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. In this year there were intriguing experiments being performed on memory engrams in decapitated planaria flatworms, etc., by James V. McConnell at the University of Michigan. PLANARIA FLATWORMS

During the following year I would be at Harvard Graduate School while Theodore John Kaczynski, known later to the FBI as “UNABOM,” was still an undergraduate, if an extraordinarily privileged one. This math genius was my professor Willard Van Orman Quine’s favorite student, whereas Quine could not bring himself even to be polite to me (in all likelihood, I suppose, due to my personal appearance). By reconstruction, I think it likely that I encountered Ted once when I visited the professor in his office: it was probably he who was standing to the professor’s one side with the professor behind his desk, while a graduate assistant stood to the other side — they glared at me like a pair of eunuch harem guards as I stood before Quine’s desk and made my pitch, that I had come to Harvard in order to study under him, having been so greatly impressed by his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in FROM A LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW. Then somewhat later I visited a notorious student’s room once, N43 at Eliot House, invited by another student to witness how stinky it was because the notorious student wasn’t there that day. Kaczynski the odorous, the glarer, after Harvard, would go on to graduate study at the University of Michigan, and this memory experimenter James V. McConnell, he of the planaria experiments, would later on fall victim to Ted’s 10th mailed bomb while Ted and I were in our respective cabins on our respective mountains in our respective states, unbeknown to each other but equivalently defeated by human society and equivalently attempting to live off the land.

It is interesting to me to note now, in 2018, that we do not seem to have gotten any closer at all, to an understanding of how memories are physically encoded and stored and then decoded and redeemed in our neural tissue. It is almost as if we were searching in a dark room at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. What if there actually aren’t any such brain structures as “memories,” but our experience of “having memories” is to be accounted for in some manner other than by the existence of structures of neural tissue? If the black cat isn’t there, this would perfectly account for half a century of investigative failure. This has been one of the enduring puzzles of my life!

I had an opportunity to teach a Sophomore class in Introduction to Ethics during this year, in Mezes Hall at the University of Texas. What I quickly discerned was that the students in the class divided into two distinctly different groups. One group of the students was using this class A.) in order to study how to persuade themselves to live lives of decency and honor, and the other group of the students was using this class B.) in 1. Note here the sarcastic echoing of the language of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 school integration ruling in Brown v. Board of Education). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

order to study how to fabricate facile justifications for whatever it was that they wanted or needed to do in order to make their lives work well for themselves. These two groups of students had nothing whatever in common other than that they were seated in the same room of Mezes Hall at the same time. I also observed, during our session on the Kantian categorical imperative, that the TxU sophomores seemed quite competent to create their own sets of Fake Facts, whereby they could permute the Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant in any manner that would tend to facilitate their own life (it would not be until 1961 that I would be educated in how easy it had been for Adolf Eichmann to permute the Categorical Imperative, by the deployment of the fake absolute categories of Nazi Germany totalitarianism, in such manner as to legitimate the regime’s destruction of International Jewry — that bureaucrat had been able to dream up Fake Facts while standing on his head and stacking BBs).

Someone contributing to a discussion group on the Internet once made the mistake of suggesting that there was a trail of secret medical experimentation on humans in the 20th Century. Of course, with this sort of provocation, some righteous patriot on that discussion list immediately and with vast indignation challenged this: “Other than that carried out by Nazis, can anyone produce any documentation of the secret use of humans as experimental subjects in medical research?” I contributed as follows: Secret? There has never been any need for secrecy. When I was a student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas in the late 1950s, I had a bad reaction to a medication tried out on me by the duty physician at the Student Health Clinic. I then found out that the medicine he had given me was not approved for human use. But, I found out, that had been quite all right. Had he charged me for this medication? No! Was I a student in a public institution of education? Yes! Therefore, according to them, I had no recourse, as no wrong had been done and no law had been violated.

This would have been rendered illegal had the physician on duty HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

charged me for the medication; however, the medication he administered to me was a free sample distributed by a drug company to him for such free experimental use. This would likewise have been rendered illegal had I not been an inmate in a public institution, to wit, a student at the University of Texas taking advantage of free public education. I was, from the standpoint of the law, as a student receiving the benefit of a public education, an institutionalized person. I was a beneficiary. The state was my parent, my provider. Legally, I found out, I was in precisely the same category as if I had been a prisoner in the state prison. My consent to being experimented upon was constructive, that is, by being a recipient of the public largess I had already in point of law tacitly given my consent to being thus experimented upon. Well, at least, this is the way in which the situation was explicated to me at the time, while I was recovering from the adverse impact of this untested medication upon my health. How much of what I was told was truthful, versus how much was institutional self-protection, I simply have never had any way to know. I had merely had a severe case of athlete’s foot and, as I had no resources at all and was supporting myself by working nights as a janitor while in school, had presumed that going to the Student Health Clinic was better than spending food money for a bottle of itch powder at the drug store. The unfortunate side reaction I had was that all the skin lifted off the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet in great thick gray sheets. I put my feet in plastic sacks of Vaseline under my socks, and learned to hold my pen between my 2d and 3d fingers in such a way that it did not touch the undersides of my fingers, and went on with my study of philosophy. By the time I had become a graduate student, the skin had grown back and the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were no longer a bright pink color. I learned a lot in college. Did I, during my public education, acquire “a feeling of inferiority as to [my] status in the community that may affect [my heart and mind] in a way unlikely ever to be undone”? Well, I’m now 80 years of age, and this you’re-just-a-ward-of-the-state-on-whom-we-can-experiment Texas episode in my personal trajectory still, for me, festers. Maybe I should ask the State of Texas for an apology — an apology might help, maybe? ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

Fall: Harvard University undergraduate Theodore John Kaczynski moved into room N43 in Harvard University’s Eliot House. He was selected to be among 22 students of the Class of 1962 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), something being described as “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development.” 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 through Spring 1962, when Professor Murray retired and the CIA renamed its program as “MKSEARCH.” In 1973 by order of the Director all records would be destroyed).

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1960

Roderick Nash graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. NEW “HARVARD MEN”

Harvard undergraduate Ted Kaczynski registered at the age of 18 with the Selective Service (later, the FBI would find a SS card among his possessions in his cabin). Wary of the draft, he would be able to avoid this at first with a 2S student deferment and then as an instructor.

Theodore Nelson invented the concept of hypertext, as a result of which he has come to be characterized in some quarters as “the king of unsuccessful software development.” The four smarmy-ass maxims which characterized Ted N.’s outlook on life were: • Most people are fools. • Most authority is malignant. • God does not exist. • Everything is wrong.

At this point Ted N. was studying strategy under Thomas Schelling at Harvard after having graduated from Swarthmore with a BA in Philosophy. Simultaneously I was studying symbolic logic under Willard Quine at Harvard after having graduated from the University of Texas at Austin (hence my pen name, “Austin”) with a BA in Philosophy. We did not, to my recollection, encounter one another while graduate students at Harvard,2 although this was the year, behind my lodgings, in which they were laying the foundation stone of the first ever university computer center. (Oh, well, life is full of missed opportunities.)

At this point the immense University of California system began requiring its applicants to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), making itself the largest client of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). As president of

2. Well, but then, I don’t recollect having encountered Ted Kaczynski, the UNABOMER, either, although we were undoubtedly denizens of the same building, Mathematics Hall, at the same time. (Ted and I were fellow students in roughly the same manner in which Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein had been fellow students in 1904: Ted K. and I never met although fellow students just as Ludwig and Adolf never met although fellow students; in this comparison I would be the Adolf figure because I was the older one, and Ted would be the Ludwig figure because he was the smarter one; when they were in school together Adolf had not yet killed anyone and Ludwig had not yet had any profound thoughts, and when we were in school together Ted K. had not yet killed anyone and I had not yet had any profound thoughts.) On the basis of the above four maxims, however, clearly Ted N. would have been a better soulmate for Ted K. than I could ever have been! By way of contrast, were I to have developed such a set of four smarmy-ass maxims by which to govern my attitude toward life, my own set would more likely have run something like this: Most people are more or less ordinary and this isn’t any of my business. The legitimacy of authority is never more than mildly enhanced by legitimacy. Falling down before and worshiping God provides a convenient way by which we can hope to avoid falling down before and worshiping what’s not God. We’ll all be just fine the way we are — as soon as we do some minor amount of fine- tuning in paying attention to the way we pay attention to one another. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

Harvard, James Bryant Conant had been aiming to make his school more egalitarian. (At least, that’s what he

supposed he was doing.) Soon after his appointment in 1933, he had established a scholarship program for students from modest backgrounds. His assistants Wilbur Bender and Henry Chauncey had sought to find a

way to assess the academic promise of the potential scholarship students. Chauncey had eventually recommended the Scholastic Aptitude Test that had been developed by Carl C. Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton University. Being selected in California meant that this effort had finally made it to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

big time.

