I can remember when printing a photo was less common than it is today. Newspaper columns, ads, flyers and business cards hardly ever showed a smilin’ face, and readers had to form whatever thoughts they might according to printed words. What a hardship! I haven’t seen a doctor’s or dentist’s diploma on the wall lately, but I guess they feature prominent faceshots where they used to list the school and the degree. So I’m putting the world on notice: if anyone thinks I rate an obituary when I croak, be kind enough to use a photo of my gnarly hands, not my face. It’s my hands which have done whatever might be worth remembering.
I have a neighbor with a vigilante attitude, fueled by liberal doses of tequila and home-brewed hash. Sometimes we have curious drive-throughs in this neighborhood, and he may confront them with a gun. Last year a friend dropped in to see me when I was out and let himself in to see if I was lost in the nether reaches of my home, and soon met up with my neighbor and his rifle. We haven’t had a history of burglaries in this obviously indigent neighborhood, but I’d rather be burgled than have to deal with mayhem and cops on my place. Hard to imagine the mindset of the armed and aggressive defenders of property in this world. A powerful weapon cheapens life: think of the difference between a deer rifle and an intimate hatchet-job on a chicken, or compare the intimacy of a sword- wielding horseman with an RPG or a drone. Because we believe that violence settles disputes, we’re more likely to be felled by an unbalanced neighbor or lawman than by the hypothetical threat of all the “extremists” in Waziristan.
A reader commented that I write like a Marxist, so maybe I haven’t been writing clearly. Marxists might have an idea of the problem, but running around with a book of slogans in one hand and a gun in the other is not the solution. I hope I’ve been writing like a social-democrat who believes that teachers, nurses and people who work with their hands are every bit as valuable to “the economy” as the head officers of GM and Google, and deserve to be treated accordingly. So why do the gadfly entrepreneurs get all the press while the 20-year career workhorses who are the real backbone of any economy get hardly a mention? And why does the very hint of socialist-democracy get the knee-jerk put-down from the media, be it unionized workers in Europe or a progressive leader in South America? Why don’t we ever hear about the benefits of the tax structure in Denmark or the worker-owned factories which succeeded where their capitalized predecessors failed?
I know a rockhound who dug up a rock and sold it to a dealer for $85, and the dealer used his connections to turn it over for $5,000. I knew an art dealer who imported bronzes by world-famous sculptors which were cast in controlled limited editions, but the dealer had the casting numbers altered and doubled his profits. History tells us of an emperor who brought in enough gold and silver from his New World colonies that he paid off all the debts he’d run up with his armies and navies, but heinflated the price of wheat until his people went hungry. When are the scientific among us going to come up with a new molecular structure for our living arrangements that doesn’t leave some of us being the chumps? So Stalin was a murderous tyrant, the Kibbutzes in Israel mostly went broke, and in pseudo-communist China there were 2,800 dead pigs pulled out of the river which supplied drinking water to a major city … that doesn’t prove we’re living here in the best of all possible systems. I’m just glad I’m not raising kids in a world where kids are opiated with videos and game programs and all the killer sweatshop fires are in Bangladesh so we can find cheap shirts on the racks. We’ve sidestepped the work which gave substance and continuity to our lives and traded it in for a virtual world of images and egos and euphemisms like “middle class.”
Marx and his followers weren’t the first to be discontented with “bourgeois decadence.” We can find suggestions for a more intelligent design in the thoughts of Plato, Jesus, and Thomas More’s “Utopia,” to name just a few. The pithiest put-down of Marxism might come from Albert Camus, social-democrat, who wrote a series of essays during and after World War II and the occupation of France, reprinted in a book entitled “Camus at Combat,” which is in the stacks at the Salida Library. Yet even Camus was willing to recognize “red” as one of the colors of political thought and give it an honest appraisal, not like the snarky commentators who peek at it through rose-colored binoculars.
Unplanned free enterprise claimed a victim this year in Crestone: Curt’s Country Store. The new and spacious food emporium had risen from the ashes of the previous, more intimate Curt’s Store with sagging floors, which had served the town for decades. It was forced under by a newer, more economical supermarket plus a more intimate mom-and-pop greengrocer. Now there’s a ghost store with snazzy stucco, large windows and high ceilings, which cost a pretty penny. It may sit unoccupied in the heart of town for some time.
Does anyone question the freedom of dreamers and schemers to lock horns until one, or both, go over the cliff? Lord what fools these mortals be.
If Marx’s writings have any value at all, it’s that they get us to think outside the box. The really great minds of the mid-to-late 1800s were occupied writing symphonies and string quartets and couldn’t be bothered with economics, which is a shame, since if someone could devise a system in human affairs which plays as sweetly and smoothly as Tchaikovsky or Dvorak, we’d be that much better off.
I read somewhere that those dissident puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay on a platform of hard labor and zero tolerance for vanity had to pay back their start-up loans by exploiting the natives for cheap beaver fur, which brought a high price in Europe – for the vanity of fancy hats for fancy gentlemen. Considering that inauspicious beginning, maybe we’re not doing so badly after all. If only we can keep siphoning enough cream off the top of those fancy folk to keep the rest of us comfy with medicare and social-democratic security ….
Too bad we’re left with no legends about the first Black Friday after the first pilgrim Thanksgiving. Mark Twain might have had a ball with that one.
