Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern Life – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed,
Maybe our American overseas interventions have a certain planned obsolescence to them, just like your technology: every so many years (or months) we need a new toy in the office and a new chance to free the world from an oppressive regime (with a new dictator who’ll grow unacceptable in short order).
Consider the wisdom of the technology of the steel spring. I just picked up a 1960s German-made manual typewriter. With a bit of luck it will replace this electric with the loud humming and the power-draw. The whole thing is driven by springs, so it’s not affected by gasoline or electric rate-hikes. It’s a model of clean efficient design, contains no plastic unless you consider the keys and nylon-blend carriage return strap, and doesn’t look the least bit pretentious. An hours worth of pleasant tinkering will probably get it functioning again.
Oh, I know, some genius dreamed up the Selectric and stole the hearts of American typists back around 1970 with that magical spinning whizball, and sure as marijuana leads to heroin, we got hooked in short order on piloting our mice down the information superhighway with super-highwaymen lurking behind each server to rob us of our sanity. But consider that today is the holiday Passover, for which the Jews have a peculiar prayer called “Dayenu,” which can be roughly interpreted as: “Oh Lord, we’re so tickled that you chose us to receive you miracles, but we’re humble enough that you might have given us one or two less miracles and we would still have been happy campers.” Put in modern terms, that might just go: “Oh Lord, had you invented the steel spring and never thought of cyberspace, it would have been enough for us.”
And this for Martha: Why dither about who should control wages? The corporate state already controls the relative value of money, through subsidies, price-fixing, trade scams, taxation, brokered labor agreements, and who knows what else, but when the notion of wage regulation pops up all the bells and whistles go off in our conditioned brains and we tremble at the specter of godless communism. Heck, that national debt alone is surely going to affect our standard of living far more than an extra hundred on a two-week pay period.
Low wages promote the independent anarchy of the “informal economy,” as they call it in Latin America, where a huge proportion of the money transacted tends to remain in the hands of street-vendors who don’t support their corrupt governments by paying taxes. Though they may have to bribe the local police and though thievery may be common, at least they’re not enabling their governments to engage in the grander offenses such as genocide and chemical weapons. Here in the States we’re so dependent on the corporate/state teat that we’re breeding out the innate ability to act independently. Meanwhile back in the USSR there was always an informal economy parallel to the state-controlled factory-and-farm syndrome, and the notion that there was no competition nor motivation under the Soviet state is pure fiction: the difference is probably that, except in more rarefied circles, the perks in Russia were more mundane compared to the gross excess we know here.
So, before we fly off in a tizzy at the idea of regulated wages, let’s consider how our lives are regulated, for example, by the government’s unwillingness to back the development of sane technology like an alternative to petroleum and pesticides, by endless wars which devalue the esteem of every citizen (who is seen by the world at large as a dupe of the Frankensteins in power), and by all those little global trade junkets which knock the economic playing-field out of level. Then again there’s the Federal Reserve and the Prime Rate and the Treasury….
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