Well, yes, this testing program sponsored by Conant and Chauncey had made it to the big time, but had it made it to the big time in the manner in which Conant and Chauncey had intended, or in some other manner? Let us parse the fact of this matter. What Conant and Chauncey had intended was a testing program that would replace the subjective selection process then in effect whereby any dolt with money and standing could make it from his prep school into the Ivy League, where he would be awarded the “Gentleman’s C” –George W. Bush comes to mind as a case in point– with an objective selection process whereby the Ivy League would become the home away from home for the best and the brightest of each new generation of American youth. But, this was not what Conant and Chauncey had achieved. What they had achieved was not a replacement for the old system of privilege and exclusion, but a supplementation of it. Their new system simply was not operating to include the worthy who would otherwise have been excluded as they had intended (such as myself with my fine academic record and top test scores, and helplessly twisted spine) — but merely perhaps at most to exclude a few of the more unworthy preppies who would otherwise have been automatically included.

In attempting to correct a system that was functioning in many overlapping, hyperredundant, overdetermined manners as a mechanism of exclusion and privilege, Conant and Chauncey attempted to add a feature that would enable this system to function to include — but in the real world things simply don’t work that way. Rather than seeking to enable exclusion, a corrective mechanism, to function as a corrective must seek to disable exclusion. Because this Ivy League system of privilege had so many mechanisms of exclusion that overlapped one another, were hyperredundant, so that the exclusion of any excludable individual was overdetermined in any of a number of ways, social, financial, in regard to personal appearance, in regard to race and gender and sexual orientation, etc., etc., etc., the problem simply could not be solved merely by adding yet another technique by which that system might exclude. These boys Conant and Chauncey had sent themselves on a fool’s errand. THE MERITOCRACY

Had Conant and Chauncey really intended to succeed, and had merely been unable to think their way out of a wet paper bag, or had all this stuff about the meritocracy been a mere scam, a way by which they might manufacture a cushy life for themselves? –The jury is still out!

Once upon a time somebody named Ethan Bronner contributed a column to the newspapers, “High Schools HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

Fear Telling Colleges All About Johnny,” a column which was illuminating but which entirely avoided one aspect of its story — the point that great harm may be done not only to the institution of higher education but also to Johnny, if there is a failure to inform the college of what it is getting into by accepting as a student a young person who has a personal problem.

When this hit the newspapers, I responded to this somebody named Ethan Bronner who had written the column, using myself and my own personal experience as a case in point. As a child on an Indiana farm back in the 1940s I had contracted bovine tuberculosis and my spine had twisted. As a deformed young adult in this year, 1960, however, by performing outstandingly on my Graduate Record Examinations, I had been able to win a merit scholarship (a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funded by the Ford Foundation, intended to assist me in “becoming a teacher”), and on the basis of that award, I had been able to gain admission to the graduate school of Harvard University — beginning with the 1960/1961 school year.

What I did not know as a deformed young man was that these prestigious “Ivy League” colleges had had a program whereby they had been screening the posture of their students, expelling those with bad posture when this could not readily be corrected. (This was well before the existence of that program would be revealed, in national picture magazines such as LIFE.) Not myself having a Preppie background, never having had any contact at all with this “Ivy League” or with the “prep school” graduates to whom it catered, I myself simply had no way to predict –nobody had bothered to inform me– that due to my spinal deformity I was going to run head-on into a brick wall of institutional disfavor when I got into these hallowed halls of Academe. And, what is even more significant, nobody had bothered to inform Harvard University that when they were accepting me on the basis of my academic performance record and on the basis of these objective test scores, they were accepting, as material for the manufacture of their sophisticated-leader product, a young man who was obscenely deformed — a young man who would simply not be able to act the part of the Harvard Man. Deformitas vincit omnia

I had received one hint of what was to come, a hint that I later became able to appreciate in retrospect, a hint which at the time I had been unprepared to process. When, at the University of Texas, I had gone for the interview for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, I wore a suit jacket to drape my body and was very careful upon entering the interview room to always position myself directly facing the panel of interviewers — to never give them a chance of a side glimpse of me. Then, upon leaving the room, I most courteously waited for them all, and exited last from the room — again, to never give them a chance of a side glimpse of me. (I supposed at the time I was getting away with this!) However, at one point while these men were still at their table talking among themselves about me, one of them turned to the person sitting by his side and made some sort of comment about Harvard. The comment he made, the comment I was at the time unprepared to process, was something to the effect that “this would teach them” or “this will give them their come-uppance” or “they think they’re so high and mighty.” The metaphor he deployed was “through the transom like a hand grenade.” I really have no firm recollection of the precise words used (other than this mention of the transom above a door, and a hand grenade), for when I came to reflect upon this remark a year later, after my dismissal at Harvard, all I could recall was that some such comment had been made, and that it had had a general Shadenfreudian flavor — something about my case in particular that was going to cause Harvard some embarrassment. I did not realize it at the time, but I had been the hand grenade they were lobbing at Harvard. It had been obvious to them because of my spine, that I was never going to make it as a Harvard Man. It had been obvious to them that this was going to harm me rather than help me. They were taking delight in the idea that, through me –the guy whose appearance screamed at them that he’d be a reject– they would be creating an embarrassment for Harvard. It was Harvard that mattered to them, rather than me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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So when I showed up in Fall 1960 at Harvard University, as yet sight unseen, I headed directly for my choice of teaching career, the Philosophy Department in Emerson Hall. My life goal was to become a philosopher and a Professor of Philosophy. What I created in that building, and created in the Administration Hall when I went to get a dorm room allocation, was — shock, disbelief, panic. Harvard University, I found, was a school which prided itself in being the assembly station for the leaders of our nation’s future — and it was instantly obvious to these people, that no-one was every going to be willing to follow such a Hoosier foundling as this one who had so unexpectedly and unaccountably shown up in a basket on their doorstep. So what they did was, they got inventive: they took me off behind closed doors and advised me that while I had indeed been “accepted as a graduate student at Harvard, to study at Harvard, to spend my scholarship money at Harvard” whatever I may have presumed to have been going on, I had not been “accepted into a degree program at Harvard.” Then they made damned sure that I exited their campus as soon as that Woodrow Wilson Fellowship money I had brought with me had all been expended on courses and lodgings.

The meaning of Mens sana in compore sano at Harvard University seemed to be “If you aren’t of sound body then we will pretend that you aren’t of sound mind, and on that pretext we will shitcan you.” Nathan M. Pusey, the college’s president while I was there, has been referred to by his biographer Roger Rosenblatt as a “patrician pighead.” Although undoubtedly this was only one aspect of his personality, and although undoubtedly he had not been personally briefed on my case, he would obviously, if he had needed to be informed, have approved of their getting rid of me as a graduate student in Philosophy there. –His Harvard would definitely not have been for the likes of Henry David Thoreau, let alone for the likes of me.

(At that time, as you may be aware, there was no such thing as an ombudsman or an appeal from a decision of a department chair. I hesitate to fantasize that there was any such thing as student rights. The institutionalists were calling the shots; they were calling all the shots.)

