Letter from Slim Wolfe
Colorado Central – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
The September Slimbo Award (most cynical and defeatist item to appear in September’s Colorado Central) goes to Cactus Jack for his cartoon about the firehoses. Every other contribution to the magazine was superlative, so there were no other nominees.
Over a million Americans gave their lives in World War II to stop the spread of fascism but here’s one in our midst having fantasies about being the head Nazi and hosing into oblivion whatever threatens his point of view. Democracy has clearly been wasted on Cactus Jack, all 23 centuries of it since Socrates and Plato gave humanity the gift of intelligent discourse. Just blast ’em, Jack, anything you can’t or don’t want to understand. The Freudians would sure have a field day with you and your hoses.
And just for the record, this infantile sortie comes from a fella who’ll gallantly allow what he probably sees as a flaming liberal to underwrite his radio program — so long as he can alter the underwriter’s message to suit his own opinion. Why not just move to some banana republic or jump in a time machine and go back to Fascist Spain, where you can put on a uniform and slaughter whatever seems scary?
My other comment stems from Martha’s excellent in-depth essay about the shafting of labor in America. As if blaming labor for America’s troubles wasn’t dog enough to kick, there’s still a tendency to deride the communist working classes (past tense, I guess) for being unproductive — since according to those who never set foot in a communist country, one can hardly have any drive without the hope of riding the roulette wheel of a free market to your place on easy street. This is a generalization about on a par with the notion that black people like watermelon.
One of Martha’s recent essays described how fantasy became reality as her TV impressions of the West took root, and let’s not forget how, when American self-esteem dropped a hundred points in the wake of Russian advances in space technology, TV obligingly invented the bumbling tyrannical Russian, forty years before Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz invented the WMD.
This is not to say that I would have been a happy Muscovite, dutifully marching to Proletarian Square to gape at the heroic monumental statues and repeating all of the empty slogans. But let’s give credit where credit is due: there were millions who took up the optimistic belief that mankind needs neither the carrot-and-stick of religion nor the roulette-wheel of free enterprise, but can achieve in the name of human justice and cooperation. And they did achieve; all but a few Western soreheads agreed that Soviet progress was one of the miracles of the twentieth century, until the victors revised history in recent decades to suit their economic spin.
Meanwhile, how many corporate employees can you name in America who work for anything but hope of jockeying for position or avoiding getting sacked? In the United States of Idon’tgotta, productivity means I don’t gotta produce, I just gotta buy cheap and sell high, and manipulate my fellow people.
Martha ends her essay by wondering how we’ll all learn to work together, which got me thinking about dance. For thousands of years, all over the world, simple farmers and peasants learned how to dance together in a circle or a line, cooperatively, holding hands. There may have been leaders, but pretty much everyone was happy to do the same moves and not try to outshine the next one. Then history progressed to couples dancing, the male generally inducing the female to follow his lead. Now we’ve got lone-star dancing, where each individual does his or her own little peacock strut having little relation to what anyone else is doing. Pretty soon we’ll just have computer dancing, where you work your little mousie and don’t have to deal with another human at all.
Progress, as the man once said, is our most important product.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
P.S. A 2×5 foot patch of beets provides greens through the season — a bit high in oxalic acid, but nice to supplement other greens. Then one can pull a few roots now and then as they reach full size, dice and boil with a bit of vinegar or mix with carrots, onions, etc. Beets are cold-hardy and not favored by pests.
