Whispers in The Dark

Thus many a weighty discussion ensued while weeding the garden, paring a turnip, or serving tea.--Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

No one actually dies of congestive heart failure, certainly not Stanwyck, who survived her Bitter Tea lead by nine years. Lust for life is broken by marginalization as we lose relevance, and pathology experts may scoff, but disease is mainly an issue of status and stress. Take the pressure for territory away, stigma, and all that. This points to why the monastic lifestyle lends itself to longevity, why we're all hot for cosmopolitan tyrants, despite protestation to the contrary. Eurasian matings were tolerated slightly better than African Caucasian sex, where they occurred in the last century, due to the fact that, with the appropriate grooming, it was difficult to tell the difference. David Carradine certainly had no problem submerging European individualism to Asian methodology, leaving him hot literally in the throes of death, the fusion which gave him prominence ultimately catching him up.

Frank Capra is absolutely shameless in how he utilizes the Chinese civil war to create this lust charged romance, but who wouldn't be aroused by it must be dead alive. Spastic knew Stanwyck had a hot to trot career, but rarely viewed the sizzle of her controversial rise. Damn, how what we leave to the imagination opens so many possibilities, even in the yearnings of post menopausal dryness. The juicy plasticity of menstruation is actually missed after all, the bloating, the inconvenience of diarrhea, trade off right back for this level of taunt seduction which blames Christianity for Mao, but more than that, the kinetic lure between Western and Eastern cousins. Though we now have the technology to meddle in it, and the evolutionary advance is, at times, infinitesimal, the liberal to progressive spectrum starts howling bricks if anyone dares assert that Nubians, who led to Semitic peoples, Asians, and Europeans, advance the original African model. Not by very much, but if evolutionary science is driven by adaptation, well, if nature is allowed to take its course, Africans and Native American Indians will eventually breed out of the human population. Intelligence being conditioned by geology and environment, Asians and whites adapted smarter, which is why we will never move past the damnation of liberal paternalism. Humanity allows pity and empathy en masse to virtually ensure global catastrophe. The ruthlessness Asther mimics prior to Mah li's seditious activity sealing his fate isn't far off from Eastwood's nuanced arrowhead in the same direction: Euthanasia is the better part of valor, especially when decline passes its plot. The exotic sex along for the ride is compensation of our ancestors watchful spirit. This doesn't mean the CPC won't kill us all if it isn't careful, dancing on the bleached bones of Danish silent film relics.

Delusions of American Syndicalism

As Morris describes members-only unionism, it is based on voluntary membership, and does not rely on NLRB-recognized exclusive representation (which recognizes exactly one union as the representative of an entire bargaining unit)--Life-Long Wobbly

It has often been noted, that within his directorial framework, Frank Capra was very dark in his journey toward his egalitarian, if heavily Westphalian, utopia, and this is just as true for Lost Horizon as for his more successful films. The point of contention for a skeptical viewer resides as much in Capra's wobbly axis as it does in the metaphor as a struggle for faith. The script falters, unsure of itself and the price of doubt, and fails to acknowledge that even the nirvana of Shangri-La is striated on the belief of ethnographic European superiority.

It also illustrates the danger of allowing adamant visionaries too much power in Hollywood. Capra must have known something about the Wobbly anarchy which in his time was just beginning to fade, not really libertarian, simply a reversal of polarity toward labor rather than managerial processes, which, in the Depression era collectivism of the American village, was dangerous. Dissimilar to any president since, Hoover actually faced the threat of rebellion, and his passing of the reigns to a benevolent blue blood like Franklin was simply the course of genealogy from which the country has never recovered. These days it isn't so simple, of course. We've moved from leftist radical to "the liberal progressive spectrum," to quote Krugman, who looks increasingly frail.

As an historical artifact, Lost Horizon is absolutely worth viewing, and sets a precedent for future surrealist poses, even if they obfuscate their way toward disaster, but critically, the metaphor is rife with contradiction, particularly as it relates to how the original pilot was vanquished. Someone would have heard a struggle, found a body, so the European passengers must have been dead in the first place, with the exception of Conway, whose brother George cannot accept the truth, and thus perishes trying to give his brother back to the world as the absolutely essential Foreign Secretary.

Is Maria's discontent analogous to Lucifer's rebellion? Does Capra feel evil is the reality set against sedate metaphysics? 

The man was a loon, and his amputee lama Perrault just as sinister as Ahab, his legacy problematic, very much alive. The number of human beings who can recall what any existence was like prior to Its A Wonderful Life is dwindling, as it must, but we believe in Stewart's triumph with the bump on his head in our collective noggins, and that, too, is the folly of American sentiment. Bill Gates certainly contributed to what he became, and deserves credit in his current status as the last American tycoon, whether or not his ferocity with his geniuses was trumped up, but circumstances played a part in his fate, like smaller computing units, and he and his wife should be able to see damaged potential and offer it a hand while they're curing malaria for Africans.

There is a mind here.