Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Has Home On the Range lost a bit of its old zip? Have injun raids been replaced by crop-duster attacks? Did you forgo the old sod-and-log cabin in favor of a modular? Do you manage your range with a spray-can of easy-off oven cleaner?
Like many of my neighbors in the San Luis Valley, no doubt, I eagerly opened the pull-out section in the Valley Courier, our local advertising institution, to learn all about Homeland Security. Maybe there’s danger in them thar hills yet.
My patriotic fervor gleefully bubbled as I read the headline: Forests and farms could be targets. Oh, to be sure, cooed the writer, not really likely targets, but still, who knows when some terrorists might attempt to disrupt the agribiz food chain or start a forest fire? After all, didn’t a bunch of radicals have a sit-in at a forest service office awhile back, disrupting the gears of the bureaucracy? Aren’t we glad they’re taking steps to tighten security these days? If they make me get a photo ID at the front door to walk the ten steps to the permit counter…. Well, I sure feel safer for all that.
The closest the writer managed to come to any sort of reality I could recognize was in acknowledging that the most likely catastrophes here are:
a) mishap with a fertilizer truck;
b) a mishap with a radioactive waste vehicle; or
c) a crazed horde of citizens fleeing some sort of catastrophe in the region of the densely packed, about three-and-a-half hours drive away.
What’s plain is that the scare tactics in current vogue have enabled a lot of folks to jump on the Homeland Security Porkwagon. The Sheriffs have got new Brinks’ truck-looking response vehicles; the lab technicians are working overtime to eliminate any hypothetical vulnerabilities in the food-chain; et cetera ad nauseum.
Everyone’s got state-of-the-art communication and everyone’s got a council or a committee. Never mind that the World Trade Center was recognizable to any half-wit as a symbolic target of corporate fascism and that no passenger jetliner could possibly have permeated the defenses of the Pentagon and then left a piddling 18-foot hole with hardly any wreckage to be seen. Circle the wagons, pardner, we’ve gotta protect our wives and our daughters. We need to figger every angle — except the real angles, that is.
The real angles are too much for mere mortals to figure. The calamities in our inner cities and our schools, the strangulation of democracy by the two-party system, the decapitation of freedom by the Patriot Act and the War on Terror. The arm-twisting and frog -marching of American public opinion by media cartels which are in cahoots with big business and Daddy Warbucks. Pardner, whose turn is it to look-out tonight?
Could well be, they’ve got me under 24-hour surveillance already. They might even have a million dollar device to decipher the bumps and groans of this old Smith-Corona typewriter from a clandestine listening station tucked away in the home of some patriotic neighbor. After all, I’ve had the most brazen anti-Bush signs for a couple of years now and there might even be some vague resemblance between my bearded features and the face of yo-mama-Osama-himself.
So I’ll reiterate my offer for the last time: For a cool fifty-million cash they can use me for a Bin Laden lookalike and stage a mock-capture for the cameras here at my remote mountain hideout. Hell, for a hundred million they can dress me up in a hood-and-chain and make me do the dog, if it gives them some kind of rush. There’s not much time left to goose your ratings up, Boy George. Elections are just around the corner. I’m waiting to hear from your managers, whoever they are.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove