by Jason Ginsburg
When they brought in the Unabomber last week ... excuse me. When they brought in alleged bomber Ted Kaczynski (you know, like alleged killer O.J. Simpson) last week, the media picked up on his background quickly. Kaczynski was portrayed as something of a malevolent genius, a brilliant mind somehow sickened. As a child, he skipped grades and attained a scholarship to Harvard by the time he was 16. He would eventually earn a doctorate at Michigan and go on to teach mathematics at Berkeley. And, of course, he was able to elude the FBI for 18 years, something not easily done. All of these facts were used by the media to paint Kaczynski as a criminal mastermind, but I just see him as a simple idiot -- like Forrest Gump with a beard.
Oh, Kaczynski is clearly insane, but just being crazy doesn't make you a killer. He's no more nuts than Louis Farrakhan or Pat Buchanan, and you don't see those two FedExing explosives. No, what makes Kaczynski different from other extremists is that he's dumber than a door post. Hey, I might not be able to get into Harvard, but I'm smart enough to know that you can't change or even influence American society with tools as crude as blast-o-grams.
Oh, I know that it seems so tempting sometimes to lash out at things we don't like. (Bud Adams? BOOM!) But what would that accomplish? Nothing. All it would really get you is a ticket to death row, one-way and nonrefundable. Kaczynski is getting his ticket punched and all he has to show for it is a published 35,000-word manifesto that no one ever took seriously anyway. Trade your life for space on the opinion page? Hell, I would've traded him my space for some Dominos! Sure, I like rambling in the paper too, but I'd have to be brain dead to ride The Chair for the pleasure.
Farrakhan and Buchanan are able to make the papers, are able to influence people without building bombs because they're just crazy, not stupid. They're Americans! And Americans are an educated and, therefore, a democratic people.
Violence as method of social change is only used in societies where people are ignorant. People in Liberia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and other places are not intelligent enough to work out their differences without bloodshed -- they're like apes throwing rocks at each other. And Kaczynski is as much a monkey as they are, despite his doctorate.
I'm sure that Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh think they're revolutionaries, but they're no better than the simple street gangs who shoot at each other to make their points -- and they'll meet the same end that most gangbangers do. I hope their graves will help educate all of the other radicals out there so that none will ever make such stupid choices again. A lesson needs to be taught: It's one thing to be crazy and another to be terminally ignorant. It's a lesson that the Unabomber is going to learn.
Ginsburg is a junior political science major.