On the island of Tanna, in the Vanuatu archipelago, they are waiting for John Frum.
He came first in the 1930’s – at least, that’s what the stories say. Depending on the version and who’s telling it, he was a white soldier – or a black one; he was an avatar of the god Keraperamun; he was a kava-dream. Whatever he was, John Frum walked among the Melanesians and promised them the same food, houses and pretty toys they saw among the white people.
If.
If they went back to the native traditions they called kastom; if they turned their back on the white man’s ways. If they held true to their old culture, all the outsiders would leave Vanuatu in peace, and their gifts would fall on the Melanesians instead.
So they did. They spent away their white man’s money. They left the missions and their schools. They left their work on the plantations. And they began to wait for John Frum to deliver.
They’re still waiting. Today, the cult of John Frum – one of the largest and oldest genuine cargo cults still active – has a political party in Vanuatu, and holds a parade every February 15th – the day on which, one of these years, John Frum will finally return and make good.
And as I think about them today, I am put in mind of another cargo cult, of a sort - one much closer to home.
Read on . . .
Cargo cults are the odd chimeras that are sometimes born when indigenous tribes encounter more technologically advanced societies. They are a religious mutation, the result of native peoples grasping to understand – and shoehorning into their cosmology – things their own science and magic can neither reproduce nor explain.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Yes, but “sufficiently” is a relative term. If aliens landed tomorrow with their own, unimaginable wonders and toys, all the “civilized” religions would suddenly beget mutant children of their own. That in mind, it’s a little more understandable (and a lot less laughable) that a few C-47’s loaded with crates of cookware and vehicle parts were enough to give John Frum a winning sales pitch in the Thirties.
But the weird and wonderful flowers that can grow wherever religions and cultures clash are not the point of this. That could be a diary of its own – several, most likely. This is more an exercise in comparative anthropology.
Around the time John Frum – whoever or whatever he was – was taking his road show through the villages of Tanna, America was building itself. From the ashes of the Great Depression, we rose in a staggering frenzy of growth and infrastructure. The Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to a broad swath of some of the Depression’s greatest devastation. Hoover Dam fed water and power to a chunk of the American Southwest, including Los Angeles. We built roads and rail lines and parks.
But we built more than a physical infrastructure. We built an economic one, as well. Beyond the rampant hiring to build all we built, we created a minimum wage, a national retirement program, bank reforms and farm programs that took America into its greatest age. We built a middle class.
We grew up in a world where families could realistically expect to send their kids to college, a world where they weren’t up-ended taking in elderly parents that couldn’t afford the full-time care they needed, a world where we could drive across the entire country in days, a world where parents didn’t have to choose between giving their kids a good life and giving their own parents a comfortable end to theirs, a world where a poor man really could become a rich one. We grew up in a land of wonders.
You and I see all this for what it is - a shared harvest, earned by the sweat of our collective brow . . . and an obligation. What we built here together is something not just for us, but for generations after us, something we have to maintain and pay forward. Republicans . . . they grew up in the same country we did, but here’s how it happened for them:
They found a crate labeled “American Greatness”, and liked the sound of that, but the actual contents were alien and indecipherable. The things that had gone into it – from the Erie Canal to the Interstate to the Rural Electrification Program to the CDC to the National Weather Service – were things their own ideology could neither explain nor replicate. So they shoehorned these wonders into their own native religion, and created the Cargo Cult of America.
It’s how Alabama Senators can vote against funding tornado forecasting, even as that forecasting saves lives in their home state. It’s how Orange County – built by the Pacific Electric Railway, Hoover Dam, I-5 and Lockheed Martin – can become a bastion of small-government conservatives.
They see these good things. They just don’t, in their heart, understand where they came from, or how they work. It’s all as senseless to them as toasters and jeeps to an island culture that knows nothing of manufacturing. So they twist their indigenous faith into stories of small government, and bootstraps, and Christian heritage, and promise that if we all hold to them, all these same blessings and more will come. Their faith never says how it works, exactly – it’s PFM ("Pure Fuckin’ Magic") – but hold to these old ways, they say, and it will happen.
I will say this for the cargo cult in Vanuatu: when they talk about holding true to their kastom, they’re at least talking about something real - practices and traditions their people actually held, the way they actually lived, once upon a time. But the heritage Republicans talk about – the golden world they’re so nostalgic for – is as illusory as the prescriptions they claim will take us back to it.
It’s a religious rewrite, a forged manifest for the crate of American Greatness. But they hold onto it, as patiently and faithfully – and as immune to all argument – as those bands of Tannese that watch and wait for John Frum every year.
He will return, it is said, on February 15th, of the year . . . well, one of these years. We’ll just keep holding parades until he shows up. The GOP calendar runs a little differently – their John (or, increasingly, Johnette) Frum will get here in 2012, or 2016, or 2020, or . . . well, we’ll just keep holding primaries until he (or she) shows up. And then, well . . . then there will be tax cuts and deregulation and the blessings will shower down on us all. PFM, baby.
Maybe one day John Frum will come back for the Tannese, and the blessings will rain down and all the outsiders will leave (great, now where do we film "Survivor"?) - but I know he's never going to show for the GOP. There is no savior coming to validate their ideas, because their ideas can't be validated. They no more grok economics or governance or social mechanics than those early Tannese understood internal combustion.
I'm not the first one to call the GOP a cult, and I'm sure I won't be the last. But it needs be said, loudly and often, because we need to remember this: we are the ones who hold the true manifest of that crate, because it was our crate. The GOP is just the cargo cult that found it, dressed up their incomprehension in faith and fervor, and preached magic as a substitute for everything they didn't understand . . . or couldn't accept.
Well, let them wait for their John Frum.
The rest of us have a harvest to tend to.
2:39 PM PT: At the advice of some of the commenters, I'm adding in this link for the Wikipedia entry on cargo cults, for those unfamiliar with the phenomena:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...