The Horror Of The Airport Perfume Aisle
I’m walking through the airport perfume aisle. Airports are the most racist, classist places on Earth. They’re mini police states, where freedom of movement is violently constrained by where you’re from and how much money you have. The rich and corporate literally sit in first class or business while everyone is lumped together in ‘the economy’. And the perfume aisle distills it all.
Perfume is a French word, a French brand, which is ironic because Paris is historically one of the smelliest places in the world. Even today it remains littered with dog shit, and the stench of brutal colonialism pervades it all. Perfume is the distillation of colonialism because it takes cheap, ‘exotic’, ingredients from all over the world, mixes them with marketing and bullshit, and makes them reappear as ‘French’. Like Belgian chocolate or Italian coffee, it’s all a colonial con. Resources are stripped out of the South, branded in the North, and both the credit and the cash are laundered up and out. Like so much smoke, blown up the asses of us all.
Ambergis from all the whale populations they brutally genocided, sandalwood from the trees they cut, all borne upwards on palanquins by the colored people that do the actual work of colonialism. Colonialism works (still works) like holding a child…
