Is Crichton's poisoned pen aimed at Crowley's penis...

This has been getting a bit of play from various sources but I hope you will allow me my wee personal rant. Some time ago Michael Crowley, a political journalist of TNR fame, wrote a piece (second page here) in that journal about Crighton's brilliant writing style and intellectually stimulating plot lines. It opens with the following quotation from State of Fear:

She took a sip of red wine, then set the glass down on the bedside table. Unceremoniously, she pulled her top over her head and dropped her skirt. She was wearing nothing beneath.

Still in her high heels, she walked toward him. ... She was so passionate she seemed almost angry, and her beauty, the physical perfection of her dark body, intimidated him, but not for long.

Apparently Crichton took offense at the accolades heaped upon him. "Next," his most recent bit of airplane reading (did anyone else read Airframe while flying a redeye across the country?), includes a character named "Mick Crowley" who happens to be a Washington-based political journalist...who----wait for it----rapes a two year old baby boy.

Mr. Crowley (who often goes by "Mike" and, like the the "Mick" went to Yale...but does not, I believe, rape babies), is quoted as saying, “In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist." The following is a snippit taken from the NYTs

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. (NYT, Columnist Accuses Crichton of 'Literary Hit-and-Run')

Now don't get me wrong: I am fond of trashy reading. I am fond of some of Crichton's speculative romps...though the science is *often* so broken that the annoyance level grates at me. I am fond of really public personal attacks...especially really venomous ones (as noted in the NYT's piece, Crighton took advantage of the "small penis rule" for defamation, the idea being that no one wants to go into court and say, "yep, that 'small penis', it's definitely ME").

No, what really offends me is how Crighton has slowly drifted into annoying (and...er...wrong) socio/scientific/political rantings that make his recent books little more than thinly veiled position rants with the intent, I suggest of pushing/shaping public opinion (e.g. State of Fear re global warming, Prey re nano-tech and now Next re biotech). I know, I know, people aren't that dumb to get their ideas about major social/cultural/scientific issues from the pages of Crighton's thrillers...they are too busy watching Fox News and reading USA Today.

Crowley sums it up exceptionally well at the end of his apparently offensive piece:

The Bush years have been Michael Crichton's anni mirabiles. And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong--a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms, and even the Oval Office. And, ironically, this leaves Crichton in the very role he and the science-fiction genre have always derided: the hubristic man of opinions, the insider, the expert.

The sad thing is that this little tiff is undoubtedly going to lead to the sale of additional copies of Next. I think I'll wait for the inevitable film.

In the meantime, I am going to go reread one of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels...at least his happily misogynistic protagonist ("all women want him, but none can possess him") finds lots of neat things in unusual places...I learned everything I know about archeology from Dirk (well, and Indiana Jones).