The revelation that authors have been reviewing their own books on Amazon to pump up sales (gasp!) has me wondering who wrote this Internet review of a certain Danielle Steel novel. The reviewer, whose true identity is hidden by the Internet equivalent of a CB handle and a refusal to upload his or her picture, confesses his or herself to be smitten. “I am hopelessly in love with Danielle Steel’s way of writing. She seems just grab you (sic) out from inside the book…The capturing way Steel writes activates your emotions and slams your reality way of thinking…I highly recommend this book if you are very sentimental and tenderhearted to the core.”
Let’s begin at the beginning, eight months ago in Iraq, where soldiers searching for weapons of mass destruction in one of Saddam’s faux marble palaces found instead a stash of Danielle Steel novels. If this escaped your notice, you probably also missed an interview with Mohammar Khaddafi some years ago in which he named his favorite novelist: Dame Barbara Cartlandt. Now that you’re up to speed, you may well ask: what are the odds of two sadistic despots reading romance novels? (Seriously, if anybody knows, what are they? I have no idea.)
Personally, I’ve never read a Danielle Steel novel and the Patriot Act prevents me from doing so now - if there does turn out to be a link between romance and terrorism, I don’t want some bookseller or librarian ratting me out to the likes of John Ashcroft. But I have read a few Barbara Cartlandt books in my time from which I’m proud to say I can still recite whole sentences: “There was an innumerable number of people in the room.” And “’I am fed up to here with repleteness,’ said Saltash.” Q.E.D. Literary merit isn’t the attraction for sadistic despots like Hussein and Khadaffi (not to mention Oracle CEO Larry Ellison who’s married to a romance writer).
One obvious conclusion could be drawn from two books I fortuitously found at a garage sale – for a quarter! Cash only! No paper trail! In “How to Write & Sell Romance Novels” Linda Lee lists the requisite attributes for the Romantic Hero.
“…He is attractive, but his physical appearance need not be flawless. His features and build should suggest virility, strength and power…He is masterful and aggressive…” Is the attraction then that Saddam and Khadaffi like to see themselves as romantic heroes? Could it be that simple – they’re not just sadistic despots, they’re narcissistic sadistic despots?
But Lee’s list leaves out the most important attribute, one that even a cursory reading of the literature shows to be the sine qua non of the romantic hero. From my second garage sale find, for example, “Rafael’s Love Child” by Kate Walker:
“But when the kiss came, it had nothing of gentleness. Instead, it was as fierce and demanding as the touch of a flame, searing over her skin, scorching her senses, taking, plundering right to the depths of her soul.
“She was unable to face the laser-like force of his gaze. He seemed to want to probe right into her mind, into her soul, and read her innermost secrets there.”
“Plunder”? “Probe”? Yes, the sine qua non of the romantic hero turns out to be penetration, the defining criterion of masculinity from the time of the ancient Greeks. Since the Greeks had sex with both women and with slave boys, heterosexuality was out (so to speak) as the defining criterion. Instead of depending on the object with which one had sex, masculinity rested on who was the penetrator (the active male) and who was the pentratee (the woman, the slave boy and the effeminate male.) Don’t think the United States was ignorant of this when it broadcast pictures of the captured Saddam, mouth open to accept the penetrating instruments of the Army medics. What could be more damaging to Hussein and to his followers than to reveal him as effeminate?
Indeed, the Greek idea of masculinity flourishes in the Bush Administration’s neo-con ideology, the “manly man” wet dreams of Midge Dector and Grover P. Norquist. And what about “The Fountainhead,” written by Ayn Rand, the neo-con goddess? Here’s Howard Roarke, the man Ayn Rand refers to as her romantic ideal?
“These rocks, he thought, are here for me, waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice: waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn.
“[Holding a pneumatic drill] fists closed tight…to feel the drill and his body gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel might sink slowly into granite…”
Truly, it’s enough to make the penetrated female reflect, as does the heroine of “Rafael’s Love Child:”
“What sort of fool was she? A masochist of the first order?”
