Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern life – February 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
My Visitors Guide to Planet Earth defines Christmas as a synonym for excess. This morning before dawn I indulged my own bit of excess, consisting of turning on two 60w bulbs simultaneously. Generally my activities, including machine-sewing and typewriting, are adequately serviced by one, and I have several swivel mounted bulbs (really 14-watt high-efficiency which yield a 60w equivalent) in strategic places. By not lighting areas not in use I save energy but still imagine I have more available lumens than Joseph and Mary in the manger. Their eyes, like mine, probably were strengthened by years of use to adjust to less-than-daylight conditions, and we don’t have a tale of some busybody innkeeper busting in on the pair, crying, “turn on some lights, you numbskulls, or you’ll ruin your eyesight.”
I already feel like an alien when I visit friends in town or hooked up to the electric grid, who burn 300 or 500 watts in their kitchens and the same again in their living rooms, not to mention TVs and computers left at full-crank when no one is in the room, except the whoosh of the fans of the rather inefficient duct heating arrangement. Most of us have lost whatever ocular muscle-tone we might develop as a result of years of convenience-addiction.
I really start to wonder what planet I’m on, however, when I see the outdoor displays of holiday wattage some people come up with. There’s no way those camel-riding magi could follow the light beams of yonder star through all that conspicuous distraction, nor can any sane human enjoy a winter’s evening stroll with nature. Here are some more entries in My Visitors Guide to Planet Earth:
Security: Desirable feeling of well-being, achieved by killing a thousand bystanders in the hope of knocking off a terrorist.
Refrigerator: Contraption designed to aid in the disappearance and spoilage of purchased foods, consumes lots of energy, makes noises at night, and releases toxic substances when disposed of. Photos of modern refrigerators were used by the CIA to encourage the fall of supposedly hostile governments. Can be run for free during winter months using homemade ice, but this may cause unemployment in the utilities sector.
Savings account: Device by money-fiddlers to fiddle away deposits.
Computer: Tool which teaches humans to follow indistinct instructions for diminishing rewards and box themselves into a given mental state. Not to be confused with house.
Congress: See also circus.
Music: (Archaic: pleasing to the muse) Pleasing to the sales charts.
Tax: Device for paying for weaponry, the oldest word in the dictionary whose meaning has remained the same.
Phone: Used to increase mandibular muscle-tone while encouraging a more general atrophication.
Christmas: In its youth it must have been fresh and charming. But now in its maturity (more even than Limbaugh) Christmas is obese, wrinkled, and soured by generations of copy-cat creativity.
Observing it we humbly realize that our species may not be destined to greater heights. Hash up a symphonic extravaganza based on proven Christmassy themes, hire a flute track from Zurich and a pianist from Buenos Aires, mix it up in Los Angeles, put it out on the mother-net, and watch your royalties come rolling in. Joy to the world.
It’s the same principle principal primo primero dinero which puts Limbaugh on one end and you and your couch on the other when you might otherwise have been out tending your crops, shearing your sheep, weaving your new djellaba, and showing the three nice travelers and their camels the way to the inn. The same dinero principal which makes dealing drugs and SUVs so attractive to young and old alike.
So when Martha editorializes her fears about losing personal liberties to some Mussolini, she knows she has hit the ultimate irony of the social condition. Unchecked, private dinero principal/interest loses it’s principles and becomes oppressive, and unchecked government does the same. Five hundred years ago, fourteen-year-olds were fair game for arranged marriage and reproduction: somehow custom evolved to codification to limit the freedom of teen servitude; the weight of opinion, over time, turns custom into law. Wade out into this idealogical quicksand a bit more and you find op-ed columnist and self-confessed Democrat Hazelhurst, in the Colorado Springs Independent, describing the Republican agenda as Marxist.
Keep in mind, however, that the operators of proletarian dictatorships may have had much to gain through excess, but the original theoreticians were merely attempting to put a new slant on the social condition of humanity and could expect no more than a check from a publisher for all of their trouble. This batting about of ideas leads to opinion, law, custom, and history. How much history is progress and how much a regression, that, dear neighbor, each of us may decide. Human ambition is a reality, like a rushing river. We’re damned if we contain it, and damned if we don’t. And steady-state cosmologists, Marxist or Methodist, may fall short as lenses through which to view a changing cosmos.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