Well, one might say, it was for the best, because all things considered, I did manage to extract one year of high- quality education in philosophy from this pitifully unethical and obtuse venue called “Harvard University.” However, when I then went to another school to attempt to further my life goal to become a philosopher and a Professor of Philosophy, specifically, when I went to the acting Chair of the Department of Philosophy (John R. Silber) of the University of Texas at Austin –a school which, being a land-grant state college, had no existing program of dissing the physically deformed– the reaction I got from him was a reaction of local pride: “You’re a Harvard reject. We don’t accept the rejects of other educational institutions.”

As a direct result my 2S student deferment expired and I was ordered into the military service. My spine was not twisted enough to keep them from trying to kill me off. I promptly wound up in uniform in Guantánamo, Cuba, directly under the suspended Damocles Sword of four to seven Russian/Cuban nuclear warheads during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. (Hey, I’m lucky to be alive, damn right.)

In other words, what we have here is a process of “intensification.” Starting out with a physical deformity in the 1940s, on that basic I had become classifiable as an educational reject in 1961, and on that basis I had become classifiable as nuclear cannon fodder in 1962. Whatever the people who fronted for me and got me into Harvard University had supposed that they were doing for this young man, as it turned out they certainly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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had not done this young man any great favor.

So I attempted to point out to this Ethan Bronner, the author of this newspaper article, that if he investigated this angle, he might very well find that he could elaborate significantly on that story “High Schools Fear Telling Colleges All About Johnny,” which as it appeared in print was skewed in favor of the harm done to institutions and to institutional apparatchiks to the point of neglecting entirely the harm done to individual students by such practices of reticence.

(It would appear, surprise surprise, that this was something of which the newsie did not care to learn.)

It is not just the newsies who do not care to learn of this sort of thing. Virtually nobody want to know about it. Here for instance is the culmination of an email exchange with one such skeptic, a refusenik by the name of Wallace. I had done my best to persuade him that I was telling the truth, and provide corroborating detail, and he had remained entirely indignant at this accusation, rising in the righteous defense of the powerful, maintaining that a place like Harvard would never be guilty of such a disgusting thing: >Odd, all I asked for was some proof. > The truth is powerful, and in that sense I plead guilty. > Offered some proof that Harvard had a policy of dismissing people with crooked spines, > I will gladly yield to the power of truth. I was unable to offer such a proof to such a skeptic, so instead I asked that he please take a look at this URL: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/04/22/2003137673 The implication of the article at this URL would seem to be that while deformed people are treated horribly in Japan, they are not treated horribly elsewhere in the world. The sad fact that I have to report, however, is that while deformed people are indeed treated horribly in Japan –that is a given– although the treatment awarded to deformed Japanese by nondeformed Japanese may well be worse than the treatment awarded elsewhere in the world, nevertheless this is a global problem — and we in the United States of America have our share of it.

Here in the USA, and in Europe and England, the persecution of deformed people seems to be correlated to some degree with Lutheranism. The reason for this is historical. According to Paul Althaus’s THE ETHICS OF MARTIN LUTHER, English translation by Robert Schultz, pages 96-97, Luther “occasionally suggested that misformed infants, or ‘changelings,’ should be drowned. He believed that such a changeling was not created by God, but was made by the devil and had no soul — or even that the devil himself was in them as their soul. LUTHERS WERKE. KRITISCHE GESAMTAUSGABE (Weimarer Ausgabe) TR 5, no. 5207; LUTHER’S WORKS (American edition, 1956-1986) 45, 396-97. Cf. LUTHERS WERKE. KRITISCHE GESAMTAUSGABE (Weimarer Ausgabe) TR 2, no. 2528-29; LUTHERS WERKE. KRITISCHE GESAMTAUSGABE (Weimarer Ausgabe) TR 3, no. 3676; LUTHERS WERKE. KRITISCHE GESAMTAUSGABE (Weimarer Ausgabe) TR 4, no. 4513.” Luther suggested that the thing the parent ought to do with a child of this sort, out of kindness and in a quest for redemption, was to beat the Devil out of him. From a deformed child who was badly enough beaten, the spirit of Satan might flee — leaving the child cured of its deformity, and full of grace. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

However, there are other venues than Lutheranism, in the USA, in which there is persecution of deformity. Generally, from a sociological standpoint, persecution of deformity is greatest where there is the greatest perceived disparity or dissonance between the deformity and the victim’s status or standing in society. Which is to say, the lower the deformed person’s perceived status or standing, the less the persecution because the lower the perceived disparity or dissonance between that person’s form and that person’s position: a janitor HDT WHAT? INDEX

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who was deformed might have an easier time of it simply because being a janitor is not in our society a high- status occupation. Conversely, from a sociological standpoint, the venue at which we might expect to discover the greatest degree of persecution of persons with deformities would be the venue of the highest status or standing in society. We might, for instance, expect to see greater levels of discrimination at, say, an Ivy with a reputation to maintain, such as Harvard University, than at, say, a land-grant college with no particular reputation for excellence to maintain other than on the football field, such as the University of Texas. The sociological reason for that is simple: the perceived disparity between condition and standing would there be the greater.

The situation is difficult now to prove simply because –as the Harvard lawyers have frankly acknowledged, indeed bragged about– their first move when their deformity program of long standing was finally exposed to public view was to marshal all the evidence they could get their hands on, as to what had been going on, and destroy it. They bragged that what they were doing, in destroying the evidence, was not destroying the evidence. No, they were not destroying evidence, they were merely righteously retroactively protecting the privacy of the poor normal students with straight spines who had been so invasively photographed in the nude. Some of these people had since gone on to become rich and famous, they offered — and it would be very wrong to allow a naked picture of a rich and famous person to surface after all these years. The rich and famous have rights, you know. They cleaned out the files, leaving nothing undestroyed that they could possibly get their hands on.

In such a situation, after such a known destruction of evidence, after such a known purging of the record, we are entitled to put the burden of proof on the other foot, and ask the hard question: Can anyone provide the name and graduation year of even one single person with a deformed spine, who has prior to the 1970s been allowed to graduate from Harvard? For instance, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the deformed inventive genius who did so much to build the empire of General Electric, four feet tall exactly, he of the twisted spine — was he perchance a Harvard Man? ASSLEY

The Philosophy Department at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s was dominated by Logical Positivist types, whose deities were of the Carnap sort. Basically, their idea of the function of philosophy in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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life was that it was a scientific endeavor to create the ultimate Truth Machine, which would be something like a sausage grinder. You’d turn the crank of this Truth Machine, like turning the handle of a sausage grinder, and out of the little hole at the bottom would come an endless series of linked Truths, like sausages, with not a single Falsehood ever. They were going to make thought unnecessary, by providing a superior substitute for it. They seemed to be possessed by the conviction that Thought was dangerous, that it led to Error and needed to be more carefully regulated than ever it had been in the bad old superstitious and metaphysical past. They were of course foundationalists, who were intent upon discovering and publishing The True Foundation, that axiom set of intuitively certain propositions such as “A is A” from which might be deduced, by iterations of the strict rules of logic, All Truth And Nothing But Truth. Existentialism wasn’t even part of philosophy, it was merely some sort of Dada aesthetic movement over in Europe where they aren’t up to date. Wittgenstein was to them just another Logical Positivist, albeit a rather problematic one who liked to whistle. In my final semester at the University of Texas at Austin, the spring semester of 1960, I took as my final course in the Mathematics department (I had dual minors in Mathematics and in Romance Languages in addition to my dual majors in Philosophy and in Psychology) a course entitled “Foundations of Arithmetic.” I supposed this would be a good complement to my studies in the Philosophy department on Russell’s and Whitehead’s PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA and its derivation of arithmetic from the logic of the stroke function and the propositional calculus. How that senior class in the Mathematics department made my head spin! Actually, it was construed among the Mathematics majors as a “gut” course, one that involved only a tiny amount of imitation and memorization. They were spinning down, getting ready for graduation and partying. Again and again the professor would dash through a “proof” on the blackboard, and leave out three or four steps between each step of his proof without ever giving any clue that he was aware that there were necessary proof steps that he was leaving out. I observed that these seniors in Mathematics were dutifully copying these pseudo-proofs from the blackboard into their notebooks. I received no impression that there was anyone in that class except yours truly, who was even subliminally aware that the topic was being merely skimmed. These math majors were doing very well indeed, because they were performing as if on a TV quiz show where the key element was the speed with which one could mash one’s palm down on the red button, and then shout out the expected correct answer. In that abortive class in the foundations of arithmetic I acquired a piece of life learning that would be invaluable to me, a piece of life learning that has stuck with me for the duration of my existence. That piece of life learning is as follows: Of course, we all begin to learn by a process of imitation. We memorize our multiplication tables in the 2d and 3d grades, without any awareness that anything more than memorization is required. When we come to long division, we memorize the procedure and we apply the procedure and then the teacher tells us whether the answer we have arrived at is right or wrong. Throughout our formal education, such imitation and memorization stands us in good stead. Pleasing the teacher is such an effective substitute for learning! However, this sort of process is not constitutive of what might be termed, by way of an honorary rubric and by way of a radical contrast, “thinking.” Thinking is something more than and something different from imitation and memorization. Those who have learned to think are similar to those who have experienced “salvation” in a fundamentalist Protestant religious cult — we preserve the sacred memory of the exact day and place and circumstance of our conversion experience, the exact day and place and circumstance in which we initially acquired the information, that there was much more to “thinking” than we had to that point supposed, that “thinking” actually can go far beyond anything with which we had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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previously had experience back in our schooldays of trivial imitation and memorization and pleasing the teacher. We preserve vivid memories of our first creative thought, the day and hour at which in our minds “something was first produced out of nothing.” However, it is a sad fact that many humans never have this conversion experience, in which they first acquire the blessed ability to think. They never really ever learn to think, they never really ever learn even that it is a possibility. When they suppose themselves to be thinking, they suppose that they are thinking because actually they have not a clue, as to what thinking actually amounts to. It is also a sad fact that many American college students, like those UTex math seniors I was surrounded with in the spring semester of 1960, perhaps even like the professor who was teaching that class, are among those who have never had this conversion experience in which the first learned that there was such a thing as thought. They are college graduates and they have never had a thought in their lives and they remain entirely blissfully unaware that they have never had a thought in their lives. If they ever hear a fresh thought, they are likely to respond “Oh, that’s just another one of your metaphors.” It is also a fact that our business workaday lives are organized around the general success of those of us who have never acquired the information, that there is such a thing as thinking. These are the people with the ready answers, and the confidence, that wins time and time again over those of us who are disabled by having learned that there is such a thing as thought. If you are a thinking person, and have ever had a supervisor, you have noticed that your supervisor was not able to think. There is a reasons why you were the subordinate and he or she was the supervisor. Allow me to bring this to a fine point. He or she was the supervisor, perhaps, because of not being able to think. You were the subordinate, perhaps, because of being able to think. It’s sorta like the boss who hires a cute secretary to clean up his spelling, a detail with which he himself cannot be bothered because he is too busy doing the manly stuff. In 1950 Alan Turing had posed a question. If we were in communication by Teletype machine with someone or something at the other end of the communication circuit, how would we be able to tell for sure whether what was at the other end was a computer or a person? Computers can be trained to operate in a “chatterbot” mode that to a limited extent simulates personhood, and in the course of time it can be expected that these “chatterbot” simulations will become more and more capable of deceiving us into supposing falsely that we are interacting with another human. Now, I am not here mentioning the famous “Turing Test” in order to discuss it, but in order to here propose a different test, one of my own imagining. You might regard this as the “Meredith Test.” Would it be possible to develop a test, that would reliably inform us of whether some particular human HDT WHAT? INDEX

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being, let us say your supervisor “John Doe,” is or is not capable of taking thought? Some, I am convinced, have never had a thought in their lives, and if they ever had a thought, that experience would be so unsettling that they would need to go to the nearest restroom and lock the door behind them. These nonthinkers cannot be identified by whether or not they possess a college diploma, for in fact we know of cases in which someone has gone to college and even graduate school, and self- describes as “a thinking person,” when demonstrably they are not that — they have merely become very skilled at memorization and imitation. They are like the illiterate adult who has never been capable of recognizing words and could not possibly order off of a restaurant menu, who has masked this and has a driver’s license because they are not stupid, they can fake it on the basis of the shapes and colors of the usual highway signs. They function as excellent simulacra of thinkers but are merely faking it exceedingly well. Now, one might suppose that if a person is functioning competently and satisfactorily in their life circumstances, that ought to constitute some sort of assurance that they are capable of taking thought. Not so. Thinking can in fact be disabling rather than enabling. What then might constitute the criterion by which we may construct a reliable “Meredith Test,” and determine whether a given individual “John Doe” is or is not capable of taking thought? I believed that in this senior course in the foundations of arithmetic, I had discovered such a criterion. The students, and the professor, were oblivious to the skipped steps in the proofs. When I pointed out steps that were being skipped, their response had been that these things were just obvious, could safely be elided, and that if I did not likewise find them just obvious, then perhaps I was not bright enough or did not have the necessary mathematical prerequisites, to be in their class.

What a treasure my memories of that senior class in the foundations of arithmetic has been for me! This explains so much about our modern world. It explains the herd mentation of the Republican Party (this is not intended to imply that most Democrats know how to think). It explains how it is that for so many, truth is what appears in Pravda (or, in whatever the local substitute for Pravda happens to be at the moment). It explains the nuclear industry, and how so many of us are so willing to expose our families to such enormous threats, in exchange for a modicum of immediate and temporary easing of the parameters of existence. It explains how people are able to be credulous rather than skeptical in regard to matters of faith. Etc.

To date, in my quest for the “Meredith Test,” I have been able to construct only negative proofs rather than positive ones. That is, I have been able to ascertain that a particular person was incapable of thought, on the basis of their own testimony, but I have had less success in being able to ascertain that a particular person was capable of thought. One may reliably use, for instance, a person’s attitude toward metaphor and analogy, as a “Meredith Test” of their ability to take thought: in the case of a person who goes “That’s a mere metaphor, that’s just an analogy!” they convict themselves out of their own mouths. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I had been forced into the academic study of philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems, such as “why are people always finding a good reason to abuse me, why are they forever accusing me of being bad or wrong in this or that inventive way, when actually there is nothing particularly bad or wrong about my conduct or beliefs, but they actually are abusing me merely because the kink in my spine makes me look ridiculous, and embarrasses them and makes them not want to be associated in any way with me?” This, although not itself a philosophical problem but rather a sociological or psychological one, raised the difficult philosophical issue of false consciousness in its relation to ethics. But I found that, precisely because I was being forced into the field of philosophy by such personal life problems, my philosophy professors at the University of Texas, and then my philosophy professors at Harvard University, considered that I had no place in their profession. Philosophy, they uniformly instructed me, was not about these problems that I was finding perplexing, but instead was all and only about whatever the recognized professors of philosophy, on payroll, were at the moment considering it to be about — whatever it was that they collectively were choosing to obsess about. A few years later I would have been able to quote Sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper at these bildungsphilisters, but at the time the following had not yet been published: The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy.... Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if those roots decay.... These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who “study” philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems. [CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS: THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. London: Routledge, 1963, 5th edition 1992, pages 95-97]

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1962

Duke University’s faculty formed itself into a legislature (this “Academic Council” was a necessary response to the resignation of President Arthur Hollis Edens in what had come to be known as the “Gross-Edens Affair”).

Although his grades were not the best, Theodore John Kaczynski, whose mathematical specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory, was able to graduate with his class although without distinction from Harvard University.3 The CIA-sponsored experiment in extreme social stress “MKUltra” in which undergrad Kaczynski had been one of 22 willing student guinea pigs, guided by Professor of Clinical Psychology Henry Alexander Murray (a Herman Melville scholar), was brought to its conclusion through that professor’s retirement. (Such college experimentation on students would continue, renamed as “MKSEARCH” by the CIA, until in 1973 by order of the Director all the program’s records would be destroyed). Kaczynski was no longer “Lawful,” no longer continuously subjected to social and personality assaults that were “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive.” — He would proceed into the graduate mathematics program at the University of Michigan, where as a student teacher he would need to live on a stipend of $2,300/year (he would describe his period in Michigan as the most miserable of his life).

