Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern Life – November 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Hi Martha and Ed,
Enjoyed every page, you’re more cohesive but never slick. In your well-written article on the “Indian wars” you hope humanity can rise above the baseness of slaughtering innocents.
May I point out that, a hundred and fifty years later, one essential component of the psyche of massacre remains, as a people we have a high opinion of ourselves which we feed by developing a low opinion of everyone else. This braggardly ego is maintained by a culture of SUV commercials and garage-rock warriors (not to mention politicians), but we seem to have passed over the phase of proving ourselves by murder to the perhaps more sophisticated phase of creating for ourselves a world-wide-womb in which no direct thought or action occurs, rather every movement and idea is a transaction with some sort of support mechanism.
To put it bluntly, we fell so in love with our remotes that we completely forgot to go out and kill. Most of our recent bloodbaths have taken place in regions which have been slow to develop the lord-and-master relationship with the device. Overall we’re wreaking havoc with population attrition but saving a bundle on laundry bills. The world-wide-womb will bring us to the point where population is no longer an issue, however, since we will all live in coffin-sized cubicles and feed ourselves on electronic impulses which we control with our remotes. Murder-by-virus will still be within reach but we won’t be able to see through the neighbors coffin to determine whether we’re stifling a Hutu or a Tutsi. Once and for all the drive to carnage won’t be confused with genetic considerations and will be enjoyed in it’s purest form.
In your other well-written article about the state of our nation’s politics, I would only take issue with the implication that Republicans and Democrats share equally the credit for our mess. I am not now, nor have I ever been a Democrat but somehow the tire-biter obstructionism and sour grapes we’ve seen in the party of Armey and Gingrich, which began, almost eight years ago when Clinton tried to act on his universal health care mandate and then escalated into impeachment (which was no more or less than a prolonged filibuster) seemed like the most disgraceful show of grandstanding since the days of Joe McCarthy back in the 1950’s.
Nor do I hesitate to lay some of the blame on media and video. They may not have invented the eat-my-dust, na na na na na na, hey, hey, hey, good bye, attitude, but they damn sure improved, on it. Witch hunts, censorship, nor even violence-sensing microchips, however, won’t change any of this, anymore than any other sort of emotional icon can be smashed by the powerful. It remains for each individual to make a personal pledge not to make one’s living by peddling human hubris.
Finally, my hat’s off once again to your George Sibley, a talented writer. Not everyone would have the cojones, to charge twenty-five-bucks for a seminar on rescuing the world from money, but it does sound like good fun. Next year, let’s do it at my place. Folks can pitch camp in my prickly-pear-patch and observe the fat-and-sassy prairie dogs as they continue to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion. George and I can split the take just as well as George and Western State College and I’ll come up with a keynote address, something like Rise Above Your Shameful Working-Class Roots and Find Fulfillment in A Slick Import-Export Bizness. We might even bring out that striking Los Angeles bus driver, the one who said, “Hey, we’re not against the public, we used to be the public, but thanks to all this overtime we’re not the public anymore, we’re the middle-class.” Bet he could enlighten our conference on all kinds of stuff.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
