Letter from Slim Wolfe
Democracy – June 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Snickety strikes again….
And what strikes me is a general inability to ask the right questions. Let’s not be put on the defensive by an 18-year-old marine who thinks there’s no right to ask questions, rather let’s ask if any service person has the right to obey orders contrary to international law and convention or if they can claim the excuse of being ignorant as brainwashed by TV. Why wonder whether Bush is bright enough to be the next Hitler when all either one of them had to do was play the part, read the script, seem sincere, and appeal to the simple?
Certainly, whoever is writing the present script is smart enough to gain a lot of ground on the domestic and global chessboards. With a well-orchestrated stampede of fear on the home front, those dulled minds were easy to move. Did the brains of the New American Century think tank predict in 2000 that a Pearl Harbor-like calamity would turn the tide of opinion? Is a wedge driven midway in the Muslim world and a new foothold on the Russo-Chinese underbelly a slick attack by King’s rook?
If Saddam’s weapons were tossed in a suitcase and hidden in a locker in an Atlanta bus depot, who’s got the combination? We can amuse ourselves by editorializing and protesting but we were never major players here. Russian missiles in Cuba forty years ago were a response to American missiles in Turkey, the game is somewhat still the same but somehow closer to endgame if only because we’ve come no closer to changing the nature of the pieces. The human mind still has the same fascination for the power game. Watch any kid playing video-war.
The greatest comfort of late has been Pacifica radio and its Democracy Now program now available on KHEN as well as KRZA. They seem to ask the right questions of the right people. They kept up a great interplay with correspondents in Baghdad and Iraqi civilians. Now that NPR has got in bed with the corporate Nazis this seems to be the only voice filling the vacuum of honest reporting.
Some people might call them left, but I’d just call them “beyond the blinders of American thought.” We do look like fascists to a great majority of the world. It’s too late for “loyal opposition.” Call us the new Reich, the new Babylon, or the New American Century, it makes little difference we’ve plainly come out on the wrong side of history, and the reasonable among us will by lucky if we’re remembered as a curious footnote.
History, we’re told, will no longer be a matter of international laws and negotiations but will be decided by a few handfuls of commandos in space-suits, with super -weapons (and super-drugs self-administered by built-in skin patch), glorying in the law of the jungle like the horde of Genghis Khan.
The rest can stay home and watch the broadcast from bed and take whatever crumbs fall from the table. It’s the nature of animals to wrestle, and it’s the nature of humans to plunder, the more so since it’s been fed them since they could crawl, on one tube or another. Whereas wealth gained by plunder once supported musicians and architects who gave us the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Kremlin, that sort of investment may now be irrelevant, because Americans have been bred to be satisfied with exotic-sounding names for their SUVs and their children, club-cards at the grocery market, and Pokemon.
It’s notable that “we” haven’t tried “liberating them” by simply dropping load after load of Wal-Mart crap and overwhelming their airwaves with heavy metal sounds and Anacin commercials. The winner, of course, has been America the Huckster and America the Shill. We buy and sell phony slaughter and blatant lies, whether cooked up by promoters of TV Wrestling bimbos or the President’s teleprompter. If some sort of terrorist event were staged by some psychos from Argentina, we can expect the masses to gladly swallow the packaged response like one more TV dinner, even if it means signing up everyone with a Spanish surname as an agent of a foreign power and occupying all of Latin America indefinitely.
There seems to be a large base of lazybrains who would rather follow anything than think, who enjoy vicarious or even participatory violence, and while this gorilla mentality isn’t particularly American, we’ve come a long way in furthering the science of perpetuating and manipulating it. In doing so we have demeaned the consciousness of the human race every bit as much as the propaganda machine of any totalitarian regime in history. The anti-war movement which Martha wished to see last year finally shook off it’s cobwebs and took to the streets, though the repression has been increasing in severity, and this too, is just another rigged wrestling match to amuse the vidiots after a long hard day’s work of pushing buttons and leaning on the gas.
Wow. They’re shooting the bystanders now. Maybe we should drive down there and bust a few heads with our truck. Nah, here comes the minivan with the Chinese food, let’s eat instead.
Help me out, someone, write a happy ending for this little essay, because I’m stumped. Is it time to take our goats and chickens and walk off into the desert and wander for forty years, hiding out and seeking visions? I considered self-immolation on the Capitol steps but all that would leave would be colorful videos for digital enhancement. I considered leaving the country in disgrace, but most peaceable nations might not want to gamble on an American (money might help, so any well-to-do fascists who’d like me to shut up can buy me a citizenship elsewhere if so inclined). Maybe the best option is to keep the present course, and make noise and music while we still can.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove