Seattlest Finds A New Way to Die, In Our Basement

Once the dust had subsided, after we'd sawed through a concrete wall and brushed the rat droppings from our heads that rained down on us as we demolished our basement bathroom, we began to find unusual things. Old toys stashed behind sheetrocked walls, left there to mourn their solitary confinement at the hands of a former owner who was too lazy or cheap to free them amidst the detritus of the dump.

And then we found this:

It is a torn, almost scorched corner from a piece of paper clearly designed either by the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company, or, more likely, by someone around the time of World War II. The first sentence in the bottom right corner reads "Turn a fine spray of water on the bomb." We hoped Google would dutifully reproduce an exact copy of the original document somehow for us, but we found only a few hints at what we'd discovered, most notably this excerpt on bomb preparedness from the online exhibit Life on the Home Front: Oregon Responds to the War.

The paranoia of the WWII response struck a chord--we may scoff at our meaningless fear-mongering color-coded threat levels, but at least the government isn't trying to send us all gas masks and tell us how to dismantle some guy's suicide bomb at the market. We're not sure which is worse, seemingly instructional information that claims you can do something about a situation over which you have no control, or bottomless fear without cause or resolution. The propaganda of our modern "war on terror" is an abject lack of concrete propaganda whatsoever.