Letter from Slim Wolfe
American life – October 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Martha,
History teaches that those with the most toys may wind up at the guillotine.
I felt a bit queasy and dizzy as my brain tried to accommodate the shifting scene before my eyes: it rolled, flipped, and flickered at will. Was my face in a paper bag, sniffing cheap model airplane glue from a tube? No, the tube was called a computer, and editor Martha Quillen was attempting to show me where she gets her information. Bah, humbug.
All your facts and all the hue and cry the citizens may raise are unlikely to counterbalance the votes that the citizens cast with their dollars. Would it were otherwise, but we’ve had facts before, and they’ve rarely if ever prevented a war or a scandal. We want airline tickets and dishwashers and cherry-red Blazers and instant housing built from toxic chipboard and better-paved roads and faster search engines, and all of the above by dint of some poor slob’s cheap labor, no pitiful Gandhis with spinning-wheels are we, no m’am, we’ll just borrow more money and require an economy which in turn requires more wars and abuses. It would never cross our minds that life can be lived quite nicely, thank you, without a refrigerator, no power drain, no freon. We’d save the planet but not if it means spoilt milk, we’ll fight cancer when it’s not in a computer-assembly plant overseas.
So we’ve got a war between a venomous viper and a clumsy, overstuffed bullock whose been tromping all over the globe for forage. Who’s the villain? Though Paul Martz wrote in these pages that the purpose of war is to incapacitate combatants any way you can, I’d say that is the strategy of soldiers; the purpose of war is to gain economical and egotistical spheres of influence. He’s right; there’s no honor at stake. These were the words of Victor Hugo, describing the Napoleonic wars:
“The words, passive obedience, tell the tale. An army is a strange composite masterpiece, in which strength results from an enormous sum total of utter weakness.”
The same could be said for our clumsy bullock of an industrialized world. The villains are those who pull the trigger; whether in defense of Allah, or in defense of Nabisco, it’s still arrogance; it’s still murder; it’s still the result of lies and brainwashing. It remains for the universal soldier and the universal consumer to refuse to be led around by the nose. Your well-informed vote can be thrown out by the Supreme Court, but your corporate behemoths will starve if they can’t graze on your money.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
