From America

Zombie talks about Cargo Cults.

What fascinates us about the John Frum movement and cargo cults in general is that the cultists had no idea where “cargo” comes from, and assumed it must be created magically and sent by spirits or deities. They had no conception what the world was like outside their island, or that there even was a world outside their island.

So, instead of figuring out how to generate cargo — or wealth in our terminology — themselves, the Tannans wait for a messianic figure to arrive and rain riches down upon them as a reward for their piety.

Guess just guess what Zombie is talking about?

Here's another hint:

John Frum is the son of God, but he’s not Jesus. He’s a black Melanesian, but sometimes a white man – or, according to others, a black American GI. He’s a kastom messiah, come to turn the people of Tanna back to their old ways before the missionaries – but he’s also a universal avatar of change, a successor to Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed.

Ahhh, now it gets obvious.

Of course Obama didn't start this cargo cult, he's just the most visible headman. Much of goverment depends on giving people the "cargo" they've been waiting for. Speaking of waiting...

One of Obama’s most potent campaign slogans was “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” While many have since noted the not-so-hidden narcissistic megalomania encoded in the slogan — Obama was asking us to vote for him, after all, not for ourselves, so by “We are the ones” he really meant “I am the one” — but it was the second half of the sentence which disturbed me even more. “Waiting for”? The implication is that Americans have been pining for a messiah to rescue them, as if that was our default position. Waiting. Waiting.

I saw this as vaguely insulting, because plenty of Americans haven’t been waiting for anyone to do anything — we’ve gotten on with our lives, under our own steam. But then it hit me: a certain percentage of Americans — 52.9%, as it turned out — were indeed passively waiting for someone to come along and make things better, and by “make things better” they meant give me more stuff (“stuff” being the American translation for “cargo”). And that someone wasn’t John Frum — it was Barack Obama.

Read it all, there's some good news at the end.