'Affable, Polite and Sincere': The murderer as celebrity - making murderers celebrities

National Review, Nov 8, 1999 by John O'Sullivan

'His voice is nasal and singsongy, full of flat Chicago vowels. He is 57, his hair and beard trimmed close . . . He makes constant eye contact, laughs easily and often; when it's time for a photograph, he jokingly pops out a fake front tooth, as if to parody the deranged mountain-man image he inhabits in the public's mind. He is, for the most part, affable, polite and sincere."

Guess who? Well, he's clearly a celebrity, and a pretty easygoing democratic one at that, if we judge by the way he affably parodies his public image. Willie Nelson perhaps-there's a touch of the "mountain man" about him. No, Nelson's voice is hardly "full of Chicago vowels." Maybe Kris Kristofferson-there's a touch of the "deranged mountain man" about him. No, those Chicago vowels again.

Baffled? The correct answer is: Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski.

What, still baffled? The Unabomber, of course. You remember him. He's the one who became famous for mailing package bombs to suspected scientists, killing three people and wounding 23 more. The quotes come from an interview with him in Time magazine, the bible of the commuting classes. Kaczynski is in demand at present. His interview with Time was advance publicity for his book, Truth Versus Lies, forthcoming from a New York publishing house. He has just written a short story for a literary magazine at a university in upstate New York. And according to Time, he has graciously accepted the request from a major university library that he donate his personal papers to its archive of anarchist literature. This status is reflected even in prison. Kaczynski lives on "Celebrity Row." His cell has television, and he has subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. (I can almost hear the sigh of relief down at The Nation.) The prison food is "pretty good." And he mixes with such prisoners as Ramzi Yousef of the World Trade Center bombing and Timothy McVeigh (who recently lent him Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab). Interestingly, Kaczynski doesn't think of these companions as "criminal types . . . They're considerate of others . . . Some of them are quite intelligent."

It is especially interesting that he should exempt McVeigh from the charge of being a mere criminal (or in the wry lingo of Belfast, an "ordinary decent criminal"). For, contrary to the Clinton spin and most reporting on the Oklahoma bombing, McVeigh was not a right-wing anti-government radical tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. His letters to a local paper showed that he had a number of left-wing, environmentalist, and "animal rights" opinions, such as opposition to factory farming. If he was anti-government, it was not in the measured political tradition of a Thomas Jefferson or a Ronald Reagan, but in the paranoid-obsessive style of a fan of The X-Files. And since Kaczynski is in the grip of a dull, nerdy, and more systematic version of the same folly, they naturally get on.

It used to be that men convicted of vile and premeditated murders disappeared into the shadows of a penitentiary, never to be heard of again until they either died or sought to atone for their crimes in some dramatic way, like the Birdman of Alcatraz. Nowadays a murder conviction-for the right kind of murders, naturally-looks like a smart career move. As Stephen J. Dubner, who conducted the interview for Time, reports neutrally, the Unabomber is marked "by a satisfaction that the world, at long last, is treating him like a valuable human being." It had to happen, of course. Our celebrity culture was bound to swallow even murderers at some point in its omnivorous binge. Besides which, it was always hard for the aging post-radicals from the 1960s who now run our major cultural institutions to regard Kaczynski as a criminal in the first place.

For goshsakes, he'd been to Harvard.

The commissions for his new book and short story, the library request for his personal papers, the Time interview itself-these are all messages in code, sent at such a high frequency that even the senders themselves do not always pick up their thin bat's squeak of an implication: Although the Unabomber had to be imprisoned on the technical charge of murder, that does not really make him a criminal. No, he is a brave soul who got lost on a spiritual journey, one of us, perhaps better than we, someone who was misled by idealism into violence and may therefore have something to teach us.

Like the young women radicals who disappeared in the 1960s after shooting a cop during a bank robbery and who, when the FBI pick them up 20 years later, turn out to be comfortable hausfraus locally famous as fundraisers for National Public Radio, he may have to do time. But he should not be treated as a mere criminal.

And as we have seen, Time, publishers, university libraries, even the prison authorities-in short, society-all draw this fateful inference. In doing so, we invite more of the same-more self-righteous murderers, that is. Acts of outrageous wickedness have always been a ticket to fame. Herostratus burned down the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, one of the most beautiful buildings in the Ancient World, so that his name would be always remembered in History. He has achieved his ambition-we know his name (though the American educational system may eventually frustrate his amoral calculation).