if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Longing for the Past
by Lee
And lest you think that nostalgia for the old dictatorships is limited to Iraq, here’s Germany.
A German man has canned the noxious-smelling exhaust fumes of East Germany’s cult Trabant car and is doing a brisk trade selling the scent to those nostalgic for the former Communist state.
“The smell is something very special and scarce nowadays,” said Thorsten Jahn, whose cans of “Trabi” exhaust sell online for 3.98 euros (2.74 pounds).
“I wanted to preserve the past in an original way.”
Fifteen years since reunification, nostalgia for East Germany has been running strong as rosy memories of the communist state’s social safety nets, holiday camps and quaint consumer products like the tiny, box-like Trabants increasingly eclipse its negative aspects.
There’s nothing quite like the smell and memory of authoritarian security, is there?
Comments
Must resist gutter humor........
That’s better. Here’s an idea. Open up a them park called The Wall. People try and hump over a cross a field. Other guests can man guard towers and shoot the people trying to cross with paint guns. You can work in some kind of landmine that hits them with flour and concertina wire made of silly string. Good fun, yo.
Ha, nostalgic for communism.
To paraphrase a computer joke:
Good citizens, we give them what they want.
Bad citizens, we give them what they ask for.
He could be selling those things each packaged with a one-way plane ticket to Cuba. Any bets on how many would take up that offer?
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I’ve heard that smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, i.e. the right scent can bring a person back to a vivid memory from several years ago better than the right sight or sound.
I would probably pay to have some happy childhood scents in a can for me to open and reminisce with when I’m having a bad day.