post-millennium tension
So yes there are germs in the mail, but keep in mind, say, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in American meat and poultry, which are everywhere. Twenty percent of the meat in your supermarket, if the study is to be believed, has salmonella; and most of that is drug-resistant super salmonella, these days.
Here are two leaflets they're dropping around Afghanistan: The Partnership of Nations is Here to Help and Information Radio. My question is, what the hell are non-English-speaking Afghans going to make of these? The photo of the soldier shaking the Afghan's hand looks Photoshopped or something; there's a sinister falsity about it. The radio tower and the happy receivers just look like they ought to be in a Cingular ad.
Oh, here's the happy radio in Arabic.
Propaganda leaflets from the past: here's a fake LIFE magazine dropped in 1943 by German planes over U.S. air bases in East Anglia. The cover is taken from an actual issue, but the inside is full of blood-spattered corpses with captions like "This young man and his friends lost their lives over Brennan in the night preceding August 9th 1943. Within 24 hours 107 British and U.S.A. bombers were shot down over Germany. The great majority of the crews were killed."
Here are leaflets dropped in Japanese territory by the U.S.
Our Sympathies
You (the occupiers of Kiska Island) who are cut off from communication with the mainland and are in a state of complete isolation, are now suffering and will come to the same savage and meaningless death as those in the Aleutian Islands.
[...]
U.S. military power is about to swallow you like the surge of a wave beginning from the U.S. continent and moving up through the Aleutian chain. Your plight has been rendered completely hopeless by the U.S. military. Ever since you landed in Kiska [you] have been unable to attack. You have lost the ability to defend yourself. Your situation is miserable. We pity your family on the other side of the Pacific Ocean because you are dying without accomplishing anything.
