Home > Work > Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort
1 " Fort is amongst the most rare category of writers who are "political" because they make us aware of what is happening to us in the deepest sense. He points to a rediscovery of the waY THat fantasy -processes dtermine the perception of time, change, and indeed the creation and growth of fact and product in themselves. Thus he demonstrates the workings of that operational cargo cult which is modern techno-capitalism, and whose fuel is engineered mystique. The belief that the new experiments in the new laboratories will be an improvement on the old experiments in the old laboratories is a millenial promise worthy of any island cult of New Guinea, worshipping, as many there do, the skeletal rusting parts of the corpse of the American military machine of over fifty years ago. In this sense, Fort cautions us about scientific promises and expectations. No matter how hard the islanders try visualising the world that manufactured their "magical" bits of B-29 wings, they cannot visualise technological time and it's cost/resources spectrum. For them, any day scores of B-29s will land on the long-overgrown strip with tins of hamburgers for free. But the apple pie America that made the B-29 is gone with Glen Miller's orchestra , the Marshall Plan, and General McArthur's return to Bataan, while the far fewer (and much more expensive) B-52s of our own day are only seen as sky-trails in the high Pacific blue. In any case, landing on a grass strip in a B-52 would be suicide for the crew, and certain death also for many fundamentalist believers. If such a thing did happen, it would seem to be a wounded bird in great trouble, and if the watchers below were saying their prayers as it approached, so too would be the captain and his crew. As for the hamburgers, well, there might be some scorched USAF lunch-tins available after the crash, and when they were found, whole cycles of belief could be rejuvenated: McDonald's USAF compo-packs might become a techno-industrial packaged sacrament, indicating that whilst times might be hard, at least the gods were trying. Little do the natives know that some members of the crews of the godlike silver vehicles wonder what transformation mysteries the natives are guarding in their turn. The crews have some knowledge that is thousands of years ahead of the natives, yet the primitives probably have some knowledge that the crews have lost thousands of years ago, and they might wonder why these gods need any radio apparatus to communicate over great distances. Both animals, in their dreaming, are searching for one another "
― , Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort
