Mark Steyn - Lights Out

Hoo-boy, it’s heaven as an Eliot Spitzer-class bordello, like an eternal reservation in Room 817 at the Mayflower – but with a complimentary mini-bar:

He told us that one black-eyed virgin would give you a glass of wine. Wine in Paradise is a reward for your good deeds. The wine of this world is destructive, but not the wine of the world to come.

Hold the raisins.

With hindsight, I think the makers of the latest version started out wanting to make an anti-Bush allegory – hence all those endless background news bulletins about Iraq – and then couldn’t figure out how to make it fit the Body Snatchers narrative. The nearest thing to a coherent message was the Russian guy’s observation toward the end that a world without war would be a world in which we’re no longer human. And, message-wise, I’ll bet that was an accidental one.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting. Since my difficulties with the “human rights” thought police began, I’ve been struck by how many Canadians (and Europeans) sincerely believe that a better world can be built by giving the state the exclusive power to “ban hate” and enforce niceness. Such a world will by definition be totalitarian. I’m not proposing that the next remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers should be an allegory for the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, not unless Hollywood really wants to lose a ton of dough. But nevertheless that fits the story’s theme better than whatever Nicole Kidman was running through the streets perspiring over. In its successful manifestations, the Body Snatchers narrative is not about Bush but about sedating the populace into bland conformity for ostensibly “nice” reasons. A human society is a messy one: a lot of people will be “partisan” and “mean-spirited”, others will be hateful and bigoted, a few will bomb and kill and maim. You hope that most folks will stay down the low-key end of that spectrum, and that those who don’t will be resisted. But that is the price of remaining human, and the alternative – a state-mandated niceness – is fascistic.

Gibson Square Books subsequently agreed to publish The Jewel Of Medina , a novel telling the story of Mohammed’s first wife from her betrothal to the Prophet at the age of six. Envisioned by its author, Sherry Jones, as a “bridge-builder” between Islam and the west, the novel was cancelled by its original publisher, Random House in New York, after they received “cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” On September 4th 2008, Martin Rynja at Gibson Square stepped into the breach and announced that he would publish The Jewel Of Medina in Britain and the Commonwealth. On September 27th, his home in London was firebombed, and publication was indefinitely postponed.

“Ingsoc”, you’ll recall, is a contraction deriving from “English Socialism”. Poor old Orwell got so much right but even he couldn’t foresee that the very word “English” would be deemed beyond the pale in a scrupulously sensitive post-national Britain. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a smiley-face government regulatory agency of “Canadian values” called “Canval”.

Whoops, don’t want to give anybody any ideas.