Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern Life – November 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
The passing stranger wondered how I was celebrating September 11; at first I wrote off the odd bit of usage since she had an overseas accent, but in a sense, America this past year has been in a state of perverse celebration.
Fishermen in years past sometimes bloodied a herring and tossed it off the stern of their ships, hoping that certain other schools of fish would follow the trail of blood in one direction or another. Hence the term “red Herring” came to connote something which a politician could point to in order to focus public attention on something other than his/her own faults. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, America hasn’t had a decent red herring until terrorism showed up. Now we can beat the drum loudly enough that the sins of Babylon can almost be overlooked. Forty percent illiteracy among Mississippi women? Son, they best be glad they ain’t in Kabul, now put up or shut up….
But the Republicans and the Corporations have now become another sort of red herring to the opposition. It’s more fun to point a finger at the bad boys and forget one’s own part in the supply and demand structure, so the opposition voted green and sent some e-mails and now they need a new vehicle and a new fridge and fill it full of agribiz convenience foods with trendy labels please, and I’ll take a dozen pads of sticky labels to paste on the door and three new shirts from Bangladesh. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of stuff, set the kids in front of the TV while we pursue our inalienable right to earn and spend.
I can see going into battle to defend Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a peace-loving agrarian society with liberty and justice for all. Now that the embattled farmer has been replaced by the embattled downloader, I’m not so easily excited. Were Jefferson alive he might not find much to celebrate, either. This land was blessed, if you please, with energetic people, bountiful harvests, a brilliant constitution, but we’re trading in our birthright for a mess of concrete, asphalt, and plastic.
All the slack on the planet is being used up as surely as every vacant lot in Salida; our government is leading us to genocide as a means to gain territory since we as individuals haven’t the fortitude to follow Gandhi’s example and spin the cloth of our own lives.
If we wind up as a nation of consumer sponges with atrophied brains, lording it over the suffering workers of Asia and Latin America, slaughtering those who don’t submit, what the hell was the point?
Here in Central Colorado many of us still do have some connection with the earth, and keep some of the essential trades alive: farming, logging, horse-and-livestock husbandry, hunting and gathering, weaving, construction with nature’s materials, and other traditional crafts. Salida is a good place for us to meet, exchange, and support one another. Thus will the Jeffersonian future evolve, and lets not be led astray by the red herrings. Instant housing, instant information, instant entertainment, instant food and other gratifications; these have become ingrained in our lives, but they’re out of whack with the protoplasm of our human existence and need examining.
Moreover, I’d say there’s room for improvement in the American way. On the one hand, majority rule leads to domination of the most prolific, who may not be the same as the most intelligent. On the other hand, market forces lead to the pre-eminence of the most selfish. I can’t say what sort of improvement might be best, but in the present state of affairs I see no end to an endless cycle of wars and new trucks propping up the American ego so it can continue it’s pointless journey to meaningless conquest. Progress according to Hegel requires an antithesis before arriving at a synthesis, but if globalism continues to use one red herring after another to stifle all the world’s antithesis, we may wind up stagnant in the backwash of our life, liberty, and the pursuit of stuff.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
