Your Mayor v. Michael Crichton

While the rest of the blogosphere – and the world at large – is content to emphasize the whole “goodwill to men� sentiment of the season, Your Mayor, sagacious visionary that he’s forced into becoming, prefers to focus on its fecund feuds. And so, we turn our attentions today in this time of manufactured peace and a nominal lowering of hostilities to the realities of the age – specifically, the bemusing clash between bestselling novelist Michael Crichton and weeny liberal columnist Michael Crowley.

Long story (almost) short: Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park,� “Rising Sun� and “Disclosure,� which variously railed against the evils confronting America via dinosaurs, the Japanese and women, respectively, released a novel entitled “State of Fear,� which essentially called b.s. on global warming.

Michael Crowley of The New Republic subsequently called b.s. on “State of Fear.� Crichton retaliated by including a very minor character in his latest novel, “Next� (in which genetics is bad! and stem-cell research is really bad! and science is bad! which is an odd take to come from a guy whose books tend to be based, to varying extents, on scientific advancements – if science didn’t exist, Crichton’d have to write about unicorns and chaste wizards pursued by evil wizards), a character named “Mick Crowley,� which Crichton described as “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's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.�

Crowley, while deeply offended, tried to put on a brave face in a semi-whimsical essay informed by shadenfreude, stating, “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. It's uplifting, however, to learn that ‘Next's’ sales have proved disappointing by Crichton's standards, continuing what an industry newsletter dubs Crichton's ‘recent pattern of erosion.’�

Nice try. Your Mayor, however, aspires to yet another sliver of “literary immortality,� inviting Crichton to scurrilously libel me, by irking him while offering my own excerpt from my as-yet unpublished novel about Mikey Crockton, a “best-selling hack whose novels were cynically crafted to read more like movie treatments than actual movie treatments:�

“Crockton lifted himself from the winded, sweaty, twisted, notoriously amoral form that was Judith Regan, a craven publisher of prurient, salacious garbage that titillated the unwashed masses, and, gasping for breath, asked, ‘What if I did a book about a celebrity murderer who eluded conviction - and wrote it from his standpoint – and made him the good guy?’

“She bit him with a saucy kiss. ‘Go for it,’ she purred, her bosoms heaving.�

Your Mayor expects Crichton’s next book to feature a character named “Don Konkey,� a “schizophrenic� entertainment media giant whose clouded judgment taints his efforts to report judiciously on the industry he’s been charged to cover, resulting in outrageously prurient and unjustifiable coverage of entertainment icons.

Oh, wait: That’s already happened.