President Trump’s missing naval armada seems the perfect
example of traveling in fog without instruments. It’s not his habit alone as
illustrated by bundled mortgage credit default swaps, weapons of mass
destruction, walls at the border with Mexico, and a growing alienated segment
of the public impaled by their loss of expectation and privilege. All compose the danger in which we now stand
There are
complicated questions of strategy: Can the Democrats preserve their voter base
which falls mostly into the bottom 90 percent whose incomes have been mostly
stagnant the past thirty years and whose children, especially, may no longer be
able to earn a secure living? Or there is the shaky vision of faith communities
whose interests tend to vacillate between their institutional need to raise the
annual budget and disappearing immigrants (led away by ICE agents), or people
of color incarcerated en masse.
Today’s
conditions increasingly mirror well known historical examples of failure by
communities of privilege to respond to the needs of the common good. The U. S.
in the heyday of the robber barons, Great Britain’s colonial policies.
Twentieth century capitalism in both the Fascist/Nazi era and during the
current era of globalization. As Trumpism
illustrates, illusion can work both ways: deceiving others and deceiving
ourselves.
Lost Horizon, a haunting tale
written by James Hilton in 1931—between the two world wars—captures the tension
between hope and illusion.
A pilot hijacks a plane carrying
British diplomats from Khandahar, Afghanistan. He flies toward Tibet but loses
visible horizon and crashes. A rescue party leads the survivors to Shangri-la,
a Lamasery high in the Himalayas----a place of peace, beauty, fields of plenty
where people age very slowly. The High Llama is reported to be 250 years
old. Both diplomats fall in love with an
apparently young postulant, Lo-Tsen, who speaks no English but plays the
harpsichord. One diplomat wants to remain living at the Lamasery, but the other
seeks his help to hire porters and return to civilization. Lo-Tsen agrees to
help him find his way out of the valley. On the journey he is taken ill and she
leads him to a local doctor who remembers that she was "the most old of
anyone I have ever seen" and died soon thereafter.
Lost Horizon is a critique of a British high culture, we may
say modern high culture, that drives men and women to seek new horizons. Today’s question is whether we can avoid
worlds of illusion by focusing all energies on giving people around the world
and in our own neighborhoods a better future.
Economist Paul Krugman has noted that A single Hedge Fund
manger earns more than all the Kindergarten teachers in the country
According to the World Bank Average Middle
East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456. In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s
$53,960. Blacks and Hispanics in U. S.
have 60% of white income. Black incarceration rates are six times White
rates. Latino rates three times greater.
