Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“This is the town of Summitt City, Tennessee,” Correll said. “To aid in your orientation, the state of Tennessee, whose hospitality we are presently enjoying, is in the southeastern section of the United States. Neighboring states you may be familiar with are Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and the Carolinas.

“Summitt City, as you can see for yourselves, is a pleasant place. It supports a prosperous chemical industry, and other congenial amenities. But before I tell you more of Summitt City, let me digress for a moment to talk to you about freedom.

“We might all agree that freedom is a desirable condition for human beings,” Correll continued, “but it is unlikely we would agree on a definition of that condition. Army officers regard freedom of behavior as an aberration harmless in children but dangerous license in the case of, say, rebels and students. Novelists tend to think of freedom as a character’s striving for transcendence or epiphany, the obligatory climax of a work of fiction — a break with tradition, a defiance of family loyalty or religious tradition.

“But to social engineers, Marxists and their religious counterparts, freedom is always an act of basic and disruptive anarchy. Now while such distinctions may be intellectually diverting,” Correll went on, “they seldom if ever result in any reasonable consensus. That problem, that ageless semantic squabble, is a luxury none of us can any longer afford. Because it is not a luxury anymore, it is a death sentence.

“Therefore my colleagues and I — General Taggart, Mr. Thomson and Lord Conestain — decided it was essential that we cut our way out of that philosophical labyrinth while there was still precious time left, and create a truly free society to meet our generation’s desperate, last-ditch needs.

“The fact is, we had no choice, because everything in our world today is at risk. Our equities, our birthrights, our privileges, our very lives, can be extinguished in a finger-snap. The old palliatives and restraints no longer work. The placebos, sedatives and titillations which either made life bearable or purported to give it meaning are useless. Religion, Marxism, sex, art, science and all the other therapeutic abstractions have turned out to be nothing but excess baggage.

“Because we live on a razor’s edge in a time when any fool or madman, a despot with terminal cancer or a simple soldier neurotically ambitious or impatient with peace, can totally destroy this world of ours. Any border clash could activate a decision that could turn this planet into a speck of lifeless dust floating in space for the next few million years. Perhaps time would start things up again, a microbe in a rock eventually creating sonnets and cathedrals but we saw no reason to chance that. Instead we created Summitt City. ”

Correll pointed to the screen. “What you are looking at is a community free from most of the social viruses that infect modern society — crime, pollution, terrorism, racial injustice, discrimination by color, religion or sex, unemployment, energy shortages, bankruptcy, mental illness, divorce, alcoholism, sexual dysfunction.”

Correll turned back to his audience. “But most importantly, Summitt City is a community without fear. That is what we have built, a pilot social organism which works together in harmony for the advantage of all parts, a society that is contented and without disruptive curiosity, a society, in fact, incapable of analyzing and therefore criticizing itself, and needless to say, incapable of revolt or civil disobedience, a society of men and women as orderly and productive as a beehive.

“We have accomplished this vision with drugs. Our systemic revolution has been chemical. As I’ve warned, the film you will presently see may upset some of you. But view it with your own best interests in mind.

“There is nothing artificial in confronting and testing our problems with chemical modifiers, with synthetic opiates and stimulants. Because we have to change the way men think before we can change the way they act. And to change their thinking means breaking destructive mental habits, to alter their memories of themselves and refine their concepts of the world around them.

“Our true enemy was and is invisible, of course. The terrors of the world stem inevitably from the memory of man, the rage of flogged slaves, the arrogance of kings, shame and horrors men have always both inflicted and lusted after, fantasies of sexual and physical domination over their brother and sister human beings, the avenging and restoring of so-called national honor and so forth.

“These poisons, lesions, must be cut away as selectively as possible by employing chemical rather than surgical lobotomies. There is a nice justice, symmetry, in using drugs to save ourselves, because we have been using them in a suicidal form for decades. We are, in fact, already a drugged society.

“We have lived in a world surrounded by chemical compounds since the end of World War II. It is illusory but comforting, of course, to polarize our concern in the ghettos of America’s decaying cities, or on the docks of France, or the narcotic production fields of South America and Turkey and Pakistan and the Far and Middle East. We can thus relegate the drug problem to the trinity of the supplier, the dealer and the user — corrupt entrepreneurs, inhuman pushers and helpless addicts — the last condemned to steal and murder to supply their habits. That is a grim picture, and accurate as far as it goes. But it is in truth only a smokescreen that hides the true dimension of our chemical dependence and addiction.

“The facts are even worse than what the staggering police statistics tell us: millions of doses of powerful tranquilizers are routinely prescribed for pregnant women; a typical standing antepartum order for nearly every woman awaiting delivery includes Nembutal, Demarol, Scapolamine, Largon, Deladumone, Riger’s lactate — notwithstanding the medically proven fact that the fetus is vulnerable to brain damage. The drug generation is a helplessly programmed entity; people of this group turn not to drugs but, in a real sense, back to them, finding again the first essential mood of their existence — the experience of being drugged at birth.

“From infancy on, chemical toxins reach all of us through the air we breathe, the water we drink, oil and asbestos, millions of square miles of crops dusted every season by poisonous contaminants, the vinyl chlorides, which are related to various cancers, including those of the scrotum and the reproductive organs.

“Brain cancer is now the second leading cause of death among children under fourteen in this country, and in addition these chemical cripples are tragically susceptible to cleft palates, severe thinking impairments and tendency to suicide — the last increasingly common when the child is old enough to prefer oblivion to pain, depression and chronic insomnia. And for those who survive the rigors of a chemical childhood, it is enough to tell you that one out of four Americans living today will spend a portion of his life in a mental institution.

“It is virtually impossible to plan a diet free of cancer-inducing agents. DDT is linked to liver tumors. Heart disorders and birth defects are the price we pay for the contamination of plastic garbage bags, bread wrappers and nylon clothing. Nitrites preserve meats, chlorine purifies drinking water. They both contribute to intestinal cancer. Great freshwater lakes around the world have become so layered with flammable vegetation and chemical debris that they are becoming both health and fire hazards.

“We are killing off the world and everything that inhabits it. There are approximately five million species on the earth at present — humans, animals, insects, plants and mosses. They are dying off at the rate of one species per hour — lost forever to pollutants in the air and soil and water and by our destruction of forest and sea habitats.