way pop culture serves as a much larger code that scrambles reality into nonsense, then provides phony eureka moments—for sale, naturally. It’s “The Pop Culture Code”—sound and fury encrypting everything so that it signifies nothing.

The entire quasi-historical/theological ideas that give “The Da Vinci Code” its cultural significance have been available for decades. But they’ve been hidden by mainstream pop culture because they were more irritating than marketable. Now that more people read and watch thrillers than go to church, priorities have changed, and people not only hear about the wacky Jesus-survived story, they think it’s the first time anybody has.

The “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” authors finally pushed through the murk to claim priority—but far too late, and only then through the publicity-friendly mechanism of suing Brown for plagiarism (unsuccessfully, unless you count oodles of free press as a success, which I’m sure they do). Brown had already re-coded their book as a prop in his own.

And of course, reality is still shut off at the source. “The Da Vinci Code” may (or may not) be entertaining fiction, but there is definitely no reality whatsoever to its Jesus story. But pop culture, which is interested solely in making money, naturally has turned that period into a question mark. “It is obvious horseshit” becomes “Is it obvious horseshit?” on who knows how many TV specials and spin-off paperbacks.¹ The only people who actually have to care are Christians, who are stuck in the unenviable position of saying this particular silly old story about Jesus is bullshit, but that their own silly old story about Jesus is true. Their whole religion is founded on Jesus coming back from the dead—but not, like, living-next-door-to-Johnny-Depp’s-chateau back from the dead. A Gaulling little controversy, indeed.

In any case, the vast majority of people remain stupid, taught to view reality as a secret message that can be read only through the decoder ring sold by Hollywood, publishing houses and/or some religion. In fact, the only thing being scrambled are people’s brains. Ignorance makes everything look like a secret code. Hype makes anything look like a magic revelation.

Oh, right, I promised a view into my alien world. Well, it’s pretty simple. I heard about the book and I wondered what it was about. So I looked it up and thought, “Oh, that old story. Well, that’s not very interesting. Maybe if it was something new.” (Indeed, I can think of at least one more novel Jesus-didn’t-die novel, Piers Paul Read’s “On the Third Day.”) I’m not interested in bragging or pretending I was making some kind of big statement, but I think in a consumerist culture, that response can only be described as freedom. I feel that way in retrospect, especially as I watched with astonishment as this old and silly story grew into a much-nattered-about phenomenon. So many people talking for so long about something so outdated with such shallow roots.

Yeah, yeah, “The Da Vinci Code” is only a book, or movie, or novelty tour, or whatever the hell it will be next. But the system within it which it was constructed and became successful is not “only” anything.

The exact same process pulled the American public into supporting the ridiculous Iraq War and creating the needless hostility with Iran. Pretty significant, eh? And all the more appalling to someone in my position of already knowing much more than the PR stunts with which our president and his crew convinced so many people. Fake pop-culture eurekas can kill.

Everybody pays attention to the news during some hot-button moment like the beginning of a war. That is, of course, far too late. A democracy, as opposed (and the ideas are indeed diametrically opposed, not twinned) to a consumer culture, relies on people paying attention ahead of time—shaping the decision, not being entertained by the result.

I have a habit of paying attention. For example, I still have the clipping of the Associated Press story from the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War that said our troops were establishing a permanent base in Saudi Arabia. “Why the hell are we doing that?” I wondered. “That just seems imperialist, like a provocation.”

US bases in Saudi Arabia were subsequently the targets of terrorist attacks—mere blips on the cultural radar—and the main thing that sent Osama bin Laden on his rage-aholic destroy-the-world trip, which has been a pop-culture success extraordinaire. I’m sure not one US citizen in 100 right now knows we had permanent bases in Saudi Arabia. (They were shuttered in 2003, early in the Iraq War, in which Saudi Arabia refused to participate.)

I still have the little tidbit I saved from a Reuters report in the aftermath of our invasion of Afghanistan, where our troops had found Al-Qaeda literature calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power so an Islamic state could be established in Iraq—something I thought might be worth knowing later. In spades, of course. How many of your friends know a Muslim government like the one we’ve established in Iraq was Al-Qaeda’s only goal there? Ask around! Now, that’s conversation-starter!

