drowning in Stupid Conspiracy Theories

While Da Vinci starred Opus Dei, a Catholic organization whose secret, unstated mission is to suppress the knowledge that Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, Angels and Demons takes on the Illuminati, a secular secret society that supposedly exists to impose Enlightenment on the world against its will. As far as Brown and his readers are concerned, it doesn't matter what purpose any given secret society serves — religion or atheism, the church or its opposite — just so long as there's a conspiracy. The hunger that Brown's books feed is not a hatred of one group or another but the fantasy that someone, whoever it may be, is running the show from behind the scenes. The rumor circulating about his next book, putatively titled The Solomon Key, is that it's about the Freemasons. Maybe Mel Gibson will get lucky and Brown will then move on to the Jews.

Brown's most bankable decision — and one mimicked by a string of best-selling imitators like Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry — was to avoid the mistake of overcomplication, making paranoid delusions of hidden power, which are usually esoteric and elaborate, simple enough that anyone with a grade-six education could understand them. The old adage that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people needs a caveat: Wide audiences can desire more difficulty, more confusion, more stripping away of the expected and apparent, but only for a while. The appeal of a show like Lost, at least at the beginning, was the feeling that nothing is ever what it seems. What is this island? Who are "the Others"? Why is Michael shooting Ana Lucia and Libby and then himself in the arm? The sensation of assumptions collapsing drove the show. Now Lost has collapsed under its own endless collapsing, its record-low ratings a symptom of intellectual exhaustion...