Risk: Interplanetary Edition

In justifying the bailout package, the US Congress described certain businesses as "too big to fail," and indeed many corporations in the modern age have revenues that exceed the budgets of several countries, sometimes of several countries combined. Who can really regulate in such an economy? What happens when business becomes larger and more powerful than the government that's supposed to control it? Or, the corollary, what happens when a government is too big to be controlled by its people? What happens to our version of the truth?
This week's readings and film cast a troublesome light on what happens in just such a situation.
In Red Mars, the colony begins as a scientific research station, supposedly void from all such political concerns. The ship itself becomes a microcosm of modern debates on our responsibility to our environment, our planet, our traditions, the role of government and the possibility of world harmony. Arkady offers a sharp retort to those who wish to follow the exact confines of the treaty: "And yet some of us here can accept terraforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our selves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It's absurb, it's crazy..." (89). In fact, while governments themselves stay somewhat uninvolved for a time, concerns of profit and wealth become more important, as the search for mineral wealth changes the scientific quest from a search for knowledge to search for money. The entire capitalist ethos is questioned by the book, as what begins, perhaps not as a perfect utopia, but certainly as a better version of the world, becomes chaos and ruins.
It's interesting to consider that while Red Mars begins as a relative utopia and destroys itself, Total Recall situates Mars as a colony largely under corporate control that becomes independent thanks to revolutionaries, including Douglas Quaid. While the book shows reasonable people taken over by greed, only the film begins with a very literal control of the mind. It's not even clear at the end of the film what the reality is, whether Quaid is really a secret agent or just a construction worker having a vacation implanted in his brain. The control of life and all its facets becomes especially poignant with the company's monopoly on the very air necessary to breathe.
Compare these visions of a corporate chokehold with Hardt's description of America's role in the modern world: "In all the regional conflicts of the late twentieth century, from Haiti to the Persian Gulf and Somalia to Bosnia, the United States is called to intervene militarily—and these calls are real and substantial, not merely publicity stunts to quell U.S. public dissent. Even if it were reluctant, the U.S. military would have to answer the call in the name of peace and order" (181). The acceptance of US supremacy as not only reality, but righteous fate, suggests an unwholesome arrogance and unhealthy nationalism. Indeed, as Arkady objects early in the voyage to Mars when several other passengers complain that they came to get away from politics: "You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!" (60). How we look at the future is based on our vision of the past. As Quaid responds to a fortune teller who asks if he'd like a look at his future: "What about my past?"