For the past decade I’ve enjoyed the insightful, liberal movies that have come out of Iran, indicative of the once-burgeoning pro-democracy movement there, and been privileged enough even to spend some time (awkwardly, though that’s another story) with some of the filmmakers. Then I watched an asinine, deliberately ignorant president declare the country “evil”—with an asinine, deliberately ignorant public tagging along happily—and then the inevitable strengthening of the ruling conservative regime to the point of nuclear saber-rattling. Knowing nothing about foreign film has probably never been so instrumentally destructive to international relations or democracy.

I watched (literally, like a shocked scientist) people listen to Colin Powell’s ridiculous piece of theater before the United Nations, trying to convince an organization chartered to stop war to instead authorize it, as if they would learn something valuable from it. Why were they watching? Because it was on a TV schedule. My only thought was that by merely staging this event and getting people to pay attention, Bush and his hawks had already won the argument. Content, as everyone must admit now, had nothing to do with it.² Try to imagine being someone who knew then that content didn’t matter, and you’ll have a glimpse into my obscure world. Only now that the war is failing so badly are some of these ideas becoming marketable; one day Al-Qaeda’s opposition to Saddam Hussein will have its “Da Vinci Code” moment (with the added kick of being true).

And now we still have Democrats and other nominally anti-war types complaining that they were “misled” by “bad intelligence.” The only intelligence that’s bad is their own; there was never any evidence for going to war and much against it—if we pretend evidence had anything to do with it, anyway. They looked at reality and pretended it was a mysterious code that only CIA briefings or Powell’s stint as Minister of Information could decipher.

I suggest intent here, and I guess I believe that. It’s convenient to pretend you can’t see anything for yourself, to wait for commercials or presidents to tell you what’s important—or at least, what’s exciting, which amounts to the same thing in this context. I’m not pretending I’m any better; I’m just not entirely built that way. Maybe I’m silly for getting worked up over “The Da Vinci Code.” But I don’t think it’s silly that people are killing and dying overseas for what I found to be old, and incorrect, news.

If people love codes so much, they should at least learn to crack some for themselves. So I’ll leave you with a little bit of work—a transposition substitution, the simplest form of code.

Zpv’sf opu ubmljoh bspvoe uif xbufs dppmfs. Zpv’sf espxojoh jo ju.

¹ On my way home tonight, walking past “Da Vinci Code” movie posters, I noted the tagline is “Seek the Truth,” a wonderfully ambiguous phrase that goes to the heart of what I’m talking about. Obviously, one need “seek” no further than a Wikipedia entry to see the storyline is utterly untrue. The advertising phrase manages to imply that a fictional movie will provide you with factual truth, or that it may at least inspire a quest for truth that we all know you’ll never actually undertake, while also serving as a quasi-legal disclaimer placing the responsibility on you, not the film, to find truth. And, of course, the truth about what is not specified. The context for the phrase is that seeking the truth is a kind of thrill that is best handled vicariously through the purchase of a movie ticket. (Of course, it is also an attempt to sound high-minded in the face of accusations of Catholic- or Christian-bashing.) Or, for that matter, the election of a president. A candidate could definitely win in 2008 on the slogan, “Seek the Truth.”

² Ditto for “The Da Vinci Code.” It could be argued it has been beneficial in the sense of appealing to peoples’ often-buried sense of inquisitiveness, but everything is in the context of Making Dan Brown Et Al. Rich(er), and there is no way to participate in the discussion without sacrificing oneself to it to that degree. The real truth is that in terms of facts (as opposed to possible entertainment value), “The Da Vinci Code” is not worth five minutes of anyone’s time. Absolutely no media will tell you that, not even Catholic media, because it is not profitable to end a nine-figure discussion. And yes, here I am spending well over five minutes on it, too. This is Dan Brown’s column; I’m just writing in it.

Posted May 12, 2006. Updated May 22, 2006.

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