3. In his Senior year his grades had been B+ in History of Science, B- in Humanities 115, B in Math 210, B in Math 250, A- in Anthropology 122, C+ in History 143 and A- in Scandinavian. He had finished with a 3.12-out-of-4.0 GPA. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1964

The University of Frankfurt and the University of München withdrew Josef Mengele’s academic degrees.

Theodore John Kaczynski received the MA in Mathematics from the University of Michigan (none of his degrees have ever been removed).

Henry Petroski received a Master’s Degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1966

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated Project MKOFTEN, a program of secret medical experiments to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.

Theodore John Kaczynski was having such difficulty getting close to women that he briefly fantasized about having a sex change operation so that he would be able to touch a female. He went as far as making an appointment to see a psychiatrist at the University Health Center, planning to ask whether a sex change would be the right thing for him. However, while in the waiting room he lost his nerve, and wound up telling the psychiatrist that he was depressed about the possibility of getting drafted. Later, he was able to manage his shame through fantasizing the murder of this psychiatrist: Why not really kill that psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.... I suddenly felt that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal. He schemed to save up some money and buy land in the wilderness. He would live there with a rifle, managing his life by occasionally killing someone. In his coded journal of the time he wrote: “If it doesn’t work and if I can get back to civilization before I starve then I will come back here and kill someone I hate.” Later he would add this comment: Because I found modern life absolutely unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point, a sudden change took place: I realized that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free! That was the great turning-point in my life because it was then that I acquired courage, which has remained with me ever since. It was at that time, too, that I became certain that I would soon go to live in the wild, no matter what the consequences. I spent two years teaching at the University of California in order to save some money, then I resigned my position and went to look for a place to live in the forest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 1, Monday: Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon replaced Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi as President of Nigeria.

Charles Joseph Whitman wrote that he desired that his body be subjected to autopsy, to determine if there was a biological reason for his actions and increasing headaches. He asked that any funds that remained in his estate after payment of debts be sent anonymously to a mental health foundation. He wrote “I never could quite make it. These thoughts are too much for me.” He then took the elevator to the top of the tower at the University of Texas in Austin. On the observation deck he followed the US Marine sniper motto “One Shot One Kill” by refraining from firing a 2d time at any of his targets. He killed 16 and injured 31 before being killed by police. The bodies of his wife and mother were found in their homes. The autopsy would be inconclusive.

Mesa for cybersonic bandoneon was performed for the initial time, in St. Paul de Vence, France, by the creators Gordon Mumma and David Tudor.

Norman R. Draper’s and Harold Smith’s APPLIED REGRESSION ANALYSIS (by 1981 this had been cited more than 2,760 times and was recognized as a “citation classic” by Current Contents).4

4. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1967

Late in the year: Ted Kaczynski became the youngest professor ever hired by the University of California – Berkeley, when he was made an Assistant Professor of Mathematics to teach undergraduate courses in Geometry and Calculus. In case you’re not familiar with these things: this was a considerable distinction.

Dr. Daniel Ellsberg completed a 350-page draft report on the Kennedy Administration’s Vietnam policy during 1961 (the first stuff of the Pentagon Papers project). Over the course of the following year Ellsberg would find himself becoming increasingly skeptical about our nation’s policy in Vietnam. It was becoming like “Do these fellows have any concern at all, for what they are doing?”

After 5 years of taking only 2 courses per semester, Theodore John Kaczynski submitted a doctoral dissertation on “Boundary Functions” and received the PhD degree at the University of Michigan. His grades were better than the ones he had received at Harvard University: although he flunked Physics, his only other low grade was a B-, there were only 4 other B grades, and he received 12 A grades. His dissertation was awarded the Sumner B. Myers Prize of $100 recognizing his dissertation as the school’s best in mathematics that year, and he was hired an instructor or assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California – Berkeley.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1969

June: Theodore John Kaczynski resigned from his position as an instructor or assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California – Berkeley (the student evaluations generally indicated that it was useless to show up at his classes on the Theory of Sets as he lectured straight out of the textbook while refusing to take student questions).

His goal at this point was to move to a secluded spot and become self-sufficient so that he would be able to live autonomously. To that end he began carefully to acquire survival skills such as tracking, edible plant identification, and construction of primitive technological devices such as the bow drill. He would gradually come to realize, however, through observing as the wild land around him got destroyed by development and industry, that it would not for long be possible for him to live that way. He would therefore begin to perform isolated fun acts of sabotage, and initially would target the developments in the vicinity of his cabin. The ultimate catalyst which would cause him to begin his campaign of bombings was when he went out for a walk to one of his favorite wild spots only to find that it had been destroyed and replaced with a road. About this, he would write: The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days’ hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it.... You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June-July: In about this timeframe Ted Kaczynski, at loose ends, came to live at his parents’ small residence in Lombard, Illinois.

Having received a 2d induction notice in the mail in England, something that would have meant his getting shot at along with the other American boys in Vietnam –an induction notice with a July 28th induction date– William Jefferson Clinton had no alternative but to come home to America.

Didn’t Inhale

Summer 1969: Charles Lindbergh began building a dream home on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands.

Ted Kaczynski and his younger brother David Kaczynski drove to Canada to look for a plot of remote land on which they might settle, where they might begin to lead a life that was remote and self-sufficient. They filed a request with the Canadian government, to lease such a plot of ground. HERMITS

William Jefferson Clinton went to see Colonel Willard A. Hawkins, who according to the Los Angeles Times happened to be “the only person in Arkansas with authority to rescind a draft notice.” VIETNAM [I] never received any unusual or favorable treatment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Gosh, he’s a young man of such promise. It would be a shame to waste him.

I did not have sex with that woman — Monica Lewinsky.

Fall: David Kaczynski returned to Columbia University for his Senior year while Ted Kaczynski waited in the home of their parents (then in Lombard, Illinois) for the Canadian government to issue a permit for the 2 brothers to lease a remote plot on which they might create for themselves a life of simplicity and self- sufficiency. HERMITS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1970

Although Boston claims that Aerosmith formed there, actually the band began at this point in New Hampshire where Joe Perry and Steven Tyler met while working at a Sunapee ice cream parlor.

Governor Sargent of Massachusetts put a moratorium on highway construction.

In this year Ted Kaczynski authored a commentary on Jacques Ellul’s THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, a 1964 treatise that had argued that for efficiency to become our God it must become our only God. The alternative to technology the author perceived was to fashion oneself as absolutely devoted to Christ — but according to David Kaczynski, his brother was entirely disregarding Ellul’s religious leanings. Although Ted was considering this book “his Bible,” that did not mean to him that he was obligated to buy into any of the author’s conclusions.

June: Paul Benjamin Auster received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, where Literature of the Renaissance had become his primary field of study.

David Kaczynski graduated from Columbia University. At some point David would attempt to live the simple life in the Texas desert. As a Christmas or birthday present, a year later his brother Ted Kaczynski sent him his personal copy of WALDEN. David has written me about this: Thanks for your note and for checking in with me. If no Thoreau was found in Ted’s cabin (which I don’t know for a fact) it could be because he sent me his personal copy of Walden as a birthday or Christmas present one year after I had moved to the Texas desert. I remember that in his early years in the woods, Ted self-consciously compared himself to Thoreau in their common aim of living as simply and inexpensively as possible. Clearly, he admired Thoreau. It’s amazing that Thoreau could have had an influence on two such different people as my brother and Gandhi. Keep in mind, though, that Ted’s principles and values got mixed up with serious personal and emotional afflictions that rose to the level of a diagnosable mental illness. The lesson for me is that human beings are very very complex, and I think my brother is more complex than most. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Summer: David Kaczynski toured the western states with friends. When the Kaczynski brothers learned that Canada had denied their application for a permit to settle on a remote parcel of land, Ted was disheartened but nevertheless returned to Canada and used the season to continue to view various suitable parcels of wilderness property.

