The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. The line is Kipling’s. Here in America, which ostensibly is my own country, everything smells of fear. It’s an old smell hereabouts. Cotton Mather’s rotten breath, the sermons of slavery’s defenders, clergy all, the anthropological and racial exceptionalism taught at Harvard–consistent with subsequent massacres in the Philippines and Viet Nam–and now the post 9-11 militarized policing of the nation’s poor, it’s young, it’s people of color. The smell is thick as tear gas and incense.
Paul Ryan’s assault on social services smells like good corporate starch until you hang around, then it smells like bloody feathers. And what does a domestic drone smell like? I say it smells like Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Macassar, the one that kept the hair tonic off his favorite chair.
“Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?” (Nietzsche)
If you’re a raven there’s plenty of inspiration to go around. Especially with the help of Congress. Over at Buzzfeed they’re reporting:
“An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.”
It smells like greenbacks and the fear of foreigners, namely, our own people.
Planet of the Blind 