Dan Brown's Latest Mal 'Akh

By David A. Kearns

I've decided to send my kids to Harvard to study symbology. Apparently, it's a really good gig. Sure and if you get good enough at this symbology stuff your emergency Gulfstream rides - and you'll have these, from time to time - are all comped; anywhere you want to go.

Okay we start each one of these Dan Brown dealios, following behind the illustrious likes of the tweed-frocked, Robert Langdon as he takes yet another comped jet-ride to a new locale where a colleague is in the midst of yet another symbology crisis/meltdown.

Mary Magdelene, these can be a real pain in the ass! I had one on the pot, just last week, so I did.

When he arrives someone has either been murdered, hacked into all meat and graffiti, or had pieces just lopped off of them. This newest in the Langdon series is no different, only it's set in Washington D.C. and this time, he's going after the Masons, and it's about BLOODY time, everyone knows what a bunch of dangerous drunken roustabouts these guys are, and it's high hour they were knocked from their alabaster horses!

But not so fast. The lesson here, again is? Symbology can be dangerous, children, so play along carefully.

The most recent villain is someone named Mal 'Akh. Mal, as any of us familiar with Latin, via eighth-grade Spanish, means "bad." Akh, is likely Arabic, or ancient Sumarian, or - whatever - for "ass". So, we ammatuer symbologists can be pleased with ourselves, straight-away, for having identified who the villain might be? Perhaps?

"Who is Bad Ass, Alex?"

Isn't it neat the way these writers make things subtle so you have to work for them?

The way the whole marketing machine works, (and you better comply and conform!) is that they are already busy casting for the part of Mal Akh, and it's important they set the right tone with this one. Very crucial casting decision. And I have a feeling he will be just as hard to spot, as His Assness-of-bad, in phenotypic form, as he is in the literary sense. That is to say, he will likely bear a passing resemblence to either a Nazi, or someone resembling a big-eyed Sheik, with a very long schiminctar? Just spittballing, not having read the book, and you can't make me, either, so there. It was hard enough getting through a fawning AP review (vomit sound, here! )

(right: Hanks, just making a gal want to drop those 'Mom Jeans!')

Once again Tom Hanks, the man's man, will stoop to play this strangely-effeminate, virginal, quasi-priest-like figure Robert Langdon: a successful atheist, yet jet-setting, bachelor (really? Can't imagine why!) symbologist at Harvard University. The department chair, in fact of symbology, who never asks for a cent in perdium in spite of his expensive flitting about, not to mention a man who doesn't like girls so much that he will attach himself, physically, to any of these rare creatures of exquisite beauty he comes across, in these little symbolic adventures, least of all the really hot, descendant-spawn of the Lady Maggs and Jesus Christ himself in the first one.

Ooooh Sophie, I was blind, but now I can see you be lookin' fine!

Because, well, that would be just akhward.

Anyhoo-

As long as Hanks is getting paid, right? And, after all, since the point of the entire exercise is the continued, symbolic, iconographic emasculation of the already gelded American male, and the destruction in symbol form of all American, and Christian icons, onward ye non-Christian soldiers. Right? Are ye with me? Tear it all down. Offend everyone in the heartland! Stick a fork in their eye! Bloody hayseeds descerve it! Arrrrrr!

Gee, I don't know: I guess I'm wondering who might be behind all this?

Anyhooo, part two- Long and the short of this whistling? The bullet? The nut graph?

"The point, damn your eyes man, the point!"

Yes, well, sometime this week, yet another 10,000 writers out there will be misled by agents, themselves who have been left outside the joke. These boys and girls will begin penning "the next Dan Brown novel," like Vegas grannies banging on the one-arm bandits.

The 10,000 hastily written tomes will involve religious iconography being studied by another bland character of androgenous leanings, and an improbable, not to mention, medieval, occupation. (Really? Why didn't a first-reader catch this first-time round? A world famous symbologist, working for Harvard? Really? Does he wrestle as well in the WWF? Or is a video game base on him? Really? Really? Uh-Huh? Oooo sure, nothing strange or bizare about that, is there?)

Rather than a symbology Phd at Harvard, for instance we might see an alchemy wizard at San Jose State University, or perhaps an astrology expert at Slippery Rock State College Pennsylvania, or perhaps the chair of Nostradamian Studies at MIT? I mean go for broke, go big or go home, like the skateboarders say.
But, alas, they will be met at the gate by agents and publishers who are inside the joke; those who know all the secret handshakes, passwords, so on and so forth, who will curtly inform these hapless aspirants after months of toil, "hold on there Sparky, you can't write this. You're not Dan Brown."

Because the point of this excercise, on a macro-scale, is not only to emasculate the American male character, it is to futher eviscerate and demoralize the American writer, who would be stupid enough to lend themselves to this goddamned hamster wheel of misery/stupidity, even for the price of the matinee.

Inside the joke, we find Dan Brown himself, dutifully playing Hyram Abiff to all of us, who is then clouted on the head by the Cowan likes of me demanding "what is the code-word, Master Mason!?" (ask it three times, kids!) and YET he WILL NOT REVEAL THE SECRET.

Why? Because, Sweet Susie, there is no secret. Like much of corporate nonsense, social engineering, religion or Masonic ritual, at the heart, it's all bullshit, designed to frustrate and brainwash you, and at the final hour, or the 33rd degree, it all smells like Mal 'Akh warmed over.

"I am Spasticus!"