UB = Unabomer FILES @ groups.google.com/group/playwright2009The Unabomber's Stamp
Newt Gingrich, who has been quick to blame the excesses of the sixties for every psychotic crime in recent years from Susan Smith's murder of her sons on down has so far been silent on the capture of the man believed to be the Unabomber. Perhaps he hasn't felt the need to blame the sixties for the Unabomber because the media have been doing it so well.
Certainly Theodore Kaczynski was in many of the right places at the right time Harvard and Michigan for the civil rights movement and the emergence of S.D.S., Berkeley during and after the summer of love. Certainly the ideas articulated in the 35,000 word manuscript published last fall by The Washington Post and The New York Times bear some relation to an anarchistic, anti technology strain of sixties thought.
But the Unabomber did not locate himself in that tradition. As Kirkpatrick Sale probably one of the few people to read the Unabomber's treatise all the way through pointed out in these pages ["Is There Method in His Madness?" September 25, 1995], "he seems woefully ignorant of the long Luddistic strain in Western thought...and he does not once cite any of the great modern critics of technology." Kaczynski himself seems to have had few dealings with fellow students in the mathematics departments at the universities he attended, much less with the student left. As for sex, drugs and rock and roll, the Times made an early reference to a sojourn on the drug route in Afghanistan, but Kaczynski does not generally seem to have done much that involved other humans.
The F.B.I., grasping for the prestige it has lost in recent years, has been crowing over Kaczynski's capture. Yet for all the bureau's efforts, the break came the old fashioned indeed, the biblical way, with a tip from the suspect's brother. The Unabomber episode, like the Oklahoma City bombing, seems to confirm that neither increased resources nor repressive legislation enables the F.B.I. to protect citizens from the actions of sociopaths.
Sale, who is sympathetic to critiques of industrial society (but not to violent methods), pointed out that the Unabomber's manifesto contained no vision of the good society that would follow the destruction of technology. It is here that we see the distance between the mail bomber and the sixties left, whose ideal was community. The culture of the sixties may have been the source of some of the ideas the Unabomber used to justify his violence, but he is a serial killer, not a political figure. Those of us who cherish the ideal of community can neither blame the sixties for the Unabomber nor see much of them in him.
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