The Last Word
Campbell, Will
THE LAST WORD Will Campbell The Tylenol of Defense Afew years ago we had a sweet, loyal, and lovable middle-aged Dalmatian. One evening, as the family was rushing through an early supper to get...
...But perhaps what is most important to remember from all this is that Tylenol cures absolutely nothing in the first place...
...The strategic Tylenols, the world's nuclear stockpiles, do ease certain pains of a sick human race...
...These good people never imagined their safe and sensible product could one day go wrong and wind up as a means of mass killing...
...But it was all too late...
...We have not reckoned with the possibility of tampering...
...And we are told, and as a nation convinced, that only by building more and bigger nuclear weapons can we survive...
...We are told, and as a people convinced, that the Soviet Union is the greatest, if not the only, threat to our existence...
...No, I am concerned, and as it works out I have no choice but to be concerned about the success of a huge corporation...
...It is hard to take to heart the disaster done to Tylenol's "market share," but does Will Campbell is the subject of Frye Gail-lard's article on Page 40 of this issue...
...It could have been someone whose pains were not eased by the advertised dosage of Tylenol...
...We have not reckoned with insanity...
...They did not reckon with a tamperer...
...Aside from the loss of seven beautiful people, the implications of our first brush with drugstore terrorism are simply monumental...
...But there are more far-reaching overtones to all this...
...It was a noble idea...
...The greatest danger this nation faces is not the fatuity of supply-side economics, as depraved as the notion has always been that the crumbs of Dives are sufficient for the needs of Lazarus...
...Technology has unloosened the capsules | of patriotism and nationalism and inserted the cyanide of extinction...
...No one in the Politburo knows my father's name...
...But these over-the-counter drugs simply tend to mask our symptoms and cure nothing...
...Our leaders insist that our greatest danger is that those of us of good intent will be duped by forces hostile to the Republic into a nuclear freeze which will, in turn, lead to our swift and certain demise...
...The greatest danger all nations face is that someone will tamper with the Tylenol of defense...
...A product that cures nothing...
...The vet did what he could: He induced vomiting, started an IV to flush the tissues, injected a barbiturate to stay the spasms...
...Our nuclear arsenal is not the work of some lonely and alienated person, but rather the product of our best scientific minds...
...We assume that the control switches of our military Tylenol will likewise remain forever in the hands of sensible, peace-loving, duly elected, accountable officials...
...It cannot work...
...I am sure the kin and friends of Mary McFarland, Paula Prince, Adam Janus, and the others dead in Chicago of cyanide poisoning must have the same problem, though compounded many times over...
...So who's tampering with the Tylenol now...
...But like the compassionate Quakers of Pennsylvania who, out of reformist zeal, gave us the "penitentiary" as an alternative to stocks and public floggings, their vision later became one of our crudest disgraces...
...Someone took a sensible and safe cushion against pain and turned it into a medium of nightmare...
...They assumed that their medicine would always be in the hands of responsible types—pharmacists, grocery clerks...
...But I still cannot bring this into focus: Someone driving to the store, buying a bottle of strychnine, sitting at a kitchen table calmly adding this potion of death to a leftover biscuit, and throwing it to a gentle Dalmatian waiting at the end of a lane for the yellow school bus that would bring her friend and master home...
...Someone had gouged a hole in a biscuit, filled the hollow with the toxin, and served it to her...
...Dottie died before morning of strychnine poisoning...
...At this writing, no one knows for sure...
...I care little for the harm done to the profit margin of a giant company, but do I care for the thousands whose living depends upon that corporate structure...
...And the event demands that we reflect upon some other aspects of our troubled world...
...It might have been some poor, pathetic soul sitting alone in a house of despair and alienation, striking back at a world which may or may not have done him or her wrong...
...But it happens that he lives not far from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge, upwind from the Avondale shipyards in New Orleans...
...I do...
...One evening, as the family was rushing through an early supper to get our son to his Little League game, Dottie stumbled through the door, fell at the boy's feet, and lay there in the throes of uninterrupted and heavy convulsions...
...If they did, they would applaud his innocence...
...that mean I am not concerned with the easing of pain among millions of people who have turned to the stuff for relief...
...But more than that: During the time it isn't working one terrorist act throws the nation into panic...
...And kills everyone...
...And who has no regard at all for human life...
...Neither Ronald Reagan nor his agents in the Pentagon have anything against Timotheus Sosnovy, but it just happens that he lives in Kharkov, and the city is targeted...
...Whoever sat down and unloosened the capsules could not possibly have known who would go into the stores and buy them...
...The usual profiles were offered of the kind of person who would open a capsule meant to ease a headache, and add a dose of death...
...We have not even reckoned with sanity—the sanity, say, of a Heinrich Himmler...
...It simply masks the symptoms of various infirmities...
...t is one thing to say that the cyanide murderer had no regard for human life, but it is another, far more telling point that there was nothing personal about the killings...
...Whether that act is the work of someone crazy or someone as sane as Heinrich Himmler was judged by all clinical measurements to have been is of no consequence...
...There are only two certainties: The killer or killers placed no value on human life...
...it all got out of hand...
...The profiles were all guesses...
...And there is nothing personal about nuclear war, either...
...Johnson & Johnson's real-thing Tylenol did ease the pains of millions each day...
...The Manhattan Project was begun for what seeemed to be the best of reasons—the preservation of freedom...
...The Tylenol deaths, for one thing, should remind us just how precarious, fragile, vulnerable, and unpredictable is our national economy—and human existence as well, if aspirin substitutes can deal such capricious death...
...They lull us, nation by armed nation, into a sense of security and superiority and deceive us into believing (at least in the United States) that the economy is better off if they are made to grow...
...Safe and sane, it was developed by good people with good ends in mind...
...I can visualize human beings committing monstrous deeds on the largest scale...
...At a time when one of the most successful political experiments in human history is tottering on the brink of economic chaos, with more than 10 per cent of the workers already there, the President insists that the way to bail ourselves out is to pump billions upon billions of dollars into national defense/offense...
Vol. 46 • December 1982 • No. 12
