Freaked-out fundamentalists fear "The Da Vinci Code" for its fierce feminism By Harvey Wasserman Online Journal Guest Writer May 18, 2006 Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? Did they have a daughter? Questions about Christ's love life will dominate debate over the release of the "The Da Vinci Code" this weekend. The answers do matter. But what really counts is the story's pagan/feminist core, and its role in the Culture War. The spin has begun. As freaked-out fundamentalists focus on Jesus' sexuality, and on petty documentary talking points, they'll try to obscure "The Da Vinci Code's" lethal assault on the Church's reactionary male theocracy. What's at stake is not the fine points of documentation and detail. Rather it's the contention that male-dominated Christian/Catholic fundamentalism is a repressive dictatorship that has thrown human life and sexuality dangerously out of balance. Fiction it may be. But with 45 million copies in print, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is a force of nature. How Ron Howard's upcoming feature film deals with its core content will have significant impact. Opening amidst the catastrophic failure of the macho neo-con Bush putsch and its moral, spiritual and fiscal bankruptcy, it's no wonder the Church hierarchy is mobilizing Rove-style against "The Da Vinci Code's" profoundly subversive truths. The dramatic vehicle on which "The Da Vinci Code" rides is a gimmicky Paris-London-Scotland murder mystery filled with riddles and gadgets. It is saturated with Church intrigue and the usual greed. The documentation around which it's constructed is as inventive as it is irrelevant. For the book's spiritual core -- and popular appeal -- rests on its invocation and adoration of feminist spirituality and pagan naturalism. With wild invention and literary flair worthy of its namesake, "The Da Vinci Code" flaunts the heretical, anti-clerical homosexuality of western civilization's leading intellectual superstar. Leonardo's Mona Lisa plays as a coy, cutting smirk, exalting female power and the demand for gender balance. In its most crucial exposition, "The Da Vinci Code" cuts to the heart of today's culture war, in which the "tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church 'conned' the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine." The Priory of Sion is "The Da Vinci Code's" heroic secret society. It worships Mary Magdalene as "the Goddess, the Holy Grail, the Rose, and the Divine Mother." It is dedicated to sexual liberation and a vital balance of the global spirit. It "believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever." In the words of "The Da Vinci Code"'s protagonist, a Harvard professor, the Grail "is literally the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the HOLY Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church." These are the ultimate fighting words to a rigid, eco-hating fundamentalist movement that preaches sexual repression and violent male domination, whose prelates "claim to speak the truth about Christ and yet lie to cover up the sexual abuse of children by their own priests." "The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred," says "The Da Vinci Code", "but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. It was MAN, not God, who created the concept of 'original sin,' whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy." For today's right wing, She still is. As it mobilizes to fight this story, that will be the core complaint, no matter how carefully concealed. "This concept of woman as life-bringer was the foundation of ancient religion," adds another "The Da Vinci Code" scholar. "Childbirth was mystical and powerful. Sadly, Christian philosophy decided to embezzle the female's creative power by ignoring the biological truth and making MAN the Creator. Genesis tells us that Eve was created from Adam's rib. Woman became an offshoot of man. And a sinful one at that. Genesis was the beginning of the end for the goddess." Darwin may have marked the beginning of the end for Genesis. But pagan naturalism has never ceased its struggle against the Church of totalitarian testosterone. When the film comes out, the talk/gossip circuit will focus on Jesus' sex life. Best would be for Mel Brooks to counter with a sequel showing mother Mary, the sainted virgin (aren't they all?), nagging poor Jesus (oy! a carpenter!) to get hitched, already. And, of course, he will. For "Jesus was a Jew," says "The Da Vinci Code", "and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned." If so, then what have all these Catholic priests and popes been doing -- or NOT doing -- for centuries, suffering in what "The Da Vinci Code" calls the "unnatural state of bachelorhood"? "The Da Vinci Code" says Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the Crucifixion, and that she mothered "the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ." But "a child of Jesus would undermine the critical notion of Christ's divinity, and therefore the Christian Church, which declared itself the sole vessel through which humanity could access the divine." So the hate-nature anti-feminists have waged a never-ending Crusade to cover it all up. Thus the Grail story "is everywhere but it is hidden," something an effective rendering of "The Da Vinci Code" in a block-buster film could end. Count on the bloviators to blab endlessly about this detail and that document while avoiding like a plague "The Da Vinci Code's" searing feminist critique. The fundamentalist right has already gone to war over THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, which dared portray Jesus as being profoundly human (not to mention speaking with a Brooklyn accent). With "The Da Vinci Code", the stakes are far higher. Jesus' sex life is one thing, and the documentation surrounding the plotline yet another. But it is the pagan gender war that poses the ultimate threat to the hard-right theocracy of today's neo-con nightmare. Small wonder the fundamentalist fanatics are arming for battle. If "The Da Vinci Code" the movie gets beyond the petty gossip and Rovian spin, and into the heart of Magdalene's Grail and her liberationist followers, watch for the blood of the patriarchy to warmly flow. Harvey Wasserman's "History of the US" is available at harveywasserman.com, as is "A Glimpse of the Big Light" and clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail. ***** Penn to Play Clarke in Movie May 17, 2006 http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter Christopher Isham Reports: Former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, will be portrayed by Sean Penn in the Sony film of Clarke's "Against All Enemies." The book chronicles what happened inside the White House leading up to and through the 9/ll attacks. The film will be directed by Paul Haggis. ***** The Rude Pundit Proudly lowering the level of political discourse RudePundit.blogspot.com 5/15/2006 Hand Over Your Phone Records For the Good of America: Here's what the Rude Pundit wants to see: he wants Republican Senators Bill Frist, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions and more to have a press conference, big fuckin' press conference, with your CNNMSNBCFox in attendance, and he wants to see those sour-faced white men hold up some papers. Yeah, the Rude Pundit wants Bill Frist to announce, "These are our phone records for our home phones, our office phones, and our cell phones, personal and business. They contain every phone number called from those phones. We are handing them over, personally, to the White House, and we trust this administration to use these records fairly, with no fear of misuse now or in the future." Then John Negroponte'll come out and Frist, Hastert, Kyl, Sessions, and others'll bow down and offer the papers to him as a tribute, a tithing, an oath of fealty, if you will. Negroponte, who looks like some unholy love child of Col. Klink and Robert Morley, will accept the phone records in the name of the nation and the President, and hand them off to Michael Hayden before asking, "Now, which one of you is gonna suck my herpes-ridden cock and which one is gonna lick my hemhorroidal ass?" for, indeed, true evil is diseased. At which point, the cameras will be turned off as Negroponte gives the Republican congressional leadership a bit of the Salvadoran nun treatment. Another proud moment for America. The goddamnedest pathetic and funny sight this weekend was watching Republicans proudly state that they could give a shit less if an unchecked, secretive White House, at will, with no law or oversight, collected the phone records of millions of Americans so that they can justify the budget of the intelligence services for another Osama-less fiscal year. See, without offering any kind of tangible result from the program, we are supposed to believe that all the NSA is doing is looking for call patterns that'll prevent, oh, let's say, the ubiquitous dirty bomb from blowing up, because, you know, terrorists who are smart enough to acquire nuclear material and create that kind of weapon are too stupid to suspect they might oughta be careful about who they call. (Actually, that should be the mantra of many of these spying programs: "The NSA: We're Going After the Dumb Ones.") Last week, Jon Kyl blew a gasket, declaring, "This is nuts" that we'd even dare to question the program, that it had been "leaked" to the press. Jeff Sessions ironically began, "Let's talk about this in a rational way" before screeching, "We are in a war with terrorism. There are people out there who want to kill us." But, hey, at least he's talkin' rationally. Then there were the Sunday news gabfests. Over on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf "Behold My Regally Lupine Stubble" Blitzer, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared that he could not "confirm or deny the claims in the USA Today story." Which someone should have told Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, since one presumes he revealed classified information when he told Blitzer not an hour later, "I am one of the people who are briefed...I've known