The Constant Gardener....

The Financial Post has a nice op-ed on the Le Carre's movie "The Constant Gardener."

The movie features Ralph Fiennes as a mild-mannered British diplomat who is posted to Africa with his activist wife. He is the horticulturist, but she is murdered for digging into clinical trials by large pharmaceutical companies, who are fudging the results and burying the bodies. All this so they can rush a defective tuberculosis drug to market.

But hang on, isn't rushing defective drugs to market rather a bad idea? Wouldn't it lead to hefty law suits? Wouldn't it be a negative for both the bottom line and PR? And would nobody in the corporate world consider killing people somewhat ethically challenged?

Not according to Messrs. Le Carre and Meirelles. And not according to most reviewers of the film. The Dallas Morning News, for example, describes the film is a "hair-raising indictment of the pharmaceutical industry ... examining ... the practice of using impoverished Africans as guinea pigs for untested drugs and covering up the deadly consequences."

It's not considered a hair-raising example of exploiting paranoia and economic ignorance.

According to The Toronto Star, the movie deals with "the urgent issues of globalization and First World complicity in the exploitation of Third World people."

Not the urgent issue of why people should believe such hoary rubbish.

The New York Times praises the movie for showing a "willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion." Except the pharmaceutical side of the discussion is to be discounted before it even hits print. "[B]e on the lookout for op-ed columns and public relations bulletins challenging its dire view..." warns the Times. Even the National Post's review declared that the movie presented a "believable conspiracy."

Believable maybe, but that should perhaps lead us to reflect on why people give credence to such bizarre concoctions. Humans evolved to be acutely sensitive to the possibility of conspiracy in the tribal bands in which our minds were formed. Their lives depended on it. That tendency has flourished amid the multiplying complexities of the modern world. We also have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between political and economic "power" because the two have been inextricably linked for most of human history. Put these two tendencies together and you have a widespread willingness to believe in giant conspiracies. The most widely touted of these currently is that which alleges that the Iraq war was promoted by the oil industry and its puppets in the White House and Whitehall.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the main peddlers of this take is none other than John Le Carre, whose hatred for President George W. Bush knows virtually no bounds. Mr. Le Carre, whose intellectual inspiration runs all the way from Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein, has seriously suggested that President Bush invaded Iraq to distract attention from Enron! He holds similar views about Blairite Britain. Eminent British journalist John Lloyd has noted that for Mr. Le Carre, "facts are nothing and hostility is all." As a fan of Arab causes, Mr. Le Carre criticized Salman Rushdie in 1997 for insulting Islam in The Satanic Verses. Mr. Rushdie responded by calling Mr. Le Carre a pompous ass who was supporting those who wanted to murder him.