Zora Neale Hurston on Empire and Blowback

"I do not mean to single out England as something strange and different in the world. We, too, have our marines in China. We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideals of a country of their own....We also wrote that song about keeping a whole hemisphere under your wing. Now the Nipponese are singing our song all over Asia. They are full of stuff and need a good working out. The only hold-back to the thing is that they have copied our medicine chest. They are stocked up with the same steel pills and cannon plasters that Doctor Occident prescribes."

Zora Neale Hurston (1942), Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 791-92.