anarchism

Heroic Informant Reveals Hippie Hygiene Horror to 'Elle'

Pareene · 04/23/08 04:06PM

For reasons utterly unknown to your non-fashion mag-reading day editor, Elle has a lengthy feature this month about "Anna," the FBI agent provocateur (in the COINTELPRO sense, not the lingerie sense) who brow-beat some lazy, unemployed pot-smoking self-proclaimed "anarchists" into planning a mild act of terrorism they didn't actually have the resources or intelligence to pull off. The story is a largely sympathetic interview with "Anna" ("The car stank of body odor and sweat, thanks to the extremists rejection of regular bathing and hygeine products.... Vicks VapoRub, which Anna routinely dabbed inside her nose, made it barely tolerable."), who rented the would-be bombers a cabin and bought them bomb-making supplies and provided them with bomb-making plans and demanded they stick to the fucking plan the night they all decided they'd rather smoke pot and make pasta. If it sounds like we're condoning either terrorism or lack of personal hygiene, well, entrapment makes us queasier than hippie stink. Now the ringleader of the The Collective That Couldn't Shoot Straight faces 20 years in prison. So let's all make like anarchists and insert these little culture-jammy 'retractions' into copies of Elle! That'll help, right? Sigh.