Letter from Slim Wolfe
Immigration – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
After reading Hal Walter’s excellent bit of political hackery (as he calls it) on immigrant labor, three questions come to mind which rarely get asked:
1) Why do we in the U.S. think we deserve more drudge labor than we can provide without outside help?
2) Why do other nations seem to produce more people than they can comfortably support?
3) Thirty years down the road, how many of us, and how many sons of loud-mouthed senators, will be sneaking into China in search of a living wage?
Nathaniel Hawthorne left us a tale of a simple man who went off in search of the Unpardonable Sin. I suggest the Unpardonable Sin is the vanity which believes that we are born to be better and the lowest rung of hell is reserved for someone else. Now that we’ve convinced the world that the U.S. is the act to follow, why wouldn’t the world want to come here to do it? We’ve siphoned off doctors and other professionals from Canada, India, Africa, and Asia. Our paychecks are fatter and our chickens are apparently juicier, too. Free trade is OK as long as we can pick and choose who gets what. Hardly seems free to me.
On a different topic, here’s another rarely asked question. If you wanted to make a feature film about gay cowmen or sheepmen, wouldn’t you hope for better material than that story by Annie Proulx? I found it in a book of mostly desultory stories about mostly aberrant Wyomingans, a far cry from her superb novel, The Shipping News. But the Shipping News’s tale of hardscrabble Newfoundland doesn’t have the shock-value that turns a buck at the box office, in the face of a jaded public. So quit yammerin’ about “unfaithful to reality,” when it comes to Brokeback Mountain. We tumbled down the rabbit hole long before Alice. Let ball-players do all the substances they will, let presidents swear they really didn’t want a war, let cows be sheep and sheep be cows, let tourists ogle Christo’s sails until they sail their vehicles over the edge. We didn’t invent escapism, we just perfected it.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
Post Script: Slim Wolfe has been avoiding movies since he turned fifty, with one exception, Gandhi.