Years ago…

I had a friend with a kooky New Age mother. Like many children raised by kooky New Age parents, she had rebelled by becoming normal and rather level-headed, which her mother naturally interpreted as “repression”. She would be sitting quietly, reading a book and her mother would come up and say, “What’s wrong?” Sandy would look up from her book in confusion and say, “Huh?”

Mom would say, “What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing. I was just reading my book.”

“No. Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

“No, mom. Nothing’s bothering me.”

“Mothers can tell about these things. You have a trouble aura. What is it?”

At this my friend would start to get irritated. “Nothing is bothering me. Can we just drop it.”

“See! Now your true feelings are starting to come out. You’re obvious feeling tense.”

“I am not. feeling. tense. Please, mom!”

“It’s me, isn’t it?”

“It’s not YOU. WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE!”

“There! You see, it’s not good to bury your feelings like that!”

Worked like a charm every time.

I think of people like Sandy’s mom when I read cretinous rubbish like “How Dan Brown Stirs Catholics’ Buried Emotions“.

Buried nothing, Dr. Freud. The guy tells gigantic lies about Jesus and the Church in broad daylight in crappy prose and dumb storytelling and then makes a gazillion bucks off it from illiterate morons. And, for a kicker, he pompously paints himself as our Uber-Superior and the instructor of Humankind on the Hidden History of our Time, as well as the Intellectual Master of every liberal arts discipline known to man. There’s nothing subtle or hidden about my emotions when I witness such gross injustice from such a fraud.