So the right-wing blogosphere seems all abuzz concerning Randall Hoven's editorial on American Thinker entitled "Cargo Cult President (updated)" which was read on-air by Limbaugh yesterday (23 February 2010).
The premise of the editorial is that Liberals / Democrats are akin to those Pacific Islanders hoping to entice the return of cargo-laden planes through the construction and maintenance of facsimiles of airstrips and related items such as headsets made of coconuts. In Hoven's and Limbaugh's view, President Obama represents (of course) the Messianic return of cargo and ancestors.
He is the Cargo Cult President. At least the real Cargo Cult followers built real things that looked like landing strips to get airplanes loaded with food and supplies to land on them. Obama thinks you get factories to produce things and hospitals to fix people by making speeches -- speeches that are reasonably good imitations of speeches given by real leaders.
The notion of a political leader as the Messianic object of devotion of a "cargo cult" is, I concede, pretty darned clever. It taps effectively into ideas about entitlement and politics-as-religion. It also uses a seemingly neutral anthropological term in an attempt to disguise the inherent bigotry of the analogy.
The term "cargo cult" seems to have originated in an article written by Norris Bird for the November 1945 issue of the colonial newsletter Pacific Islands Monthly. As Lamont Lindstrom writes,
"An Australian expatriate named Norris Bird introduced "cargo cult" in an article in which he warned of the dangers of training and arming Papua New Guineans to serve in a native militia. [...] The label "cargo cult" thus originated as mockery, abuse and fear-mongering. It served as low political rhetoric for revanchist expatriates, like Bird, who could sense that the post-war colonial order in Papua New Guinea was no longer what it had been and feared the consequences." (L. Lindstrom, 'Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium,' in H. Jebens, ed., Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique, University of Hawaii Press, 2004, p.19)
Hmmm... "mockery," "abuse," "fear-mongering," "low political rhetoric" and "revanchist"? Looks as though the analogy most aptly describes the fringers employing the term, clumsy and ironic in their ignorance.
P.S. - this is my first diary, so be kind