Letter from Slim Wolfe
American Life – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado Central:
Editorials (a/k/a “Letter from the Editor” ) by Martha sometimes cite smallpox eradication as an indicator of human progress. Fair enough, assuming one has the funds to access a doctor and the multiple long-distance carriers required to call one. So here’s the new m
Those same editorials sometimes chafe at our contentiousness, though Americans seem cowed and placid compared to what we’ve sometimes been and the aggravated activities of other peoples. Maybe in simpler times it was easy to see the direct economic links in the chain of neediness. In the 1600s the French king needed to feed an army, which drove up the price of grain; the peasants, sensibly enough, seized the grain, hauled it to the market, and sold it at a reasonable price. Today we peasants are bamboozled by a pox of holding companies, future markets, seed patents, and agribiz conglomerates. Moreover, our staves and pruning hooks are no match for the royal tasers. But the price of wheat is on the rise, once again, the result of central government military and economic policies that we have little or no hope of altering through the democratic process.
Sorry I missed the Fourth of July celebrations. I was out in the shop trying to improve a power saw whose design was less than intelligent: a tool which carried a top American brand name and a premium price-tag. Call me for information on my ten-step program for recovering Americans. Builds strong bodies, nine ways.
Another occasional tendency of Colorado Central editorials is to shadow-box with a bunch of popular pundits whose credentials wouldn’t fill a teaspoon. Ed and Martha have some credibility as humble hard-working creative publishers and parents, but I can’t say that for the wags they quote.
Walking through tall grass and burrs between two adjacent remodeling sites seemed like the closest I’d been to nature in recent months, so I thought I’d better pull my nose off the grindstone long enough to spend two pleasant hours in the saddle, over in the Lower Cochetopa. I had a magnificent view clear down to Taos and beyond, but in all that big country, I didn’t see a physician who would take payment in chickens or a crowd of peasants seizing wagons of wheat. Maybe in some ways we were better off when the world was, like William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” right there for us to see at the end of our forks, instead of three times removed by news programs, pundits, TV and the Internet.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
