The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

How can all of them down there, those poor souls who will soon be waking up and trudging out of their minute rectangles and inching along their little noodle highways toward whatever slots and grooves make up their everyday lives—how could they live like that, with such earnestness, if they had the faintest idea of what it was like up here in this righteous zone?

Khrushchev was right about one thing: when it came time to hang the capitalist West, an American businessman would sell him the rope.