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The Cedars of Lebanon

One World

Sustainable Development

Worst. President. Ever.

Picture yourself as a Melanesian islander, native to one of many stone-age islands suddenly overrun by the Allied war effort in the early '40s. Mysterious great canoes your people have observed for decades steaming on the far horizon suddenly make a beeline for your place. Among them are giant cargo ships, full of Spam, phonograph records and soldiers eager to placate and diddle the natives. Like Adam in Eden, you are the bewildered beneficiary of extraordinary bounty and gratuitous grace. The price: you get to watch an airstrip being built, where these amazing white people come and go in still more amazing metal birds! You also get a raging dose of the clap.

But the magical cornucopia of cargo ships never stops. For years they come — literally from nowhere as far as you're concerned. The soldiers talk about places like “New York” and “London”, describing a society utterly incomprehensible to you. All you know is this Spam stuff is terrific. And free! You dig in. And gain weight. Forget farming, gathering and hunting. Olive-green gods from the East have obviously ushered in the Melanesian millennium. Forget the old deities. You join a new religion, the Cargo Cult, celebrating each heaven-sent cargo ship; blessing each holy can of Spam.

Moderns today may smile at this quasi-accurate portrait of World War II's impact on the South Pacific. Simultaneously, we must admit that most of us are members of a very similar and far more dangerous “Cargo Cult”, just as caught in the isolation of time and technology as the Melanesian islanders were in the isolation of space. Not only are we wholly removed from the experience of our pre-industrial ancestors, upon whose unseen and unremembered shoulders our civilization stands, but most of us are equally isolated from the origins, mysteries and consequences of global technologies upon which we have become likewise hopelessly dependent.

When we want something to eat, we go to a “store” and buy a can of Spam, or perhaps something more delectable. How it comes into being is as mysterious to most of us as it was to the Melanesians. We have vague notions, of course: hopefully, it starts out as a cow or a pig which just ate a nice, zesty rain forest some place south of here. Then it goes on to some kind of slaughterhouse (something we really don't want to know about). Then into a “tin can” from somewhere and onto the grocery store shelf. When emptied, the can and other waste conveniently disappear into our bottomless trash can, or an equally hungry white porcelain hole in the house, never to darken our door, beach or liver tissue again. Living in apparent security on what we fancy to be the islands of our individual lives, we have little idea and less care about what's happening on distant shores. Just keep it coming (and going). World without end, Amen.

The Melanesian Cargo Cults began to wither when the war ended and the friendly soldiers went home. If the people were lucky, the cargo ships and the Spam stopped coming. Melanesian heretics must have had a field day: “Beware! Repent!” The priests of the Cargo Cult must have urged stronger faith.

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.

Text © Travis Charbeneau

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited