Letter from Slim Wolfe
Hard and soft America – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors,
After reading Sibley’s review of the coddling book I had these thoughts:
Coddling is the very engine of American existence. It drives us to borrow money so we can be coddled. It leads us to war out of fear that some force of darkness will deny us our inalienable right to choose between Ford and Chevy, Gleem and Ipana, Fox and CNN. While other kids must scramble just to eat and learn the unpleasant language of the invader, our kids are coddled with Pac-man and Pokemon. Our soldiers can look forward to a glorious death and a heaven which no longer requires harping, since harps have been replaced with illegal downloading technologies.
Obviously, the right has no interest in putting an end to coddling; it would bring another great depression to our land in short order. It’s just one more drum they beat to get attention. Tell them they sound like communist apparatchiks exhorting the lower levels for greater sacrifice, and they’ll pretend they don’t get it. But take away the coddling and you have a population of water-buffalo peasants and jack-weavers who’ll depose the oligarchy at every opportunity.
The coddled progressives of today, on the other hand, don’t seem like they have the spine to put up much opposition or build much alternative. I myself have been exhorting just such a group to greater sacrifice this month. But a culture steeped in Leave It To Beaver, which has progressed from the nickel bag of the sixties to the $400-plus ounce of coddled kind-bud at the millennium, doesn’t relate to the sort of dedication which in 1936 moved thousands of ordinary Americans and Britons to volunteer for combat in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, without government backing or adequate resources, to fight the fascists in Spain. And such a culture generally isn’t willing to go to the barricades or even put in much overtime to create change here at home, even in an election year.
As usual, the right has got everything twisted to serve its own ends. They complain that our coddled kids need to be tossed headfirst into the raging seas of free enterprise so they’ll learn the law of eat and be eaten, but I maintain that we need to give our kids the strength to evolve up to the dry land of mutual respect, honor, and equity, where greed no longer induces us to profit from other’s addiction to coddling.
Coddling by one’s bed-partner would still be permissible in my new Utopia, as would cobbling as a building technique. But otherwise, those lily-livered pinko effete snobs had better get straight. And he means what he said. Plainly, God is testing us to see if we can turn away from Bush.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
