University of Virginia Library

Dow Answers

To the SDS:

I read with soulful sympathy
the open letter you have recently
circulated for the dubious enlightenment
of Dow Chemical Co. and
its napalm morality. Since Dow
doubtless considers you beneath
contempt and will view your condemnation
with Olympian disdain
(if at all), I should like to take this
opportunity to answer for them.

I must give you credit for a
colorful presentation. Your fiery
words evoke images of a veritable
tossed salad of shredded Vietnamese
flesh, (medium well done), and the
pictures you painted of the greedily
slobbering blood-flecked butchers
behind the Dow Conspiracy would
have done credit to Edgar Allen
Poe. You are to be commended.

Still, somehow ... somehow despite
the impressive quotes and
purple prose ... somehow despite
the fervid force of your righteous
indignation ... somehow despite
the intimidating implication of a
noble band of saints, stumbling in
the darkness of contemporary
money-mad morality, sputtering
their helpless rage ... somehow, in
the end, when all the bleeding and
screaming was done, I don't think
you won many converts.

Perhaps you ought to wait
around for a generation or so,
because this one just does not seem
to have your kind of conscience.
Few people; especially at the University
of Virginia, really give a
damn about Dow Chemical and its
napalm. Why should they?

Why should they give a damn?
After all, Oh Ye of Too Much
Faith, this is the big bad world and
you are but poor lost idealists set
adrift in it ... adrift where you will
remain as long as you want to rock
the boat ... adrift where you will
drown sooner or later if you insist
on remaining outside the System.
Dow Chemical knows that, I know
it, I think even you know (after all,
Christ knew it).

Besides, by the one and only
great contemporary yardstick, Dow
is right and you are wrong. No
matter what the issue is, nor how
proudly you carry your faultless
vision into battle, Dow is right and
you are wrong, Dick Nixon is right
and you are wrong, Edgar Shannon
is right and you are wrong, I,
speaking for the great apathetic
masses with all the power of their
holy inertia, I am right and you are
wrong.

Why? Because MIGHT makes
right, here in the big bad world -
an axiom that has always proven
true and doubtless always will (due
to the curious phenomenon of its
unequivocal support by whatever
clique happens to hold power regardless
of said clique's political
affiliation). MIGHT is always right
and SDS is always wrong (except
for one brief shining moment in
Camelot, er, Columbia).

It might help if you think of
American society as a giant jackass,
made up of the disoriented taxpaying
class attending masses,
plunging madly down its primrose
path, with The Dick Nixons, the
Dow Chemicals and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff firmly in the saddle.
You of SDS are certainly not
pushing forward on this particular
path, indeed we may credit you
with doing no more than perhaps
bringing up the hindquarters, but
this is precisely where the riding
crop, or billy club, falls hardest and
most frequently.

The Powers That Be are always
right, because they say so and they
are the Powers That Be and that's
the way it is.

Now the corollary to this (because
every eternal truth must have
its corollary or you haven't written
a proper letter) is that, IF the
powers that be are right, Then what
the Powers That Be say is right, is
right. Morality is a function, not of
God, but of guns.

What do the Powers That Be say
is right?

It is right to kill Viet Cong.

It is right to use any available
means (except nuclear weapons
which, in some ill-defined manner,
threaten the entire world and thus
the Powers themselves) to kill Viet
Cong, including napalm.

Be sure that you appreciate the
amoral, as opposed to immoral,
nature of the killing itself. Thus,

The Death of Vietnamese
children is simply irrelevant.

The starvation of a few Vietnamese
peasants is irrelevant.

The death of an American soldier,
however, is bad. It is the only
really bad death that we have encountered.

Therefore anything, such as
napalm, which produces the
morally good result of dead Viet
Cong, and the morally good result
of live Americans (who might have
been killed by the V.C.) will
NEVER Be abandoned simply because
it carries the morally irrelevant
side-effect of charcoaled
children.

That, gentlemen, good or bad, is
the way it is, when you buy the
world ... then you can change it.