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Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (That bad
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We Are Not Immune: Dan Brown, the South, and a Really, Really Dumb Conspiracy Theory Posted: by Ryan September 22nd, 2009 under Books, History and Culture, Reading the South. Tags: Books, Things We Don't Recommend http://www.yellowhammerpress.com/2009/09/22/we-are-not-immune-dan-brown-the-south-and-a-re ally-really-dumb-conspiracy-theory/
Unless you live under a rock, you're at least dimly aware that Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol was released recently. Brown kicked off the esoteric conspiracy craze in 2003 with The Da Vinci Code, a book so unbearably, ploddingly awful that AO Scott of the NY Times called it "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence". It's easy to take a swipe at Brown for his wooden prose or his formulaic plotting. But for better or worse (almost certainly worse), his novel kick-started a trend from which, sadly, the South is not immune.
And so we come to a book by Bob Brewer and Warren Getler alternately titled Rebel Gold: One Man's Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy and the less unwieldy Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. The publisher seems to have tried out both titles to see which one would stick. Regardless, it's an ostensibly nonfiction book about a retiree who allegedly comes from a long line of treasure guardians and sets out to decipher their intricate code of carvings on rocks and trees in the Arkansas wilderness.
The alleged treasure belongs to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an order who, as the book would have us believe, was ultimately behind the Civil War and who ran the Confederacy as a sort of shadow government. I'm not joking. After the war was all but over, the KGC apparently decided to squirrel away vast amounts of gold in the Arkansas hills in order to finance the next war of secession, which they believed would come relatively soon. And so, we are faced with a book in which a retiree and his wife chase around the woods with Radio Shack metal detectors and unearth Mason jars full of coins. Wheee.
I'm going to be completely honest here: I didn't finish this book. I couldn't. That's why this post is so delinquent; I kept putting it off for another day, hoping to finish this book and be able to write a review of it so punishingly snarky that it would make the authors weep with shame and self-reproach. But I couldn't. I thumbed the last 100 pages or so, which seems to involve some sort of Confederate helicopter. Again, not joking. What I did read (the first 200 pages or so) was a deadly mixture of terrible narrative pacing, absurd logical leaps, and brutal and oppressive boredom.
We are expected to believe the following, among other gems:
1. An immensely wealthy group was secretly financing the Confederate government. At a certain point they decided that, rather than pouring their remaining funds into the existing war, that they would tuck it away and wait for the next national bloodbath.
2. This immensely wealthy group chose to stash its money in Mason jars in the Arkansas wilderness rather than use, say, foreign banks.
3. The Knights of the Golden Circle entrusted penniless backwoodsmen with the treasure's safety.
4. That, while much of the country was starving and their own families were living at subsistence level, these backwoodsmen dutifully guarded a vast hoard of wealth that could have made them rich beyond imagination, and did so out of some fierce loyalty to a twisted version of Lost Cause ideology.
5. That there is some sort of massive cache of Confederate gold stored somewhere in Arizona, but if you get near it, helicopters will come and shoo you away.
So. Needless to say, this book doesn't contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the Southern condition. It is a poorly written and dreadfully boring thing and relies solely upon conjecture and the reader's ability to suspend disbelief in order to get the least bit of traction. So why am I writing about it?
Because, as sad as it may be, it's an effort to tie Southern culture (or at least elements of Southern history) to a larger milieu of broad, vaguely Masonic conspiracy theories. In this case, the Civil War just happens to be a convenient target. Brewer and Getler wield Southern history like a weapon and use its history in the cheapest of ways (the cover of the book is so low-rent as to be offensive). They are essentially cashing in on America's vague fascination with the otherness of Southern culture and landscape and cobbling together a silly conspiracy as a means to sell books.
I don't begrudge them their right to capitalism. I just wish they would take it somewhere else.
