Back in the late 1960s, my young friends and I became enthralled with a short-lived television series called “Land of the Giants.” Created by science fiction master Irwin Allen, the series, set in 1983, told the story of a sub-orbital aircraft that encounters a solar storm during a flight from Los Angeles to London and is hurtled into some sort of worm hole.
Emerging on the other side, the ship makes an emergency landing in a place that looks like Earth, with one very large exception: everything is 12 times bigger than on Earth, including its otherwise very human-looking inhabitants. The giants are also slightly more technologically advanced and, after learning of the crash landing, they become obsessed with capturing the diminutive passengers and crew of the orbiter.
The “little people” have to scurry around finding ways to survive without being crushed by the giants, either by accident or design. One of the early scenes shows the six-inch captain and co-pilot of the ship narrowly escape a flattening by a giant automobile that looks suspiciously like something built in Detroit in the 1960s. Later episodes see the “little people” in the grips of the giants, a mere fist-flex from bloody obliteration.
Over the course of the series, some of the giants are revealed to be sympathetic to the little people, even compassionate towards them. Others want to toy with them, like a cat with a mouse. Still others are bent on cruel experimentation, like a child pulling the wings off a fly. Most dangerous among the giants are those who feign sympathy and support, only to turn on the little people in an attempt to crush them. In the end they realize giants can’t be trusted.
One need not be familiar with a campy 60s TV series to clearly understand the vulnerability of smaller people at the hands of giants, even the benevolent ones.
The show was simple science fiction in my childhood but thinking of it lately it’s taken on new, darker meaning for me, as a quirky analogy for what’s been happening to Canada since the return of President Donald J. Trump.
Our comfortably familiar-looking if much larger neighbour is now being dominated by a menacing giant bent on toying with us, and possibly crushing us, rather than respecting, let alone co-existing, with us. Threats of bruising tariffs, the constant belittling of our sovereignty and our leadership, the oft-repeated notion of applying economic pressure to squeeze us into 51st state submission; this behaviour puts me in mind of the malevolent giants of the TV series. They would bemusedly threaten to squeeze the life of out of the “little people” after picking them up in an apparent act of kindness or friendship.
Back here in the real world, we have never really been eye-to-eye with the giant to the south. We have long been blithely reliant on our great big neighbour for trade and protection and therefore unwittingly vulnerable to the whims of the great nation with its mighty military, gigantic economy and massive population. We have long assumed the benevolence of the U.S. president, always been a political giant, even one with whom we often disagreed. But we are no longer dealing with that USA or that kind of president. We have crashed in the “land of the giants”.
We too will have to try to survive by scurrying about nimbly, leaning on old friends and allies abroad and more moderate politicians in the U.S., although some of them seem to fear the giant in the White House as much as we do. But make no mistake, there is no way to make this a fair fight because in this case, size does matter. He is (and they are) much bigger and easily able to crush us if they so choose. And it seems likely the president is at least willing to try because he is pushing the boundaries on virtually everything. Our government is doing its best to stand tall with bold talk and promised reprisals and Canadians are rallying around the flag and Canadian products like seldom before but in this case, we are six-inch figures scrambling to avoid being run over.
We can and should hope that eventually, some of the vaunted checks and balances in the durable American system of government are brought to bear on an unchecked and imbalanced giant, who has so far displayed little restraint in pushing all the boundaries of his own democracy. But we’re mere spectators in that drama
We don’t know whatever became of the “little people” in the television series; it ended suddenly after two seasons without any resolution.
But our exile in the land of the giants is unlikely to end any time soon. And, regrettably, there is no way to know how it will end. Some are likely to say this won’t last forever; we just have to hold on and get through the night.
Perhaps. And in truth, we have few other options beyond what we’ve been doing.
But consider this. After science fiction TV, producer Irwin Allen turned his hand to producing disaster films, including “The Poseidon Adventure,” about a cruise ship that’s flipped over by a giant tidal wave. Its Oscar winning theme song “The Morning After” includes the optimistic lyric, “There’s got to be a morning after, if we can hold on through the night”.
So they did. But only 10 of the ship’s 1,400 passengers and crew survived.
