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	Excerpt from the new AMOK JOURNAL "Sensurround Edition"      Cargo Cult      Three weeks later, in the mid-coast California town of Watsonville, I      saw the cargo cult in action once again.      Watsonville was badly hit by the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The      biggest chunk of earthquake recovery money that came to Watsonville was      a $24-million low-interest loan to rebuild Ford's department store on      Main Street downtown. Other major public funds were devoted to a new      three-story parking garage nearby. Thus did the cargo cultists set the      stage for luring in the miraculous BMWs roaring down Route 1. The      Ford's was also designed with virtually no ground floor windows. Who      needs the poor folk of Watsonville peeking in at the displays?      The sad joke is that there was plenty of parking space in downtown      Watsonville and the people likely to buy things in Ford's (now bankrupt      after less than a year in business) are those who live in town rather      than the imaginary consumers in those BMWs from San Jose or Monterey on      whom the City Fathers remain fixated. -      Alexander Cockburn      November 1, 1992 In the excerpt from Alexander Cockburn's newspaper column above, the term"cargo cult" is applied as a metaphor for the hold which the Irrational still maintains on consumers in today's increasingly technological and complex economy. The term specifically refers to groups of people desperately clinging to a misguided business strategy despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. In its anthropological sense, cargo cult is a term for the sporadic emergence in the South Pacific, particularly in the islands of Melanesia and in New Guinea, of new religious movements which the islanders believe will allow them to attain an economic parity with the Westerner (whether English, French, Australian, etc.). The "cargo" referred to is the whole gamut of Western material goods from tin cans of food and metal axes to the airplanes out of which the islanders have seen these products disgorge. But Cargo is also the spiritual mechanism which can deliver these desirable objects to those who can comprehend it. The basic premise of the cargo cult is that tribal ancestors, the foundation of the islanders' indigenous religions, are the source of all the material possessions which are now being controlled by the whites. In order to redirect the flow of this cargo back to its rightful recipients, certain rituals must be enacted to mollify the ancestors. These actions have often included ceasing all productive work and destroying crops and pigs to demonstrate sincere belief in the imminent arrival of the cargo. The first cargo cult was reported as far back as 1857 in the Irian Jaya    area of the island of New Guinea (now part of Indonesia). But with the arrival of World War II in the South Pacific, geopolitics brought a new twist to the cargo cult scene. Dropping out of the sky in parachutes were New People who frightened the whites and caused them to flee the islands. These first Japanese paratroopers to hit the beaches were welcomed as Bearers of Cargo - clearly these must be the ancestors returning to set things aright. But while the Japanese occupiers were long on promises of the bounty which would flow from their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, they were short on results in the actual "goods" department and soon lost their exalted status. The departure of the Japanese in the wake of the island-hopping advance of General MacArthur was followed by two phenomena which further intensified cargo beliefs. The first was the actual shipments of cargo being literally dropped out of the sky to the U.S. Marines. The second was the presence of Black men among the U.S. troops who clearly seemed to understand the magic of cargo. These Black men could operate the radio transmitters which beckoned the falling cargo from the ancestors and seemed to the oppressed islanders to be dealing with the white man confidently and on equal terms. Life magazines brought by the GIs contained photographic proof that in America Black people lived surrounded by refrigerators and cars in the kind of consumer paradise which the islanders had been striving so far unsuccessfully to obtain. Just as in the American UFO contactee cults which first made their presence known in the late 40s, the transmission of higher knowledge and culture seems to be an important dynamic in the cargo cult. One aspect of post-war cargo activity was the building of decoy airstrips cut out of the bush, with bamboo radio shacks sporting wooden antennae to receive messages regarding deliveries. Often GI radio commands such as "Roger, out" were preserved as an oral tradition and passed down through the generations. Ritual leaders might manipulate a massive telephone constructed of white datura flowers. Cargo cults can be seen as an attempt by wised-up "primitives" to cut through the web of lies being spun by the patently duplicitous missionaries and colonial authorities. After dutifully attending church and putting their whole panoply of traditional dances and celebrations on hold at the behest of the missionary, at some point the excessively patient islanders began to smell a con. They had held up their end of the bargain and yet no one was willing to let them in on the secret of the cargo. Often speculation ran to the effect that the Bible was not translated properly on purpose, that it had been censored, the first page was missing, or that the true name of God was being deliberately withheld. An important and long-standing cargo prophet from New Guinea described in some detail in the authoritative Road Belong Cargo by Peter Lawrence was named Yali. A sergeant major in the Australian Army during World War II, Yali was brought to Australia for further Special Forces training in jungle warfare and for further reinforcement of his allegiance to the British Crown. During an official visit to the Queensland Museum, he observed that a carved ceremonial mask from the puberty rituals of New Guinea's pagan times was being held locked in a glass case seemingly for the Australian public to pay homage to and approach in hushed tones. This was the same mask the missionaries in New Guinea had called the "mask of Satan." There were also many unusual animal bones on display at the museum. Eventually Yali came to the conclusion that the Queensland Museum was actually Rome, which was where the missionaries had abducted the original New Guinea gods in order to obtain control over the secret of the cargo. Yali had also been taken to the Zoo where he saw many kinds of strange animals being visited by the populace. Nearly every Australian family had a dog or cat which they kept in their home as well. At a government conference which he attended in the New Guinea capital of Port Moresby, Yali was shown a biology textbook with a drawing showing how monkeys and apes had evolved into humans. He then realized that the whites actually believed their own ancestors were monkeys, dogs, cats, and other animals and worshipped them as totems just as the pre-Christian New Guinea clans originally had. They did not actually believe in the ridiculous Adam and Eve story to which they expected the New Guinea "kanakas" to subscribe. The European explanation for their abundance of cargo - "hard work" - was also clearly an outright fraud. Yali knew from personal experience that the most important European big men hardly worked at all. When Yali returned to New Guinea, he became wildly popular preaching his new revelation of a return to ancestor and totem worship in order to claim the New Guineans' rightful share of the purloined cargo. Rather than a pathological form of mass hysteria, the cargo cult in the South Seas can be seen as an open-minded experimental search for knowledge and the authentic map of power relations. Cargo cults can function as a fascinating funhouse mirror projecting back the fundamental tensions within not Melanesian society but the West. The spiritualizing power of Western consumerism, from the frantic attempts to attract Capital of post-perestroika Eastern Europe to Reverend Schuller's Crystal Cathedral of Orange County with its reassuring gospel of material success, is aptly reconfigured in the Melanesian rites to draw down the cargo. Military insignia and marching formations left over from World War II easily transmute in the South Pacific into religious iconography. The widespread desire for a dramatic rupture with the past as we approach the magic calendar year 2000 A.D. reflects how easily the Western world can slide into millenial thinking.
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