about the program." Frist then went on to say he's not only "comfortable" with it, but he's damn proud of it: "I am absolutely convinced that you, your family, our families are safer because of this particular program." Then he made this tortured claim: "And, as you know, the program is voluntary, the participants in that program." He's referring, of course, to the phone companies themselves, not to each individual American, most of whom would like to assume that, absent a warrant, they would not be monitored in any way by their government. For Newt Gingrich, the problem ain't the program - oh, no, all those happy bloggy headlines about Gingrich seemingly opposing the administration, they were full of shit. As Newt told Tim "Behold My Engorged Cranium of Truth" Russert on Meet the Press, the problem's the spin, not the spying. When Russert reminded Gingrich that he had said that defending the program is "defending the indefensible," Gingrich put the smack down on that liberal talk: "Because they refuse to come out front and talk about it. As long as this stuff leaks out and then they’re on defense, then you get these kind of absurd magazine covers and then you’re going to have Senator Specter saying he’s going to threaten American companies." Then he frothed and declared that Americans want to be spied on to prevent another terrorist attack, and everyone should just shut the fuck up and trust the executive branch: "Nobody who’s not involved in terrorism should be at risk. Nobody who’s making normal phone calls should be at risk." After which, Gingrich got into a strange gargantuan head-butting contest with Russert, screaming, "I have the larger lobe, me, Newt Gingrich, fucker." So, c'mon, Newt, and all good and loyal citizens: don't wait for your phone company. Hand over your call records to the National Security Agency. You heard Bill Frist: it's voluntary. You may ask why you should bother, since you are not a terrorist. But, really, that's not for you to decide, now, is it? ***** Marines killed Iraqi civilians 'in cold blood': US lawmaker May 17, 2006 AFP A US lawmaker and former Marine colonel accused US Marines of killing innocent Iraqi civilians after a Marine comrade had been killed by a roadside bomb. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," John Murtha told reporters. The November 19 incident occurred in Haditha, Iraq. "There was no firefight" that led to the shootings at close range, the Vietnam war veteran said, denying early official accounts, which said that a roadside bomb had killed the Iraqis. "There were no (roadside bombs) that killed these innocent people," he said. Time magazine reported the shootings on March 27, based on an Iraqi human rights group and locals, who said that 15 unarmed Iraqis died, including women and children, when Marines barged into their home throwing grenades and shooting. "It's much worse than reported in Time magazine," Murtha said. At least three Marine officers are under official investigation, and no report has been released, Army Times said Tuesday. Murtha is a harsh critic of the war in Iraq and said that such incidents are the result of inadequate planning, training and troop numbers in Iraq. ***** WNBC.com Actress Susan Sarandon Endorses Clinton Opponent In Senate Race May 18, 2006 NEW YORK -- Actress Susan Sarandon, a longtime liberal political activist and outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, endorsed an anti-war Democrat challenging Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's re-election bid Tuesday. Sarandon is backing Jonathan Tasini, a labor advocate and former president of the National Writers' Union, who has based his longshot campaign on Clinton's vote in 2002 authorizing military intervention in Iraq. Clinton, who is widely considered the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination if she chooses to run, has sharply criticized the Bush Administration's handling of the war. But she has also refused to call for American troops to be removed from Iraq. Sarandon has been a harsh critic of Clinton's vote on the war, telling a British television interviewer last month that Clinton had "crumbled under the pressure of the moment." She also told ITV1 that she wasn't enthusiastic about a Clinton presidential candidacy. Announcing Sarandon's endorsement, Tasini called the 59-year old Academy Award winner a "passionate advocate for human rights, justice and civil liberties" and said he was "honored" to have her support. "She has never wavered when the call has come for people to stand on the front lines in support of progressive principles that affect the lives of so many people in our country," Tasini said. Sarandon did not offer a statement of her own but an aide confirmed she was backing Tasini. Earlier this month, Sarandon joined Clinton at a rally in Washington for the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which promotes research on spinal cord injuries. There, Sarandon offered nothing but praise for Clinton, saying "we are all very lucky to have her here today as a leader in Congress."