The Secret Agent Man

[RonPrice]

In life and in the arts there are old formula which weave their magic again and again in our lives. One such formula had its birth or perhaps its most significant and popular and modern incarnation in 1953. That was a very big year for the Baha’i community—the completion of the mother-temple of the west in Chicago and the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth. Of course, Ian Fleming, the creator of what has become the world’s most famous secret agent and superhero, James Bond 007, had no idea what that year meant to a global community of some 200,000 Baha’is. It is quite probably that he had never heard of the Baha’i Faith at all back in 1953. But in 1953 his first book Casino Royale appeared and it was followed by 13 more books. In 1962, the first 007 film Dr. No starred Sean Connery. I pioneered for or perhaps in the Canadian Baha’i community that year. I moved to a nearby town in Canada, Dundas, at the far western end of Lake Ontario. My Baha’i life and my pioneering life follow the time trajectory of 007.

James Bond films are an outrageously popular fantasy genre with a secret agent man who is handsome and well-known wherever he goes—and who attracts stunningly beautiful women. Real secret agent men, of course, are just the opposite that is, secret types who try to blend in and don’t do things that attract attention. Fleming’s hero is a globe trotter who goes again and again to exotic locations and slugs it out with the bad guys. These stories are tales of leisure which are adventures, scenes of life and death. They are anything but leisure holidays. They are modern fairy tales with 007 as the knight, the villain as the dragon and lots of beautiful women as the maidens.1-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 28th 2005; and 1Christopher Lindner, editor, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester UP, 2003.

It’s outrageous really to call
007 a spy, a secret agent man.
He’s the antithesis of such
an individual. But, of course,
these books and movies are not
about reality are they, Mr. Jones?
They’re about mass entertainment;
no one is kidding anyone here
about these fantasy productions.

And no one is kidding anyone
when I call myself a secret agent
man too, a spy, who came in
out of Canada’s cold down to Australia.
I was a man who often felt like a spy
Without those pretty girls, but who
represented a political worldview,
a global cosmology, a coming zeitgeist,
the spirit of the age that the world
was about to enter. I was someone
on the outside who had a message
for the inside, for all the powers
of the world did they but know it—
but they didn’t; it was a secret and,
just about always, I was the only one
who knew it, who was at all privy to it—
wherever I went during these epochs.

Ron Price
May 28th 2005