In Case You've Been Consulting Dan Brown for the Dow Jones Report...

So, it turns out that Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy had a love child.

I'm serious. This is totally true.

They had a love child and now that she's grown she's working at the CIA as a top-secret undercover operative. She's fighting in far-off lands to preserve our American way of life.

Well, okay, it's not actually true. It's the plot of Ewan McGregor's trash novel in A Life Less Ordinary. But it would be cool, right? I mean, you enjoyed the story, right? The interweaving of history and fiction?

Okay, here's another one: The founding fathers of the US were all Freemasons, which is to say they were all in this secret society. And when they were doing all this stuff like setting up a democracy and voting on things and writing out documents, they were also hiding some treasure. They even put a map on the back of the Declaration of Independance (like that document didn't have enough to do).

That one is the plot of National Treasure. No, no, don't worry. It's not true either. Please, do not attempt to steal the Declaration of Independance to see the map. There are big guards and little tiny jail cells.

Try this: Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married. They had kids. Nobody wants you to know this. There are these guys in this secret society called the Priory of Scion who are all about keeping it secret but also honoring it. Or something. Anyway, these other guys in this shady sect of the Catholic church (Opus Dei) are totally worried about the Priory of Scion hiring a DNA specialist and a PR guy to get Jesus and Mary's descendent on the talk show circuit, thereby exposing the church as a mafia-style power-mongering hoax. Or something. There's a lot of rooting around in churches for artifacts and killing of people.

Of course, this last one is the much-anticipated DaVinci Code. Now, to my knowledge, no one is out looking for the lovechild of Kennedy and Monroe. I have not heard of a rash of attempted burglaries of the Declaration of Independence. Possibly this is because nobody but me and Sam remember A Life Less Ordinary and, really, no one believes Nicolas Cage has hair, much less the key to some Masonic treasure. It is strange, however, that so many people are so freaked out by The DaVinci Code.

I'll admit, I haven't read it. I've only seen the incredibly Ron Howard-y movie, and it didn't blow my mind or anything. It is hard to understand why everyone is trying to disprove it. I mean, the History Channel is disproving it every hour on the hour for the foreseeable future. And churhes are handing out preventative pamplets that argue against it.

But, you guys? It's fiction. Dan Brown, whatever you may think of him, didn't write a newspaper article or a history book or a religious tract or anything else that might hinge on an assumption of credibility or knowable truth. And yet, when it comes down to it, people seem strangely unable to react in a rational manner to the meshing of fact and fiction.

Think back a couple of years and consider The Passion of the Christ. An interpretation of a story in the Bible brought in gory detail to the screen--and churches have private advance screenings. As much historical basis fleshed out with guesswork and dramatic touches as The DaVinci Code, but more palatable to Conservative Christians, and so they help to distribute it. Think about James Frey. He exaggerates the events of his life for his memoir (which, you know, I'm sure no one else in the world has done) and the entirety of our popular media breaks out the stones.

This leaves me with this feeling that storytelling is a misunderstood process in our culture. Perhaps the advent of "objective" newspapers and broadcast news have blinded us to the mechanics of relating a story, factual, exaggerated or otherwise. Regardless of the cause, however, the phenomenon leaves me exasperated and continually wanting to scream, "That's not the point!"

The point, of course, is not how factual a story is, but how well it is told. And for The DaVinci Code movie, the answer is...not that well. If a person sees that movie and decides to change their whole religion and start looking for descendents of Jesus, they deserve what they get. The theories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene are interesting and seem plausible enough to me. But I could cobble together a theory that Jesus and Peter were lovers and make it seem just as plausible while at the same time being more offensive to the Catholic church and less flattering to feminists. When your source material comes from that long ago and has been through so many judgmental hands, there's no way to be certain, or even pretty sure. So this all just seems like energy wasted and mountains popping out of molehills.

I prefer to spend my time and energy hacking into the CIA for the whereabouts of Sasha Kennedy-Monroe so I can tell her to stop wasting her time as a spy and become the first female president of the US. I mean, who wouldn't vote for her?