The Elite Can’t Hide From The Rest Of Us

My friend Craig Zobel just premiered his new movie at the Sundance Film Festival. Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel from the ’70s about a post-apocalyptic world and a woman who lives on a farm in a remote valley. A geographic anomaly, the valley has been isolated and protected from the nuclear radiation that devastated the rest of humanity. But then a man arrives, and a while later, another. You’ll have to see it.

Craig’s movie is the latest in a long line of stories about faraway, idyllic places trying to fend off human wrongdoing, from Aristophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land and the pre-serpent-and-apple Garden of Eden to the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. In the classic 1937 movie version, Shangri-La’s High Lama says to the hero, a British diplomat, “Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality.”

Sounds like a typical night at Fox News.

Z for Zachariah was filmed on New Zealand’s South Island, about as close to a paradise on Earth as I’ve ever been. Which apparently is part of the reason why, according to former hedge fund director Robert Johnson, “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

And not just a getaway for a couple of weeks of vacation fun. No, the British newspaper the Guardian reports, “With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences.”

In other words, they’re getting ready to run away from the mess they’ve helped create. But instead of holding off the barbarians at the gates, they are the barbarians. Take your ill-gotten gains behind the walls of your Fortress of Solitude, you ubermensches, and pull up the drawbridge behind you.

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