Late Summer: After his tour of the western states, David Kaczynski returned briefly to the Kaczynski family home in Lombard, Illinois and then moved to Great Falls, Montana to begin work for Anaconda Corporation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “UNABOM” University and Airline Bomber HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1971

Ted Kaczynski moved to a cabin without electricity or running water 4 miles outside Lincoln, Montana, where he would live more or less as a recluse (despite being down in a creek bed within sight of a neighbor cabin next door) while learning survival skills and attempting to make himself self-sufficient. There he completed a piece of writing in opposition to high technology, that did not as yet have a title.

Ted began dedicating himself to reading about sociology and books on political philosophy, such as the works of Jacques Ellul, and also stepped up his campaign of sabotage. He soon came to the conclusion that more violent methods would be the only solution to what he saw as the problem of industrial civilization. He would claim that he lost faith in the idea of reform, and came to perceive violent collapse as the only way to bring down the techno-industrial system. Regarding his switch from being a reformer of the system to developing a means of taking it down, he said: I don’t think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. They’ll take the easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your electricity, is not the path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I don’t think there is any controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses ... The big problem is that people don’t believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the eco- anarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it better... The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers… And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as many people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? HERMITS HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

Continuing the tradition of Evolutionary Ethics scientism at Harvard University pioneered by Professor Louis Agassiz during Henry Thoreau’s lifetime –not content with merely teaching pigeons to commit suicide– Professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner issued BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY.

EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

April: A $4,085 check was posted by the federal government of the United States of America to the Treasurer General of the Republic of Cuba. The money represented this year’s rent for the US’s oldest overseas naval base, Guantánamo Bay, a 45-square-mile sliver on the southeast coast of the island originally acquired as a coaling station for US vessels and exceedingly unlike any other military installation in the world. This check would not be cashed by its addressee. No such check would ever again be cashed. Eventually even the postal address to which these checks continue to be mailed year after year would no longer be a deliverable Cuban postal address — and nevertheless the checks would be posted.

Dr. Daniel Ellsberg gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to reporter Neil Sheehan, who took it to New York City, where he and other Times reporters began to look through these extensive materials.

In his coded diary, Ted Kaczynski explained to himself “I act merely from my desire for revenge.... I believe in nothing.... I don’t even believe in the cult of nature worshippers or wilderness worshippers.” He acknowledged to himself that he was not some sort of anti-technology Luddite but merely a seeker for “personal revenge.”

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Something was going on which eventually would mean that you could go to a cabin without becoming terminally deprived (if, that is, your cabin had electricity): Host nodes on the Internet

DATE NODES May 1969 4 October 1969 5 April 1971 23 June 1974 62 March 1977 111 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

Host nodes on the Internet

DATE NODES August 1981 213 May 1982 235 August 1983 562 October 1984 1,024 October 1985 1,961 February 1986 2,308 November 1986 5,089 December 1987 28,174 July 1988 33,000 October 1988 56,000 January 1989 80,000 July 1989 130,000 October 1989 159,000 October 1990 313,000 January 1991 376,000 July 1991 535,000 October 1991 617,000 January 1992 727,000 April 1992 890,000 July 1992 992,000 October 1992 1,136,000 January 1993 1,313,000 April 1993 1,486,000 July 1993 1,776,000 October 1993 2,056,000 January 1994 2,217,000 1995 5,000,000 predicted estimated HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

June: Ted Kaczynski visited his younger brother David Kaczynski, who was working for Anaconda Corporation in Great Falls, Montana. The brothers purchased a 1.4-acre plot south of Lincoln, Montana and Ted began construction of a cabin. HERMITS

During a college commencement speech, Senator Mike Mansfield labeled Vietnam “atragicmistake.” Gosh, do you suppose?

“Killing to end war, that’s like fucking to restore virginity.” — Vietnam-era protest poster HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1972

December 25, Monday: Swami Abhishiktananda on his final Christmas Day on earth: “But Christmas is every day, when you have discovered the non-time of your own origin! Each moment is the dawn of eternity in the explosion of the joy of Being.”

Ted Kaczynski decided that he needed to “murder a scientist.” He began to indulge in the sort of minor ecological sabotage known as “monkeywrenching” — self-indulgent Earth First! stuff, direct-action Ed Abbey stuff, I don’t know the details. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1978

February: Ted Kaczynski asked his father Theodore Richard “Turk” Kaczynski to find him a job at his place of employment, Foam Cutting Engineers in Addison, Illinois.

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: The 1st major microcomputer bulletin board, run by Ward Christianson and Randy Seuss, went on-line, in Chicago.

May: Ted Kaczynski arrived in Chicago.

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Intel began production of the 8086 microprocessor.

May 25, Thursday: At the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus Ted Kaczynski left in the Science and Engineering Building’s parking lot an explosive device he had constructed. He had addressed the package as from Materials Engineering Professor Buckley Crist of Northwestern University and it was found by Mary Gutierrez and taken back to him. When Professor Crist looked at this, he immediately noticed that this return address was not in his own handwriting. Suspicious of this package with his name on it as the sender, that he had not sent, he took it to Campus Security.

May 26, Friday: When Northwestern University Safety Officer Terry Marker opened the package that had been found on the previous day in the Science and Engineering Building’s parking lot on the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus and brought to Professor Buckley Crist by Mary Gutierrez, it exploded in his hands. His minor cuts and bruises made him the initial victim in the long-term investigation that the FBI would eventually label (in the 6-character all-caps naming system they needed to use for the files of their quaint antique office computer system) as UNABOM indicating of course “University Airline Bomber.”

The device had been fabricated from metal that could have come from a home workshop. Its primary component was a piece of metal pipe about an inch in diameter and 9 inches long. This pipe contained smokeless explosive powders, and the box and the plugs that sealed the pipe ends were handcrafted of wood (it is to be noted that most such pipe bombs use the threaded metal pipe closures sold in hardware stores). The primitive trigger device in the bomb was merely a nail, tensioned by rubber bands to impact against six common match heads when the box was opened. The match heads were to burst into flame and thus ignite the explosive powders. When this primitive trigger struck the match heads, however, only three of them had ignited (a more efficient technique, later employed by Kaczynski, was to use batteries and heat filament wire). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

June: Ted Kaczynski’s father Theodore Richard “Turk” Kaczynski had obtained for his at-loose-ends older son a job as a press operator at his place of employment in Addison, Illinois, where younger brother David also was working. Ted moved in with his parents and began to work at Foam Cutting Engineers. When he would have a couple of dates with and become infatuated by a manager at the company, Ellen Tarmichael, although she found him “intelligent” and “quiet,” traits she liked, she would consider that picking apples and baking an apple pie with him were as far as the relationship was going to go — and he would have an unfortunate reaction to this rejection.

June 23, Friday: Ted Kaczynski’s 1st day of employment as a press operator at Foam Cutting Engineers in Addison, Illinois.

August 23, Wednesday: Ted Kaczynski was fired by his brother David for refusing to stop posting obscene lyrics (the object of his affections at Foam Cutting Engineers would never be shown these lyrics). He would get another job, at an Illinois/Shanghai manufacturer of the sort of equipment needed by fast-food restaurants, Prince Castle, Inc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1979

May 9, Wednesday: At Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, graduate student John Harris suffered minor cuts and burns in to a bombing attempt of the UNABOM perpetrator.

June: Ted Kaczynski returned from Illinois to his cabin near Lincoln, Montana. In this timeframe a power pole was chopped down, knocking out power in the Stemple Pass area. Later in the year the trailer of a miner in Field’s Gulch was vandalized. At the time no one could perceive any connection in regard to such acts of ecological vandalism, but then at the time nobody realized that in his remote cabin Ted was handcrafting bombs.

