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Equally ignorant of the ways of technology-driven global society — even
though we invented it — the West has begun having trouble with
some of our cargo ships. We live, for example, off cargo ships loaded
with foreign oil. Their contents get us to work and out to bars at
night. But twice already they have failed to come, in 1973 and 1979,
tempting many American Cargo Cultists in particular to a lapse of
faith.
Not to worry, say our priests. Oil is forever cheap. Our metal birds
now have smart bombs that guarantee the availability and the price.
Cargo ships literally overflowing with oil will keep coming for as
long as dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
We live off cargo ships full of cheap automobiles and inscrutable
electronic wonders from the Far East. But (something to do with the
incomprehensible magic of “deficits,” “currency
exchange rates” and “competitiveness”)we no longer
make these things ourselves, and they may one day become quite expensive;
the equivalent for many of us of not arriving at all.
Stray not! Stronger Faith!
Stray not! Urge the priests. We've borrowed more money than you
can shake a grass skirt at. We're rich as Croesus. You never had
it so good. Toyotas will keep coming as long as Spam comes in a can.
Cheap computer chips will remain cheap as long as our smart bombs
(which depend on them) remain smart.
We live, far less aware, off cargo ships that take our empty Spam
cans, burnt-out circuit boards and used hypodermic syringes and other
toxic waste “far away” where they will never bother us.
But (something to do with the Earth refusing to behave as a bottomless
trash can properly should) our Spam cans and old cell phones have
turned into mountains, our needles are washing up on the beach, and
our toxic waste is alive and well in the banana just in on a cargo
ship from “far away.”
“Beware!” Cry the heretics, apostates and environmental
crackpots who always sound Chicken Little alarms about things in
the sky like “ozone holes, “Greenhouse Gasses” — even “One
World.”
“Stronger faith!” cry the priests.
And we Cargo Cultists wonder whom to believe.
Long after the war, the Melanesians maintained wharfs of reeds,
symbolic of their enthusiastic welcome if only the olive-green gods
would return. In New Guinea, likewise, straw models of airplanes
were raised on sticks in hopes that they would attract the metal
birds to come back and smile upon the people. Primitive? Pathetic?
Let he who is not a cultist cast the first stone.
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