Among the reasons for the latter, as Sonia Shah reports in the 30 August 2005 online version of The Nation, is the reluctance of first-world citizens to volunteer for drug trials. She writes, "On average, every American buys more than ten prescription drugs every year…. [Yet l]ess than one in twenty Americans take part in experimental trials, with half the American public maligning test subjects as 'guinea pigs,' according to a June 2004 Harris Poll. The logical outcome of this 'all gain, no pain' attitude toward modern drugs is for drug companies to shift the burden of experimentation away from Western consumers…." The fact that life is cheap, as it is put, in sub-Saharan Africa is the cause, not the result, of pharmaceutical companies bringing their clinical testing there. (By implication, the makers of The Constant Gardener, unlike the drug companies, do not see African lives as less valuable, but we'll have to take their word for it: there is only one African character who is as much as peripheral to the story and the English villains have more dimensions than he does.)
The Constant Gardener does not assess the situation reasonably or make the slightest attempt to understand it from a balanced point of view. Still Le Carré has warned, as Kauffmann quotes, "[B]y comparison with the reality, my story [i]s as tame as a holiday postcard," and, as quoted in this 2 March 2001 Kaiser Foundation Daily HIV/AIDS Report, the actions of drug companies are "far more awful than anything [he's] written about." This is classic conman speak. Why on earth would he omit the most damning information he knew of? Would you write about the Nazi treatment of the Jews and leave out the extermination camps?
Lord of War
Le Carré confined these inane remarks to publicity for the book; writer-director Andrew Niccol incorporates similar sleight-of-tongue into his new movie Lord of War itself. At the end of Lord of War the protagonist Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), an international gun trafficker, is busted and then mysteriously let off the hook thanks to his dark, but unspecified, connections with the U.S. military. Unspecified connections—in other words, Niccol can hint at deep entanglements without providing any evidence whatsoever.
Yuri then goes on to claim in voice-over narration that the current President Bush is the biggest arms dealer in the world, and not only is no evidence provided, it's entirely irrelevant to the narrative, which has been an attempt at ironic romance about a man who gives in to temptation and loses his soul. But among artistic types, hating George Bush is enough to set you up as a political theorist, an intellectual, someone with something important to say. (Le Carré's stint in the British Foreign Service during the Cold War at least gave him a basis in actual experience for his earlier spy books.) It's certainly good enough for Niccol to use as a finish, giving Lord of War the most arbitrary, "provocative," all-talk ending since Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (without having given us the pleasure of watching Martha Raye.)
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