A recent Economist had a striking photograph on its cover. A young boy, maybe nine or ten, wearing distinctive African garb and a big grin, is holding a lump of clay to his ear. The clay is shaped in an oblong rectangle with rounded corners and a tiny projection, a perfect image of a cell phone. The picture is meant to illustrate an editorial inside, decrying a UN program to help launch sub-Saharan Africa into modern prosperity through grants of cell phones and internet connections when illiteracy, hunger, and social chaos prevent (claims the editorial) any meaningful use of these gifts.
The cover, of course, proves nothing. The boy could be grinning for any number of reasons, including the fact that a magazine photographer is recording him for posterity. The boy’s attitude toward the clay phone is entirely ambiguous. Did he shape it himself, and, if so, why? Could it be meant for some kind of artistic or advertising display instead? Is it simply a prop for a game of “let’s pretend,” or did he fashion it in a desperate attempt to imitate the status to which cell phones attach, or does he carry it around to impress his friends? Is he honestly proud of the clay phone, or is he just joking around, or even posing at the encouragement of a photographer with an agenda?
Despite the cover’s ambiguity, my first reaction to it was strong and very clear: it put me immediately in mind of the cargo cults of the Pacific Islands. In World War II, American soldiers went to the Pacific to fight Japan. They brought with them a great deal of equipment and rations, some of which went to the natives, whether gifts or carefully scavenged artifacts. When the war ended, the GIs left, and the wondrous gifts went with them. Dismayed, the natives sought to imitate the magic that brought the cargo planes by building mock landing strips, conn towers, and Quonset huts out of bamboo and similarly pre-industrial materials. The story is at once laughable and piteous. The boy on the cover of the Economist looks delighted to have an inert chunk of earth at his ear. He seems, like the cargo cultists, to have missed the importance of telecommunications to the global economy so badly that he feels good things will come to him just for holding something with a precisely imitated shape to his ear.
My immediate willingness to jump to the conclusion the editors wished of me is disturbing, because it seems the bulk of political advertising employs just the same device, an image accompanied by words which may have nothing to do with it, but which together yank the attention firmly to a desired conclusion. Beware. Propaganda lurks everywhere. Including online journals.