Tim Rutten's World

The analysis in a Tim Rutten column follows the same kind of comforting template that's worked so well for "Law and Order." Those Tim likes/agrees with: Good. Those he doesn't: Bad.

In this week's column, he notes approvingly that there has been a dearth of "outraged Catholics" willing to engage in a made-for-media controversy over the DaVinci Code. Good.

Then he goes on, somewhat perceptively, to skewer the "culture of assertion" in America:

Brown's claims for his book and, by extension, the film adaptation belong to a strong new current in American life — the culture of assertion, which increasingly pushes logical argument out of our public conversation. According to this schema, things are true because I believe they are true and you have to respect that, because it's what I believe.

But, having indulged in one relatively interesting observation, Rutten compulsively returns to form, bashing conservatives and the religious right. He continues:

Thus, the same sensibility most likely to take offense at this film — that of the religious assertionists — is the same one that makes things like creationism an issue in our schools and the demands of biblical literalism a force in our politics. Brown and his foolishness are, in fact, a part of this same culture of assertion and not of some wider secular one.

Rutten's obtuseness is breathtaking, even for him. In his world, the "culture of assertion" is apparently a shortcoming restricted conservative Christians (despite his earlier admission that opposition to the "Code" from the "usual suspects" has been minimal). It's not an issue, apparently, for the hordes that keep clinging to counter-factual fictions like "Bush lied" or that women are the same as men or that tax increases are good for the economy or that the UN can solve world problems.

Somehow, from all this, Tim Rutten manages to conclude that Dan Brown and the religious right are essentially one and the same -- and the argument is so silly that one can only resolve it by understaning his template, and concluding that Rutten must not like Dan Brown.

Even so, it hardly passes the laugh test. Comparing Brown to the religious right is like arguing that Jesus and Marx or Stalin (both of whom talked a lot about the "proletariat" but did little to help them) were lots alike, too -- all of them people of "strong conviction."