Lost Horizon

        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.