Letter from Slim Wolfe
Economics – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Ah, February, the month to strike doom and gloom into the hearts of the Quillen Pundits Society, as reflected in the March issue: Walter on death and depression; Martha on Democracy; Sibley on the Silent Majority; Wolfe the indecipherable.
Surprising was the “can’t be done” tone of Jim Scanga’s letter. Not that I would ever presume to advise anyone in the cattle biz. I am, after all, a regular patron of Scanga’s deli and happy to be so; even though I rarely buy red meat, if I do, it’s Scanga’s.
But it did seem as if Scanga’s letter clouded the issue by mixing up Wasting Disease with Mad Cow, since the former affects game who are not fed on cow parts. And I did wonder where we would be if every new trend or variation were met with a flat “can’t be done.” Isn’t that what some folks said about organic beef and produce, about ten years ago?
Okay, sure, organic is one thing, range-fed is another, but that doesn’t mean purchasing habits will never change. More and more people are looking for alternatives to agribiz (can ya smell them Kansas feedlots, pardner?) and the market seems to be growing rapidly.
Wouldn’t it be nice to encourage producers and consumers looking for a more direct and human-sized connection? The extra expense of wholesome food is minimal compared to the price of all the other essential crap people are sold. If people weren’t bombarded by TV commercials….
If people weren’t bombarded by television they might also quit some of those spending patterns Martha mentioned. Rather than keeping up with their Hollywood role-models they would be thankful that they live in more comfort than most of the world’s peasants, even if they live in Tortilla-Flat poverty here in Saguache. The villagers in rural Morocco, say, wouldn’t be turning up their noses at the different flavor of range-fed beef. Heck, they’d be glad if their chickens were laying, let alone if they could find a doctor, never mind all that HMO nonsense.
Poverty is relative, and someone smarter than me once said, there is no poverty, what there is, is envy. The trouble is not the median income in Saguache County, the trouble is in the millionaire bracket which keeps fueling inflation and consumption. You can’t vote those people out of office, and you can hardly tax them, since you need their contributions to get elected. That’s why people get fed up and have revolutions.
Democracy is not the end, democracy is the matrix, the medium in which to try to grow a better world, but we’ve got it full of a bunch of self-indulgent monkeys who also thrive in it and tend to drown out the rest. Here and there in isolated corners where the monkey-chatter is distant we can try our own little experiments at cooperation, consensus, or what-have-you, including range-fed-cattle. We can also try to make our own chatter to nullify the monkey-mess. It ain’t much, but maybe it’s more than some people can do.
And here’s the bright side. Some of that silent majority are raised like decent folk and have large pickups that can pull you out of a ditch, which is more than we can say for some longhairs in Subarus.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
Post Script regarding the upcoming elections:
Pierce a dragon to the heart and you may not be done, for dragons can reform from their parts. Thus American invasions overseas recur even though the McKinleys, Johnsons, and Bushes may have been retired. What we need is not a victor at the polls but a hero who can incinerate the severed parts or scatter them so far and wide that they have no chance of reforming.
As yet I haven’t heard a presidential candidate with even the courage to say, “Yes, Bush lied,” much less the strength of character to give us the campaign promise that Bush and his circle will be turned over to the authorities in Le Hague to stand trial for war crimes, mass murder, and breach of law.
I’ve heard no one suggest that in light of repeated offenses America needs to be given a new pacifist constitution like the ones which were handed down to Japan and Germany back in 1945. I haven’t heard a peep about freezing the Bush family assets and the corporate funds of Halliburton and Bechtel and Exxon, to rebalance the budget and to compensate the victims-in-uniform.
Let’s not forget that we’ll have a new generation of veterans confronting the reality that they killed because of the lies which came down from above, trying to rescue their self-esteem with flag-waving and substance abuse, human beings wounded and deceived who will need and deserve support.
So let’s not be satisfied to say we voted: Let’s put out a daily effort to rebuild a world where the dragons won’t catch us napping. Eternal vigilance. No more lies.
S.W.
