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Welcome to ‘The Colony’ by Steven Yates
As an adult, looking at the shelves of science fiction novels I’ve accumulated over the years, and the videos in the rack hanging from the door to my study, I am fascinated by that handful of works that say something significant about the real world. Novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day or – obviously – Huxley’s Brave New World are as deserving of the designation literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The latter use extended metaphors and other literary devices to describe aspects of the human condition as the authors saw it. The former are warnings about what the human condition could become if we don’t start paying attention. Various messages come built into many of the Star Treks or J. Michael Straczynski’s five-season extravaganza Babylon 5. I am acutely uncomfortable with the global-government themes that appear in each. However, Star Trek: The Next Generation served up one of the ghastliest portrayals of collectivism to be found anywhere when it gave us the Borg: beings incapable of creating but only of "assimilating" civilizations, turning their inhabitants into zombies like themselves, controlled by a hive mind. What a terrific metaphor for what collectivism does in the real world. Babylon 5, meanwhile, features, in one of its most compelling episodes – are you ready for this? – an actual secession against a corrupt, Earthbound empire! This is enough for me to praise the show to the skies, whatever other faults it might have. Finally, of course, there is George Lucas’s ongoing Star Wars saga in which we are seeing a republic being transformed into an empire. Neocon reviewers are so furious at Lucas’s successes, achieved without their praise or permission, that they practically spew lava onto their word processors. The other night I chanced to see one of the lesser known films, The Colony. This is a 1995 science fiction suspense film starring (of all people!) John Ritter and Hal Linden. That I saw it at all was pure chance. I’d retreated to my study to deal with at least some of my usual flood of email and neglected to switch off the television. It went on droning in the background. For some reason I returned to the front room, an article someone had forwarded me in my hand. Something in the dialogue coming from the television set caught my attention. Finally I had to put down what I was reading and follow what was going on. The movie itself wasn’t anything special. The acting was melodramatic and unconvincing. The storyline was fairly predictable. Certain situations were contrived, and there were loose ends lying around at the end. But these are just details. The main question came across with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: how much freedom are people willing to give up to feel safe? In the light of current events, the question cries out for attention – and after it was over, I was a little surprised this movie was actually aired in prime time. Here is the plot in a nutshell: the Knowlton family has suffered a crisis. Security systems salesman Rick Knowlton (Ritter) and his wife have had their car stolen at gunpoint. Alarmed and fed up with worsening crime in LA, they move with their two children to an exclusive, gated community called "the Colony." The community was founded by a multimillionaire real estate developer (Linden) who, as a teenager, came home from school one day and found his parents knifed to death by an intruder. At first glance, "the Colony" is idyllic. There is no crime, everyone is well behaved, and the school is in the top 2 percentile nationwide. However, the Knowltons slowly come to realize that something isn’t right. The first sign is when Rick receives a warning citation for jogging on the wrong sidewalk in the wrong clothes, and for allowing the family dog to tag along. He and his wife receive a book of community ordinances the size of a large-city phone book. One ordinance forbids certain plants on the front lawn; another governs what vehicles residents can park in their driveway; still others dictate how they may decorate their lawns and front porches. Rick begins having problems at work; the security systems he is installing in houses under construction in "the Colony" are being modified without his permission. When he objects, he is told that his ideas now "belong to the Colony." The Knowlton’s come into their clean, pristine house one day and find it full of technicians testing the place for radon, checking drawers, cabinets, cupboards, etc., without their knowledge or consent. In short, "the Colony" is a completely planned community – with everything centralized and controlled. The children are well-behaved in school, and wear uniforms (I know people who defend this idea). However, there is no PTA and absolutely no parental involvement in children’s education. There may be no crime, but the Knowltons soon realize there is no privacy, either. "Colony" personnel will come onto their property uninvited to carry out one provision or another. A CD-ROM, hacked into by the couple’s computer-whiz daughter, reveals the locations of hidden cameras not just on lawns or by swimming pools but in every room in every house in the community. Residents of "the Colony" can be watched, their actions monitored, every minute of every day by the shadowy real estate developer who runs the place with an iron hand. Those who work for "the Colony" have the smiling, vacant stares of cultists. Rick Knowlton learns to his horror that without realizing it he had signed away his personal assets to "the Colony" when agreeing to move in. He is repeatedly told to "look at the big picture, and see what we’ve accomplished here." His wife, alarmed over behavior changes in their young son, begins to investigate what he is being taught in the local school. She runs into an administrative wall, and is told she must make an appointment to see her son’s teacher. Having managed to sneak inside, she accesses her son’s files from a computer terminal, and discovers a school-to-work nightmare. Her son is being conditioned into absolute loyalty to "the Colony" and whatever services it needs. Their daughter later describes her classmates as "zombies." Meanwhile, complaints about the dog’s modest level of barking have been translated into action: the animal returns after a brief absence with surgical scars on its neck. Its vocal cords have been severed. The Knowltons’ dissatisfaction comes to the attention of the real estate developer and his henchmen. Soon they are in greater danger than they were from crime back in L.A. The previous tenant of the Knowltons’ house had tried to leave, they learn. His burned car had been found by police after "accidentally" going over a cliff. In the final scenes, the Knowltons prepare to flee and are trapped in the house, confronted by the community’s rulers who, it is clear, will terminate with extreme prejudice in order to protect their fiefdom…. Again, much of this is predictable. But in this post-Sept. 11 era, the scene of Patriot Acts, Homeland Security, and other such shenanigans by a Bush Regime that has now expanded the power of the state more than the Clinton Regime did, the point is nevertheless worth hearing, in whatever form it appears. Most of us are familiar with the warnings of the Samuel Adams’s and Ben Franklin’s that those who give up their freedom to have safety will end up with neither one. The Knowltons learn that lesson the hard way in The Colony. So how much real world freedom are we willing to give up in the name of the "war on terrorism"? Rome on the Potomac claims to be able to protect us – if we give it more power, including the power to spy on law-abiding citizens. It carries on a pretense of protecting us against a threat it could stop in a relatively short period of time with a few simple measures, all of which the Bush Regime and federal agencies have rejected. These include (a) allowing airline pilots to arm themselves; (b) profiling Arabs and other obvious security risks at airports and elsewhere, as opposed to strip-searching granny and taking away your nail clippers; and (c) initiating a moratorium on immigration, combined with a sustained effort to return illegal aliens to their native countries. This is called protecting our borders. These aren’t perfect solutions to the nasty predicament the U.S. has gotten itself into. But they are a whole lot better than what Rome on the Potomac is doing now, which is assaulting the liberties of U.S. citizens. The illusion is widespread that we would be safe if our environment was controlled. A review of The Colony I took off the Internet complained that the weakness of the film was its assumption that "there are people who want to live like prisoners in their own neighborhood." Given that the protests against the federalization of airport security and expanded FBI powers to snoop on private citizens are minimal, and given that repeated polls evidence very little discomfort with the Bush Regime’s consolidation of power, I’d say that much of the American public doesn’t mind becoming serfs in a security-state. The sad fact is, we are no safer from terrorism today than we were before Sept. 11, just more vulnerable to abuses of power by our own government. Perhaps we will have the illusion of safety once there are hidden spy cams in every house, and when our daily activities are circumscribed by sets of rules capable of filling a volume the size of, say, a large-city phone book. Welcome to "the Colony"! Only, it might not be science fiction much longer. June 29, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
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