Of Proxies & Purity

Was having a discussion with my BIL about proxies and outside interference and times of instability [1] and I was thinking about the line drawn between a thing merely having outside help (does it then become tainted and untrue to its grassroots start...) and having something simply funded and started by billionaires and states and then where does it stand in terms of reality?). Astroturfed as it were. 
Hard to draw that line and in the fog of war damn near impossible. 
To that end, there was this piece on twitter lamenting (as I do, though now I wonder if my style reeks of this sameness) how al the pieces read the same. Like same voice etc. And tbf, blaming MFAs and their outsized influence is certainly valid. Hell I do it all the time.



And then it's hard to not remember that the MFA's foundation was funded by the CIA. Crazy, right? This includes how political writing is considered "beneath" the writer (good for Cold War propaganda and very different from the writers who got famous in America during the depression). Nevertheless, I've heard those who want to back the literary status quo say things like, well, it was just funding and he got it from them and then the literary stuff was organic. Or even that it was the past (nvm that the past is never past) and has changed since then. 
Ostensibly, but it's hard to say, right? Especially when the exact same rules of Cold War PR writing are still with us today. 
Proxies and Purity. Hard to discern, tbf. 
[1] Still reminds me of a character in a Singer novella who said (~), when the winds of change kick up, it's the garbage that floats up top. Though I do wonder how they had that when there weren't plastic bags around... 🤔 
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