Blood And Belonging
“Archaeologists say you can infer the shape of a whole civilization from the smallest trinket. My little wine bottle is capitalism epitomized: efficient, cosmopolitan, without distinction.
Beneath me the rug of the Hungarian plain crumples up into the Carpathian mountains and we enter Ukrainian airspace. I have been across the border many times. My sudden attention to the flotsam of capitalist life is a sign that I am reluctant to leave this world behind.
What will I choose as the tiny symbol th...at stands for the whole magnificent, dreadful, failed attempt to imagine an alternative to capitalism?
As we begin our descent into Kiev, I decide it will be the soap: the tiny pink bars with crenellations that await me in what I know will be the dank, evil-smelling bathroom of my Kiev hotel room, lit by the smeared light of a forty-watt bulb. This soap, which appears to be made from the renderings of some animal, which has no odor and no discernible cleansing power, is produced in hundreds of millions of bars, all the same, for every dreary hotel room on every interminable echoing corridor of every hotel in a once vast, now collapsed empire.MoreLess
Beneath me the rug of the Hungarian plain crumples up into the Carpathian mountains and we enter Ukrainian airspace. I have been across the border many times. My sudden attention to the flotsam of capitalist life is a sign that I am reluctant to leave this world behind.
What will I choose as the tiny symbol th...at stands for the whole magnificent, dreadful, failed attempt to imagine an alternative to capitalism?
As we begin our descent into Kiev, I decide it will be the soap: the tiny pink bars with crenellations that await me in what I know will be the dank, evil-smelling bathroom of my Kiev hotel room, lit by the smeared light of a forty-watt bulb. This soap, which appears to be made from the renderings of some animal, which has no odor and no discernible cleansing power, is produced in hundreds of millions of bars, all the same, for every dreary hotel room on every interminable echoing corridor of every hotel in a once vast, now collapsed empire.MoreLess
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