And speaking of masochism, in a book called “Dark Eros”, which examines the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine” among other writings, Thomas Moore offers up this psychoanalytic trope: The sadist is the penetrating inspector. The masochist longs to be inspected. Herein might lie the answer to the Wall Street Journal’s question: “If Saddam didn’t have WMD, why didn’t he let the inspectors in? Why risk invasion?”
The obvious theory – Saddam Hussein, not being a masochist, did not want to be inspected, even if it showed he had nothing to inspect – has nothing on the Crackpot Theory, to wit:
Just as the bully sees himself as the victim; just as the dominant elite in Jean Genet’s “The Balcony” come to the brothel to be spanked and humiliated, so does the sadist secretly yearn to be a masochist. He wants, like the reviewer of Danielle Steel, to be “grabbed, captured and slammed” but most of all, he wants to be penetrated. That’s why Saddam resisted the weapons inspection which might have staved off invasion; he wanted to be inspected. To be invaded. To be plundered to the depths of his soul, or at least his rat-hole. To reveal himself at last for who he really is: “tender-hearted to the core.” Indeed, it was Saddam Hussein himself who wrote the Internet review.
And that’s just the Crackpot Theory, Part I. Here’s Part II: What if Saddam were familiar not just with Danielle Steel but with Thomas More? What if he invited invasion and obligingly opened his mouth for the penetrating U.S. Army medics because he knew that while the U.S. would seek to brand him as effeminate masochist, in reality it was branding itself – for all the world to see – as the penetrating sadist?
Helen S. Astin responds to “And a Little Pig Shall Lead Them”
Your theory definitely has merit depending on how people learn about leadership. That is by knowing what is expected and also by role modeling. The part about Babe and his leadership deserves an1-soberas a judge regarding the merits of the theory. Babe shows a relational type of leadership. He is respectful, and tries to bring the best out in the flock. A shepherd cares and protects as he guides the flock toward its destination. The part about shepherds sexually stimulating their sheep to make them bond, and priests seeing themselves as shepherds of the young and thus helping them to bond by sexually stimulating them deserves a 4-Completely Crackpot, unless we assume that they are role modeling by observing sheep shepherding and that they have not had any leadership development courses, workshops etc. Oh well, maybe they need to go to the Center for Creative Leadership for some theory and practice on leadership behavior!
Helen S. Astin is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
Alexander Tsiaras responds to “And a Little Pig Shall Lead Them”
Sex with animals never came up during the entire years I herded them. What my uncles were more upset by is when people called them sheep herders.
They insisted…“We are goat herders. Sheep are stupid. Goats are smart.” They felt that they were the Ivy league of herders. The problem is their students ate the Ivy.
Alexander Tsiaras, better known for his sculpture and his amazing computer renditions of the body and its processes (check out www.anatomicaltravel.com) was a shepherd as a young boy in Greece.
John Baskin responds to “And a Little Pig Shall Lead Them”
John Baskin, an incredibly gifted and successful television writer and producer with no expertise on religion or shepherding, was asked to comment on why I couldn’t get any experts in those fields to respond.
First of all, you have no idea how hard it is for me not to respond so that you will become convinced that there is something terribly wrong here. Anyway, here goes… My HUGE caveat is that I truly believe it is impossible to guess the motivations of other people. If I had to guess here, I would say people are not responding because they completely agree with what you’re saying (a 1 on the crackpotness scale). Thus a response is not interesting because the responder is merely regurgitating what he already believes. In other words, there is no challenge here. Of course, this assumes that all the responders are in agreement with you politically. If they are not, I can’t imagine why they didn’t respond. I can’t imagine why they’re Republicans, so why should I be able to imagine anything else about their thought process? I would think that this theory would insult them, but maybe that merely indicates the level of my misunderstanding of them. They want to be sheep. The Lord is their shepherd, and they take great comfort in the thought. Which, when you think about it, makes Bush’s strategy of setting himself up as their shepherd quite brilliant. A ploy that has worked for over 2000 years must have something to it.