A man identified only by the pseudonym “R.C. Christian” representing “A small group of Americans who seek the Age of Reason” contracted for the Elberton Granite Finishing Company of Elbert County, Georgia to erect a granite sculpture to their specifications on a nearby hilltop. The plot that was purchased for this monument, the highest point in the county, is located on the farm of Mildred and Wayne Mullenix. The structure contains the following guidances “to an Age of Reason,” carved in granite in the languages English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian: MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY - IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY UNITE HUMANITY WITH A LIVING NEW LANGUAGE RULE PASSION - FAITH - TRADITION - AND ALL THINGS WITH TEMPERED REASON PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES IN A WORLD COURT AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS OFFICIALS

BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH SOCIAL DUTIES PRIZE TRUTH - BEAUTY - LOVE - SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE INFINITE HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH - LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE - LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE

(We can be confident that had Ted known about this Georgia wisdom, he would have approved.)

November 14, Wednesday: Ted Kaczynski mailed a package containing an altitude-sensitive bomb from the Chicago area to an address in Washington DC.

November 15, Thursday: Patriotic Front guerrillas accepted a British plan to return Rhodesia to British rule as a transition to full democracy.

Mt. Sinai and the area around it were returned to Egyptian control by Israel.

Symphony no.3 for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra by Wolfgang Rihm to words of Nietzsche and Rimbaud was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.

Light for chamber orchestra and computer electronics by Tod Machover was performed for the initial time, in Metz.

There was smoke coming from a mail carrier aboard American Airlines Flight 444 while the plane was in the air, that we now know was created by the UNABOM perpetrator. The Boeing 727 made an emergency landing at Dulles airport and 12 passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. Evaluating the device, it was noted that only a faulty timing mechanism had prevented it from detonating, and the explosion would have been enough to bring down the airplane. The investigation would initially be assigned to US Postal Inspectors who would label the suspect as “Junkyard Bomber” due to the materials employed in the device. The FBI would create a task force in conjunction with the ATF and the Postal Inspection Service, that would grow to employ more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts, and others. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1980

Chief Agent John Douglas, working with agents in the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, issued a psychological profile of the unidentified “Junkyard Bomber” that described the offender as a man with above-average intelligence with connections to academia. This profile would later be refined to characterize the offender as a neo-Luddite holding an academic degree in the hard sciences, but this psychologically based profile would be discarded in 1983 in favor of an alternative theory developed by FBI analysts concentrating on the physical evidence in recovered bomb fragments. In this rival profile the bomber suspect would be characterized as a blue-collar airplane mechanic. A 1-800 hotline was set up by a “UNABOM Task Force” to take any calls related to the investigation, with a a $1,000,000 reward for anyone who could provide information leading to the bomber’s capture and conviction.

Ed Abbey, a man who would confessedly “as soon kill a man as a snake,” took a copy of WALDEN that he hadn’t looked at since high school with him in 1980 on a river-ratting expedition down the Green River of southeast Utah. I don’t know if he was then aware that he was terminally ill. When he got to the “quiet desperation” passage (DOWN THE RIVER, page 39), he asked the obvious questions and hurried on as if he were afraid to probe them: But is it true that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation? And if so, did Henry escape such desperation HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

himself? HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

I can’t hurt Ed by being short and sharp about his jejune treatment of Henry Thoreau. Ed could profitably have spent his entire river trip reading and rereading the first chapter, in which Thoreau utterly devastates the economic metaphors that generate our sense of loss. For his spirit was an example of the generality that what we become most enraged of, in others, is our own errors. Let us not have a rabid virtue that falls on society like the fervid noonday sun to revenge itself by withering it. But let us have instead a refreshing virtue that falls on society like the morning dew to refresh it. Ed was desperately oppositional to all the environmental vandals of corporate America; he went ape-shit about heedless corporations and hireling police and the bottom-line mentality of outlays versus incomes. He hated plutocratic families like the Gatling family. In precisely the same manner as these unreflecting, greedy functionaries were attacking Abbey and his eco-freaks for trying to steal their corporate profits and complicate their personal lives and burn their bulldozers and pull up their survey stakes, Abbey reflectingly attacked the forces of ecological vandalism because they were stealing his Nature away from him. The one piece of baggage Abbey never managed to lose in any river upset was his sense of being cheated. In the end he achieved nothing but confrontation and the release of hatred –his and theirs– and never glimpsed his own hypocrisy.

So what is the difference between a Ted Kaczynski and an Ed Abbey? Is it the difference between a serial killer and someone who only talked a good story? Or, is it the difference between someone who apparently never came across WALDEN and someone who did come across WALDEN but failed to make anything of it? “I’d as soon kill a man as a snake.” We are not good people ... and we shall always be involved in that great network, you and I. All we can do is constantly to notice when we begin to act badly, to check ourselves, to go back, to coax our weakness and inspire our strength, to call upon the names of virtues of which we know perhaps only the names. We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past, to be forgiven ourselves and to accept this forgiveness, and to return again to the beautiful unexpected strangeness of the world. (Murdoch)

June 10, Tuesday: President of United Airlines Percy Wood received a parcel at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois. It contained a copy of Sloan Wilson’s ICE BROTHERS. When he opened the book, it exploded sending shrapnel into hands, face, and thigh and producing cuts and burns over most of his body. The FBI assembled a task force and gave it the UNABOM designation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1981

October 8, Thursday: A large package, picked up in Bennion Hall Business Building by a student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, turned out to contain an explosive device that was successfully defused. This would turn out to have been produced by the UNABOM perpetrator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1982

May 5, Wednesday: At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Janet Smith, secretary for Professor Patrick Fischer, experienced severe burns on her hands and shrapnel wounds over her body as she opened a package from the UNABOM perpetrator. The bomb had been forwarded, as it had mistakenly been addressed to Professor Fischer at Penn State University.

July 2, Wednesday: Professor of Engineering Diogenes Angelakos, director of the University of California – Berkeley’s Electronics Research Laboratory, suffered severe burns and shrapnel wounds to his right hand and face as he picked up a package in Room 411 of the Cory Hall Mathematics Building, that had been produced by the UNABOM perpetrator.

August: The RMS St. Helena returned to St. Helena from the Falklands Conflict.

Half a world away, near Lincoln, Montana some logging equipment was set on fire ($75,000 damage). Some would eventually come to suspect Ted Kaczynski to have been behind this “monkeywrenching.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

September 29, Wednesday: President Ronald Wilson Reagan reported the deployment of 1,200 US Marines to serve in a temporary multinational force to facilitate the restoration of Lebanese government sovereignty. Since this was a peace-keeping force there were to be no bullets in the weapons. It was going to be “please,” and “thank you,” and everyone was going to behave themselves. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

Someone had taken new bottles of Johnson&Johnson’s Extra-Strength Tylenol™ capsules from store shelves, laced them with potassium cyanide, and put them back on the shelves. A sick 12-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois took one of these capsules and died. Six others would die but the crime would never be solved, although James William Lewis would be convicted of extortion for sending a letter to Johnson&Johnson taking credit for the deaths and demanding $1,000,000 to stop. In 2011 the FBI would solicit DNA from Ted Kaczynski in “Supermax,” to verify that this had not been one of his ecoterrorist acts. An auction of his belongings was being planned, to pay off part of the $15,000,000 he owed his victims and their families, and the items to be auctioned included an original handwritten version of his manifesto, written on lined 3-hole paper, with the current high bid being at more than $14,000. His later draft, typed, was also being offered, for about $2,500. Ted would provide a DNA sample, he offered, only after the government canceled that auction.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel asked the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to constitute a board of inquiry into the events of September 17th in Beirut.

A Paganini for violin solo by Alfred Schnittke was performed for the initial time, in Leningrad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1983

Chief Agent John Douglas had in 1980, working with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, issued a psychological profile of the unidentified “Junkyard Bomber” that described the offender as a man with above- average intelligence with connections to academia. This profile had later been refined to characterize the offender as a neo-Luddite holding an academic degree in the hard sciences. At this point this psychologically based profile was discarded in favor of an alternative theory developed by FBI analysts concentrating on the physical evidence in recovered bomb fragments. In this rival profile the bomber suspect was characterized as a blue-collar airplane mechanic. A 1-800 hotline was set up by a “UNABOM Task Force” to take any calls related to the investigation, with a $1,000,000 reward for anyone who could provide information leading to the bomber’s capture and conviction.