)We Are Not Immune: Dan Brown, the South, and a Really, Really Dumb Conspiracy Theory Posted: by Ryan September 22nd, 2009 under Books, History and Culture, Reading the South. Tags: Books, Things We Don't Recommend http://www.yellowhammerpress.com/2009/09/22/we-are-not-immune-dan-brown-the-south-and-a-re ally-really-dumb-conspiracy-theory/
Unless you live under a rock, you're at least dimly aware that Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol was released recently. Brown kicked off the esoteric conspiracy craze in 2003 with The Da Vinci Code, a book so unbearably, ploddingly awful that AO Scott of the NY Times called it "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence". It's easy to take a swipe at Brown for his wooden prose or his formulaic plotting. But for better or worse (almost certainly worse), his novel kick-started a trend from which, sadly, the South is not immune.
And so we come to a book by Bob Brewer and Warren Getler alternately titled Rebel Gold: One Man's Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy and the less unwieldy Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. The publisher seems to have tried out both titles to see which one would stick. Regardless, it's an ostensibly nonfiction book about a retiree who allegedly comes from a long line of treasure guardians and sets out to decipher their intricate code of carvings on rocks and trees in the Arkansas wilderness.
The alleged treasure belongs to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an order who, as the book would have us believe, was ultimately behind the Civil War and who ran the Confederacy as a sort of shadow government. I'm not joking. After the war was all but over, the KGC apparently decided to squirrel away vast amounts of gold in the Arkansas hills in order to finance the next war of secession, which they believed would come relatively soon. And so, we are faced with a book in which a retiree and his wife chase around the woods with Radio Shack metal detectors and unearth Mason jars full of coins. Wheee.
I'm going to be completely honest here: I didn't finish this book. I couldn't. That's why this post is so delinquent; I kept putting it off for another day, hoping to finish this book and be able to write a review of it so punishingly snarky that it would make the authors weep with shame and self-reproach. But I couldn't. I thumbed the last 100 pages or so, which seems to involve some sort of Confederate helicopter. Again, not joking. What I did read (the first 200 pages or so) was a deadly mixture of terrible narrative pacing, absurd logical leaps, and brutal and oppressive boredom.
We are expected to believe the following, among other gems:
1. An immensely wealthy group was secretly financing the Confederate government. At a certain point they decided that, rather than pouring their remaining funds into the existing war, that they would tuck it away and wait for the next national bloodbath.
2. This immensely wealthy group chose to stash its money in Mason jars in the Arkansas wilderness rather than use, say, foreign banks.
3. The Knights of the Golden Circle entrusted penniless backwoodsmen with the treasure's safety.
4. That, while much of the country was starving and their own families were living at subsistence level, these backwoodsmen dutifully guarded a vast hoard of wealth that could have made them rich beyond imagination, and did so out of some fierce loyalty to a twisted version of Lost Cause ideology.
5. That there is some sort of massive cache of Confederate gold stored somewhere in Arizona, but if you get near it, helicopters will come and shoo you away.
So. Needless to say, this book doesn't contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the Southern condition. It is a poorly written and dreadfully boring thing and relies solely upon conjecture and the reader's ability to suspend disbelief in order to get the least bit of traction. So why am I writing about it?
Because, as sad as it may be, it's an effort to tie Southern culture (or at least elements of Southern history) to a larger milieu of broad, vaguely Masonic conspiracy theories. In this case, the Civil War just happens to be a convenient target. Brewer and Getler wield Southern history like a weapon and use its history in the cheapest of ways (the cover of the book is so low-rent as to be offensive). They are essentially cashing in on America's vague fascination with the otherness of Southern culture and landscape and cobbling together a silly conspiracy as a means to sell books.
I don't begrudge them their right to capitalism. I just wish they would take it somewhere else.
claims for support as this one above. People of dedication have always been trusted with possessions not their own. The article is packed with self-generated doubts of undue skepticism in my opinion. How could any have ever been trusted with Ark of the Covenant as long as anyone else might make a buck off it seems to be the author's position of wealth.
