Ted Kaczynski
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WHY HE NOT ME? I’ve just re-watched the UNABOM video — it really sends cold chills up and down my spine, to consider how close I came to what this dude was up to. Not just that Ted Kaczynski and I had been students in the same building at the same time (Sever Hall at Harvard in 1960) and maybe in the same classroom on the 3d floor but because while Ted was building his bombs up in his solitary cabin acting out his rage, circa 1977-1982, I also was up in my own solitary cabin, likewise sulking and infuriated. We were on different mountain chains in different states, and in different cabins, but we were in a similar state of mind. What then preserved Austin from doing the sort of boom-boom thing that Ted has been convicted of doing? I can’t tell, from this video presentation, that society ever actually hurt Ted that much –I don’t know that he even had legitimate grievances to hide behind this ostensible contempt for technology, other than having been the “victim” of that ridiculous CIA-sponsored experiment in extreme social stress “MKUltra” in which he had been merely one of 22 student guinea-pig volunteers)– but I for sure did have abundant legitimate grievances. What was it that saved my silly ass? Could it have been, might it have been, a greater familiarity with the spirit of Henry David Thoreau? “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI 1942 May 22, Friday: Incidental music to LaGallienne’s (after Carroll) play Alice in Wonderland by Irving Fine was performed for the initial time, in John Hancock Hall, Boston. The US War Production Board announced that new tires and safety razors would not be available to the average citizen for at least two years. Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Evergreen Park, Illinois (which is suburban Chicago) to 2d-generation Polish Americans Wanda Theresa Dombek Kaczynski and Theodore Richard “Turk” Kaczynski. Ted would turn out to be something of a prodigy. Later Mexico would decide retroactively that as of this date it had entered into a state of war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM 1943 March: At 9 months, baby Ted Kaczynski had become covered in mysterious hives and was put in isolation in a hospital with no visitors allowed. He would receive such treatment several times over an 8-month period. At this point his mother Wanda Dombek Kaczynski wrote “Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. enlisted in the United States Army. He would be sent to the Carnegie Institute and to the University of Tennessee for training in mechanical engineering. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI 1947 The Kaczynski family relocated to Carpenter Street in Chicago, Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM 1949 October 3, Monday: David Kaczynski was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI 1952 The Kaczynski family relocated from Chicago to 9209 South Lawndale Street in Evergreen Park, Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM 1953 Ted Kaczynski was attending the District 124 schools of Evergreen Park, Illinois. Tested in the 5th grade and found to have “an IQ of 167,” he was allowed to skip the 6th grade. (He would describe this as pivotal — much too young to fit in with the other children, he was bullied, and his mother Wanda Dombek Kaczynski was so concerned about lack of social development that she considered enrolling him in a study by Bruno Bettelheim, a study of autistic children.) The process through which I came to reject modernity and civilization began when I was eleven years old. At that age I began to be attracted to the primitive way of life as a result of reading of the life of Neanderthal man. In the following years, up to the time when I entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen, I used to dream of escaping from civilization and going to live in some wild place. During the same period, my distaste for modern life grew as I became increasingly aware that people in industrial society were reduced to the status of gears in a machine, that they lacked freedom and were at the mercy of the large organizations that controlled the conditions under which they lived. After the end of his Harvard University presidency, James Bryant Conant moved from the world of education into the world of diplomacy. He became the US high commissioner for Germany during the occupation, and would then become the ambassador to West Germany from 1955 to 1957. ASSLEY By the mid-50s he was calling for universal military service for all 18-year-old males, with “absolutely no exemptions.” This would generate an army of 3 to 4 million Americans who were to be stationed primarily in Germany, to be ready for a WWIII against the USSR. (I do not know how such a proposal would have dealt with Conscientious Objectors to the bearing of arms.) HDT WHAT? INDEX UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI 1955 Guy Davenport began working toward a PhD at Harvard University, studying under Harry Levin and Archibald MacLeish. Ted Kaczynski started high school at the new community high school in Evergreen Park, Illinois, where he would excel academically but find the mathematics instruction much too elementary. He could spend hours working complex differential equations, and would be allowed to skip 11th grade — before his senior year he would be able to handle advanced Laplace transforms. By taking a summer school course in English he would graduate at the age of 15. He was definitely Harvard material. Edward Osborne Wilson received his PhD degree from Harvard. He got married with Irene Kelley (the couple would produce a daughter, Catherine Wilson, in 1963). NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM 1958 At the age of 16, Theodore John Kaczynski matriculated at Harvard University. Early on he had such trouble adjusting that he received a C in Mathematics 101. However, when he would study under Professor of Logic Willard Van Orman Quine, he would ace the class with a final score of 98.9% (when I would take a class under Professor Quine in 1960, my grade would be “F” — so there you go). It was fun to solve mathematical problems, but in a deeper sense mathematics was boring and empty because for me it had no purpose. If I had worked on applied mathematics I would have contributed to the development of the technological society that I hated, so I worked only on pure mathematics. But pure mathematics was only a game. I did not understand then, and I still do not understand, why mathematicians are content to fritter away their whole lives in a mere game. I myself was completely dissatisfied with such a life. I knew what I wanted: to go and live in some wild place. But I didn’t know how to do so. In those days there were no primitivist movements, no survivalists, and anyone who left a promising career in mathematics to go live among forests or mountains would have been regarded as foolish or crazy. I did not know even one person who would have understood why I wanted to do such a thing. So, deep in my heart, I felt convinced that I would never be able to escape from civilization. While an undergraduate Ted would be selected to be among 22 students used as unwitting guinea pigs in a CIA-sponsored experiment in extreme social stress guided by Professor of Clinical Psychology Henry Alexander Murray (a Herman Melville scholar). Each subject in the Central Intelligence Agency’s “MKUltra” experiment was assigned a code name, and Ted would be tracked as “Lawful.” The 22 undergraduates would be subjected to what Professor Murray and the Special Operations Division of the CIA planned as social and personality assaults that were “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive.” The accomplishment would be to shatter the student’s ego, figuring out in each individual case what were the student’s most deeply cherished beliefs in order relentlessly to disparage them, and through them, the student himself. Such experimentation would continue from Fall 1959 through Spring 1962, when Professor Murray retired. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI 1959 A new testing organization was formed, American College Testing (ACT), which would become the leading rival of the Educational Testing Service (ETS).The Louisiana supreme court upheld the state’s miscegenation law, arguing that the state could protect the children from such marriages from “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”1 (In this year, California, Idaho, and Nevada were repealing their bans on interracial marriage.) I wasn’t just a major in Philosophy at the University of Texas, for I was also doing what would work out to be a 2d major, in parametric statistical mathematics, plus a 3d in experimental psychology, having to do with memory and optical illusions and learning experiments.