WORMWOOD TO SCREWTAPE: EXPLOSIVE USES

For the first time in my life when I noted the big stack of bagged fertilizer piling up at nursery stores I didn't think of the beautiful zinnias, tomatoes, marigolds, onions, etc. such fertilizer would produce. I thought of bombs! Such change of thoughts, even if you try to "laugh them off" nibbles at the edges of the contented mind.

You deduct, of course, that I've been listening to the news and commentaries about the Trade Tower explosion. Many commentators said that any nincompoop could make a bomb if he had a supply of fertilizer and a chemistry book that could be checked out of any library. Some even mentioned as a fertilizer, manure, as in the big piles that accumulated when you cleaned out the cattle barn.

Because such events are planned in advance, I'm sure it was a co-incidence that the District High School Chemistry Bowl was held here while investigators were still trying to figure out what explosives were used to cause so much damage to the New York World Trade Tower. Some of the chemistry students said experiments were fun, fun as in playing with fire and acid. If we don't catch the ones who tried to blow up the Trade Tower, maybe the perpetrators will die laughing when they look at the TV pictures of the huge deep cavity they caused, crisscrossed by a tangle of broke wires and pipes and a zillion scraps of metals and glass in unaccustomed places.

I'm not knocking the Chemistry Bowl, nor chemistry in general. It's just the wrong use of knowledge that has become so threatening. Could we say, "Give man a long enough rope of knowledge and he'll kill himself?" I think we can unless we have a stronger rope to keep reining in Wormwood and Screwtape. Remember them?

Wormwood was the devil's accomplice in C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters." He was always nibbling at the edges of the minds of those who would use knowledge for right purposes, showing them what power they might have if they put their knowledge to opposite purposes. He was the epitome of temptation to do evil.

To keep such aforementioned event (Trade Tower) from nibbling at the edges of my mind I like to visualize man marching ever forward pulling a string of unwinding knowledge and Wormwood, tightly lassoed, pulling another string, parallel, but never quite catching up. I visualize Wormwood so tightly lassoed and straining so stubbornly forward that he'd cut himself in two. Would that be the beginning of the Millennium?

When such Trade Tower, Lockerby, Leganon, ad infinitum explosions nibble at the edges of a contented mind one can attempt to repair the edges by meditating upon some more pleasant things certain mixed chemicals can do, and put it on a personal level if you can. And you can if you've ever fired a firecracker or held a sparkler.

For myself I think of how Dad cleared the old orchard of dead stumps. He would put a stick of dynamite, with a long fuse attached into a hole dug under the stump and run for a safe distance to join the rest of the family who had come to watch. After what seemed an interminably long time for the lighted fuse to reach the dynamite, "Bang!" went the old stump, roots and all, flying into the air, separated into such pieces as might make suitable firewood for the kitchen range. It was better than any Fourth of July celebration we ever had on the farm. In a year or two there would be a new apple tree growing where the old stump had been, probably a Maiden Blush, with apples creamy yellow on one side, a pink blush on the other.

And then there was the mountainous manure pile which grew steadily all winter, higher and higher. On cold winter mornings steam came out of little spots all around that mound. We could feel the warmth but didn't realize that this could be as explosive as a miniature Vesuvius if a certain other element had been mixed with it. If blown up it certainly would have a different result than that of the stump. There'd be manure in the watering trough, on the seats of the surrey, in the bed of the big wagon, on the windows of the chicken house. As the chemistry lad said, it would have been fun fun to watch Mama and Grandma if any of it had reached the house windows.

No one tampered with the manure pile until balmy weather came when it was forked into the bed of the big wagon and taken to the field to be shoveled as evenly as possible. Result? Big healthy stalks of wheat, long, fat ears of corn, pumpkins of the sort Thoreau would love to have sat on instead of a velvet cushion.

Be careful with your trinitrotoluene, nitrophenylmethylnitramine, and pentraerythritol tetranitrate. If you don't know what those are, ask those Chemistry Bowl lads, but not within Wormwood's hearing.

REJOICE!