For decades, for centuries, seekers have heard the siren-call: Go East!

And they have gone, and gone again. Why? In recent years, they have gone for the ragtag expedient freedom of the old beatnik dharma bums. Or the warm embrace of the guru du jour. Or the comfortable psychobabble at satori spas like Esalen. Or the quick fix of the compulsive reader of yarrow stalks.

With what results? Not much besides possibly a bit of money, a few minutes of media exposure, and the weak comfort offered by random coincidence desperately interpreted as "synchronicity," and then seen as proof of wisdom.

Is it all a hoax, just another illusion, more flowers in air?

Once upon a time the West (read: the United States) was the beacon of liberty. And in some ways it still is. If you want a modicum of political stability, the safety and protection of the rule of law, and a fairly level playing field for the pursuit of opportunity, the West still has a lot to offer. The proof lies in the continuing flood of immigrant applications for both America and Europe.

But (the eternal "but"). The picture is not as clear, the garden not as rosy, as it once was. Why? Because we in the oh-so-successful West have talked, thought, and lived our way into a cul de sac.

The affluent booming West, home of resurgent, world-victorious Late Capitalism in a dead end? Come on. You gotta be kidding.

Maybe, but also maybe not. The possible proof here is murky, but the dim outlines of what can be seen are arresting and worth thinking about. The idea goes like this.

On a foundation made up of an imperfect but generally equitable political system and a pragmatic view of interaction with the world, America rose to dominance. (Yes, yes, other fortuitous factors were involved, the luck of a whole continent rich in natural resources being the main one; but that’s another essay.)

The key word there is "pragmatic." European arrivals here brought with them in their mental baggage an early version of science and the scientific method. Got an idea? Try it. If it doesn’t work, make some changes and try again. If it works, go with it. If it doesn’t work, forget about it and go on to something else. What came to be called Yankee ingenuity, which, at its highest levels, unleashed a flood of Nobel Prizes to Americans.

Turned out this was a system that would give the world everything from Thomas Edison to 32-ounce Diet Mountain Dew.. And it’s a system that still, in its extremely narrow materialistic terms, is working very well, giving us more recently all cyber-wonders great and small, from a Microsoft Word that watches your spelling as you type to, well, Napster, not to mention Quake, and AOL.

Against this background of continuing material success and spreading global affluence, let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine importing into this America, land of the entrepreneurial free and home of the capitalistic brave, a movie from the East in which, when they have to survive, people fly. The movie is basically a good old-fashioned Hong Kong kung fu job with elevated production values. Plotwise, you’ve got the usual good guys vs. bad guys, except two of the good guys and the boss bad guy are all women, very, very skilled and powerful fighting women. Further, you leave the soundtrack of this imported movie intact so that viewers’ ears are assaulted by long stretches of Mandarin Chinese. You add subtitles and put it out in the merciless, overcrowded cineplex market.

Let's pretend: One of the financial backers of the movie nervously asks you to predict how the movie will do in America. After one screening, you, fingering your Harvard MBA, inform the producer that this movie has about as much chance of finding an audience in America as one of George Bush’s sons has of becoming president…. (I forgot to mention: We're also supposed to pretend that the time frame for this thought experiment is the summer of 2000, before the American release of the movie.)

The movie in question is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which in the months following its release, becomes the largest-grossing foreign film in American cinema history.

What’s going on here?

Sure, CTHD is a kind of Chinese Western. Good against evil set in remote but extremely photogenic frontier areas, far from civilization. And there’s plenty here to get the youth demographic. For the teenage girls, a couple of subplots involving frustrated love. A gifted but confused and misguided young woman who can’t weigh an ounce over 98 pounds but who is almost invincible when it comes down to the old dojo-reality mano a mano—imagine a petite James Dean in a kimono. A little skin, a little sex. And, for the teenage boys, lots and lots and lots of lovingly choreographed, beautifully photographed fighting, but with almost no blood and only one violent death.

Through it all, after much talk of enlightenment, transcendent values, etc., people keep on flying: onto rooftops, among treetops, across vast landscapes.

And, contrary to what MBA’s might have predicted, American audiences loved it, Chinese soundtrack and all.

Why? How?

Because CTHD offers lovely, persuasive glimpses of a way out of the Western flybottle, the trap of pragmatism in which we are so affluently trapped.

Just look at what Hollywood does these days: huge, expensive, special-effect- laden banquets of violence. But it is all so, so surface and so predictable. Shoot ‘em up, shoot ‘em down, do it with guns, lasers, bombs, mind waves. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same old four-dimensional time-space continuum: You’re born, you live, you die. The best you can hope for is some really good, new, cool special effects.

And here comes CTHD with frame after frame filled with flying people. Excuse me? Flying people? And nary a hint of Chinese tongue in Chinese cheek? Nope. Not a hint.

Millions of Americans paid good, pragmatic money to watch those people fly even if they could understand not a word of the dialog and had to crane over the head of the popcorn-crunchers in front of them to read the titles.

Sex sells. Violence sells. But for your long-term, your really long-term investment purposes, nothing, absolutely nothing sells like hope (ask Tammy Faye). And no hope sells like the hope of freedom. CTHD worked because it took the freedom we sometimes experience in dreams, transplanted it into an otherwise realistic (if remote) time and place, and said, "You too can escape the limits."