hatchet

If there's one thing that we in the character assassination industry know by rote, it's the fact that if you're going to go after someone, you should do your best to do it well.  You generally get one shot at destroying someone's reputation and sullying their name, so aim carefully.  I see the job of satirist as something like being a sniper, belly-down on a hot rooftop with a high-powered rifle fitted with a scope.  Every shot you take potentially gives away your position to the enemy, so you have to make every bullet count.

Apparently, nobody bothered to make Michael Crichton aware of these principles. From the NY Times via Romenesko:

“Next,” Michael Crichton’s new novel about the perils of biotechnology, has not proved as polarizing as his previous thriller, “State of Fear,” which dismisses global warming. But one of the new book’s minor characters — Mick Crowley, a Washington political columnist who rapes a baby — may be a literary dagger aimed at Michael Crowley, a Washington political reporter who wrote an unflattering article about Mr. Crichton this year.

Crowley's original article, "Michael Crichton's Scariest Creation, Jurassic President," is here if you'd like to do some catching up.  It's a witty, scathing indictment of Crichton's rush to embrace junk science in an effort to justify his belief that global warming is a myth and also explores the vein of high-handed conservativism that runs through the bulk of his work.

Crichton has taken it upon himself to respond, not with a letter to the editor or an essay outlining the science behind his beliefs, but by creating a walk-on character with Crowley's name, alma mater, and profession who also has a predilection for raping toddlers.  How charming.

To wit:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

Oof, that's some bad, bad writing.  It's literally painful to read.  In fact, I think I may have to uncork my favorite James Joyce quote of all time, "Shite and onions!" to convey its deep and thorough awfulness.

Crichton has never been a particularly gifted wordsmith.  As is too often the case with science fiction authors, readers are so caught up in the "Gee-whiz!  Neato!" aspects of what they're reading that they fail to notice that the characters are stock, the dialogue is clunky and stilted, the plotting is abysmal, and that the narrative thread limps along like a Pontiac with three flat tires.

Each Crichton book features an assortment of one-dimensional characters (the Egghead Scientist, the Rugged Adverturer, the Spunky, Plucky Love Interest, and of course a couple of Adorable Moppet Children) thrown into some extraordinary set of circumstances where everyone has to pull together in spite of their differences to make it to the happy Hollywood ending, and in the process they all Learn Something About Themselves, awwwwww.  They read more like treatments for screenplays than novels.  You expect to see instructions for boom mic placement and camera angles scribbled in the margins.

Mr. Crichton, if I may, I would like to suggest that in the future, when you go to do a tacky little hatchet job like the one cited above, you should use the sharp side of the hatchet, not the flat side.  And perhaps choose something that doesn't say more about your own pathologies than those of the person you are trying to attack.

In Michael Crowley's words:

I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level–particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child.

That's pretty gross, but it's even worse to me that the language is so pedestrian.  He describes a rapist's decision to assault a toddler as a near incidental, "The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers."

Yes, suddenly!  An "overwhelming urge"!  Like you or I might have an "overwhelming urge" to eat a whole box of Krispy Kremes.  It kind of sickens me that the violent rape of a helpless child to Crichton is, oh, you know, just a plot device to shame a critic disguised as an incidental character, just another day in the life of Alex Burnet, this novel's Spunky, Plucky Love Interest. 

Depending on how all this shakes out, I might just take it upon myself to write a character in a book someday named Melvin Crichton, a fatuous multi-multi-millionaire cokehead who gets his jollies dabbling in Right Wing politics and hooking innocent school-children on crack.  And if Crichton doesn't like it, well, he can take the usual Wingnut route and retreat to his corner and wail and cry about the Lack of Civility on the Left because those mean old liberals had the temerity to give him a good strong dose of his own medicine.

I've done it before.  It's fun. 

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