THE PLANK SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
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The countdown has begun:
In just six days, residents will awaken to find themselves in a changed city. One invaded by Founding Fathers scandal, by fictitious Harvard symbologists, by very short chapters ending in cliffhangers and exclamation points! One to which the tourists will flock, brandishing conspiracy theories. We want the real story, they'll say to helpless docents at the Smithsonian, perhaps, or the Scottish Rite Masonic temple. This is the real story, docents will reply. No, the reeeeal story. Wink wink.
Washington is about to be Dan Browned.
The Washington Post explains what we can look forward to:
In "The Lost Symbol," [Brown protagonist Robert] Langdon will be back again, this time racing through Washington..... When Dan Brown comes to town, things get a little bit nutty. Just ask Colin Glynne-Percy, director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, the rural Scottish church featured in "The Da Vinci Code," which Langdon believed to be the location of the Holy Grail.
"Before the book came out, we had about 40,000 visitors a year," Glynne-Percy says. "It went to 80,000. Then to 120,000. Then to 175,000. We had very small facilities. We had only two restrooms. We could survive on that for 40,000 but . . ." They've put in temporary bathrooms and added several new staff members....
In Italy, more of the same. One Roman tour guide describes how her tours of the Colosseum were so frequently interrupted by tourists more interested in "Angels & Demons" faux-history that she had to create a special tour for them.
The Post has more gory details here. Sounds like an excellent time to leave town, for perhaps ten or fifteen years.
2 comments
What official Washington fails to grasp [as they ever do] is that Dan Brown's escapists fairy tales are really just clever escapist political metaphors instead. You know, like the Grimm Brothers'...or Jonathan Swift's...or Tom Wolfe's....or Michelle Malkin's. Catholics, schmatholics. Brown is obviously a Communist intent on crucifying the Palins all over again. This time around Langdon is a barely discussed Levi Johnston who, upon tracing his roots back to Kenya, discovers Glenn Beck's birth certificate is a da Vinci forgery. From there the Pope falls [predictbly] in love with Bristol and becomes The Symbol of....well, I don't want to spoil it for all the conservatives out there who are taking remedial English classes to read the book. Suffice it to say one of the Founding Fathers is exposed to be a woman and John Adams' bowel moverments play heavily into a side plot about Freemasons crashing a Skull and Bones initiation and writing Hebrew grafiti on all the pledges with bald heads. Risible copulating with infantile, true, but what do you expect from a man who chooses to write a book without using either vowels or consonants? The symbols Prince invented get old real fast. Only a hard core semiotics professor will make it past the title page. Besides, our esteemed colleagues at The New Republic appear only as a footnote that Brown forgot to include in Icelandic edition of The Di Vinci Code. I'll join Orr on a sabbatical until the the Silly Season passes and we move on to more weighty stuff like taped interviews in the Redskins locker room. gw
- iambiguous
September 10, 2009 at 1:25pm
Mount Vernon faced a surge of interest in its secret underground passageways after the last National Treasure movie, and put together a special National Treasure Tour that it still runs from time to time. Basically, it's a regular tour of the mansion with a visit to the completely boring, no-secret-passages-here basement. But well worth the trouble to take the tour, since the basement is not normally open to the public, and it's got a couple of really great artifacts, including a cornerstone with Lawrence Washington's mark on it. So I figure that Washington institutions, which already deal with lots of tourists and lots of misinformed or conspiracy-addled visitors, should be able to deal with a surge of Dan Brown consumers. Also, I get that it's Dan Brown, who may be the worst writer in the history of English letters -- seriously, Da Vinci Code made Tom Clancy look like Doctorow -- but The Lost Symbol? The man has the entire history of Washington, DC to work with, and that's the best title he could come up with? It's enough to make me doubt that the man is actually literate. (Best stupid-DC-tourist story I've heard: A girl in my dorm worked weekends as a tour bus guide. One day, as the bus was crossing the National Mall, she recited the bit of the script about how the Washington Monument is surrounded by fifty flags, one for each state. To which an actual adult asked, "Do the flags all fly the same direction to symbolize the union?" To which my quick-thinking dormmate replied, "Yes.")
- rhubarbs
September 10, 2009 at 1:36pm