Cargo Cult

Orion Online:

Cargo Karma - We got what we asked for.
James Howard Kunstler

In 1973, when the first shopping mall opened on the outskirts of my town, Saratoga Springs, the local paper ran a special Sunday supplement touting its wonders and marvels. The advertisers who paid for it were all downtown merchants; and within ten years virtually all of them were out of business...

But for all the tears shed over the ruins of Main Street America, there is no question that we got exactly what we wanted. The local merchants who touted the new mall in Saratoga back in 1973 all believed in the righteousness of American business through and through, and they believed in land development as an unequivocal good -- no matter what form it took or where it was allowed to occur on the landscape. They were all members of the various local business booster clubs, sodalities for reinforcing the groupthink of the day...

Those local merchants were led into a very fundamental error in thinking that everybody in business -- mall builder and main street shop-owner alike -- wanted the same thing. "We mall builders are pro-business, and you Main Streeters are pro-business, so get behind this mall idea and there will be more business for everybody!" Plus, that thing they all wanted would be good for their country. What was that thing they wanted, anyway? A bright future, I suppose. The mall promised it in the way that a visit from an unusually benevolent UFO might signify shining gifts from on high, the perfect set-up for a "cargo cult."

The interesting sociological phenomenon of the cargo cult is best illustrated by the encounters between the tribal peoples of the South Pacific and European explorers, soldiers, and traders. The Europeans first arrived on the scene in the 1500s in sailing ships so big and strange they might as well have been UFOs. They brought with them wonders that had never been seen before, even on bountiful and idyllic South Pacific islands: guns, mirrors, iron cooking pots, bolts of cloth, crosscut saws, you name it. They left a lot of these goodies behind in exchange for food and other fresh necessities. The Europeans would then sail away and their ships would not return to a particular island for a long time -- years, decades, even generations. Their visits, therefore, entered into the mythology of the island peoples.

The wish to induce the return of the mythic ships led the islanders to such crypto-religious behavior as building big cane or rattan effigies of the ships, and placing them along the shore as sort of cosmic lures to attract real ships bearing goodie cargo. Well, sure enough, because exploration and trade were on the increase, sooner or later another ship would swing by and more goodies would be dispensed, reinforcing the cult behavior. Important in this whole dynamic is the fact that the islanders had no idea how the goods got made, or what kind of economy and society were necessary to enable the making of them. They just appeared.

...

Americans thought that discount shopping would make their lives better, that saving seven dollars on a hair dryer would make America a better country. They were quite wrong. The Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys landed like the Martian mother ships from The War of the Worlds, and in thirty years they have transformed the American terrain into a desolate wilderness of free parking and sodium vapor lamps. The existing infrastructure of our towns was left to rot, and local networks of economic interdependence were systematically dismantled. The local businessmen forced to close up shop had made up much of the middle class across America, filling both economic and social roles. They were the caretakers of the local institutions. They sat on the hospital and library boards. They paid for the little league. They employed people they knew intimately, and were held accountable for their treatment of them...

A very coherent read on where we find ourselves today: last gasp, bubble-like economic and foreign policy scrambles and quick-fixes to secure the most of a rapidly peaking oil producing infrastructure. An infrasructure prodicing gasoline that is only going to get more costly and will inexorably do so as demand keeps rising. (Urban sprawl is defined by automobile-necessitating distances further and further away from city cores.) Add in a public and private decision-making few, willfully or naively watching the diversity of both economic- and tax bases Strangle and consolidate away to distant headquarters. (HQ's unconcerned with any one particular locality's continued viability beyond a few years.)

To many big-box retail businesses, the phrase "built to flip" now applies, but in a perverse new way. Built to flip once meant you ride and harvest a company to a point where you palm it off on someone else. In often was a sucker's deal, the proverbial used car wth it's unresolved and unhealthy problems. In the eyes of Walmart, Home Depot and others, built to flip now means their stores and our towns. Once the money's been squeezed out they move on, leaving a shell. The shell of their predominantly (83%) leased buildings and of the retail areas they've denuded of small business, cultural worth, memory and vitality.

In many ways, the country's path today tracks amazingly well with corporate America's flirtation in the 50s and 60s with Conglomeration. Conglomerates were command economies, mumbling the words of capitalism, much the way Sam's Walmart has to wear a Smiley Face today. And they are both symbolic of the centralization of finance, influence and decision-making in the hands of a vaguely knowledgeable few, unaware and unconcerned with the nuances and implications of what was happening in the hinterlands, but intensely focused on squeezing blood from the money-stone.

Then, as now, as worker, consumer and taxpayer, you are the money-stone. Even if you're not old enough to have lived through them, we know from Penn Central, Litton, LTV, Gulf & Western, ITT and others what a spectacular implosion that "smart-guy" boardroom brainchild was.

Boom!² The pattern is the same this time round.

Buy a helmet. Or learn and speak up and fight from within. Or attend a zoning meeting about that new mall. Either way, it's your long-term survival, your 10-15 square mile personal daily living environment and future (or, your kids') that's being cargoed and embargoed.