At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League Peace Awards went to Virginia Eggleston, Thomas Grabell, and Ashley King.

The United States of America began to construct high-energy lasers intended to shoot down aircraft and missiles. This was in addition to the existing program OPERATION WILDCARD, with which we intended to HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

use laser beams to burn out the vision of enemy pilots. (Similar programs would begin in France and Germany three years later, and probably also in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Republic of China. By 1988, such lasers would be able to concentrate 2.6 megawatts on a pinhead target for sufficient time to vaporize an incoming nuclear warhead.)

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons banned the use of napalm. Therefore the US didn’t sign. Here is what happens to a Barbi dipped in homemade napalm:

Napalm had been invented at Harvard in 1943. In the process, fuel is made into a gel with co-precipitated aluminum salts of napthenic acid and palmitic acid (“napalm” standing for NApthenic/PALMitic). Its advantage is that gobs of it stick to the target as it burns. This isn’t something we can afford to do without. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1985

Spring: When Butch Gehring set up a sawmill near Ted Kaczynski’s mountain cabin, the equipment was vandalized. Hmmm, do you suppose?

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “A Look at James Milner and His ‘False Prophecy’” (Quaker History 74, pages 18-26). QUAKER HISTORY DOWNLOAD

May 8, Wednesday: Ted Kaczynski mailed a package containing a bomb to the Boeing Aircraft Fabrication Division in Auburn, Washington.

Thai air and ground forces pushed Vietnamese troops back across their national boundary (the Vietnamese had entered Thailand to pursue Cambodian rebels).

Concerto for Orchestra no.3 “Farbenspiel” was performed for the initial time, in Berlin, and was conducted by the composer Gunther Schuller himself.

May 15, Wednesday: In Room 264 of the Cory Hall Mathematics Building at the University of California – Berkeley, graduate student John Hauser, a captain in the US Air Force, lost 4 fingers on his right hand and had an artery in his right arm severed, with partial loss of vision in his left eye, when he picked up a spiral binder left there by the mysterious unknown UNABOM perpetrator.

June 13, Thursday: In Auburn, Washington, the Boeing Aircraft Fabrication Division successfully defused a bomb posted on May 8th by the unknown UNABOM perpetrator.

November 15, Friday: An agreement was signed by the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland that although Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland would be allowed to play a consultative role in the province.

When the United States of America sent its 3d secret ransom shipment to Iran, this shipment consisted of 18 Hawk missiles.

Harpsichord Sonata no.8 by Vincent Persichetti was performed for the initial time, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Professor of Psychology James V. McConnell and his research assistant Nicklaus Suino suffered temporary hearing loss, and Suino had in addition burns and shrapnel wounds, when they opened a package containing a bomb from the unknown UNABOM perpetrator. PLANARIA FLATWORMS

It is interesting to me to note now, in 2018, that we do not seem to have gotten any closer at all, to an understanding of how memories are physically encoded and stored and then decoded and redeemed in our neural tissue. That 1959 excitement about the planaria, with their heads cut off and regenerated, still being able to retain their previous training, had evaporated as a false lead (evidently because what the planaria were actually following were slime trails left on the glass lab equipment). We are not any closer now than we were then, to understanding the wet-computer brain chemistry by which memories are stored and retrieved! This has been one of the enduring puzzles of my life (but at least I didn’t bomb the scientist who made the mistake).

December 11, Wednesday: Hugh Scrutton, 38-year-old owner of the Rentech computer rental store in Sacramento, California, was killed when he picked up a package containing a bomb packed with nails and splinters, in his parking lot. When he would read in the newspaper about the $25,000 reward, Ted Kaczynski would deem this “flattering” and comment to his journal: Excellent. A humane way of eliminating somebody. He probably didn’t feel a thing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1986

In a roadless area near the Continental Divide, the logging equipment of Chris Waits was vandalized by one or another “monkeywrencher.” Some would eventually come to suspect Ted Kaczynski. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1987

February 20, Friday: Gary Wright suffered severe nerve damage to his left arm when he picked up what appeared to be a piece of lumber in the parking lot behind his CAAMS computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah, that had been placed there by the unknown UNABOM perpetrator. A sketch was made of a suspicious person in dark glasses in the vicinity, wearing a hoodie similar to one found later hanging on the wall of the mountain cabin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1988

Kimberley Cornish’s THE JEW OF LINZ (London: Century) alleged that Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein had interacted with one another at the Realschule in Linz, Austria in about 1904, and this had been the source of Hitler’s antisemitism. There had been, however, some 300 students in this school, and these particular students had been two grades apart, and no surviving record of any such interaction has been found. The whole thing amounts to surmise. It would be as problematic to characterize Hitler and Wittgenstein as having been “classmates” as to characterize me as having been a classmate of Ted Kaczynski — although it is true that we were both in the same university at the same time, Harvard, and in the same building in the same year, Sever Hall, I was a graduate student and Kaczynski an undergrad and I have preserved no particular memories of any contacts with any undergrads. The most I remember is being taken on a tour of a particular residence hall, and my guide popped open the door of a particular empty dorm room he said pertained to a notoriously unclean student (I poked my nose in but failed to detect any odor).

July: News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Lotus Development shipped Agenda • IBM shipped OS/2 Extended Edition 1.0 • IBM shipped DOS 4.0 that added a shell menu interface and support for hard disk partitions greater than 32 MB

Ted Kaczynski wrote to Mental Health Services Inc. in Helena, Montana asking for help. Unable to afford the trip from his remote cabin, he needed the sessions to be by correspondence. Actually, I’d even PREFER to handle it this way because, in writing, I can express what I have to say much more precisely, clearly, and completely than I can in speaking. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TED KACZYNSKI UNABOM

1990

October 2, Tuesday: Theodore Richard “Turk” Kaczynski, father of Ted Kaczynski and David Kaczynski, after learning that he had cancer, committed suicide. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1993

June 22, Tuesday: In Tiburon, California, University of California geneticist Charles J. Epstein suffered severe damage to both eardrums resulting in total hearing loss, and lost parts of 3 fingers, in the explosion of a powerful device. It would become clear that the unknown UNABOM perpetrator had moved on to a more potent sort of explosive.

June 24, Thursday: At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Professor of Computer Science David Gelernter suffered severe burns and shrapnel wounds, with permanent damage to his right hand and right eye, in the explosion of a device made by the unknown UNABOM perpetrator.

(Afterward a phone call would be received by Professor Gelernter’s brother Joel Gelernter, a behavioral geneticist, and he would be advised “You are next.”)

October: The FBI offered a reward of $1,000,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator of the UNABOM series of killings.

Members of a Vietnamese cult headed by Ca Van Lieng, who had been predicting an apocalyptic flood for the year 2000, evidently had decided not to wait it out, as at this point they committed mass suicide. It’s really so sad, their fate — since in the year 2000 they weren’t around to notice that their apocalyptic flood didn’t materialize (or perhaps we should say, didn’t liquidate). MILLENNIALISM

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Motorola’s 1st copies of the PowerPC 603, a new chip in the PowerPC family. • NEC Technologies’s triple-speed (450KBps) CD-ROM drive. • Apple Computer’s Macintosh TV combined Mac and CD-ROM with television. The PowerBook Duo 250 and 270c. John Sculley announced his departure. • Initial TV show distributed over the internet in digital format. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1994

November: A “SuperMax” prison for dangerous male federal inmates opened near Florence, Colorado (this county in Colorado already boasted 9 such hospitality complexes; its economy was largely based upon its hospitality industry).

Here are some new developments in the technology for the ELECTRIC WALDEN project: • Gavin Bell, Tony Parisi, and Mark Pesce prepared the 1.0 draft of the VRML. • The NSFNet took the first in a series of steps that would essentially remove the backbone of the beast (the Internet) without killing it. Colleges and other institutions that have been using the NSFNet were advised to find alternate feeds (which have turned out to be primarily MCI, Sprintlink, and ANS, which actually ran the NSFNet backbone as a joint effort between MCI and IBM and then had most of its operations sold to AOL a few months ago). • Digital Equipment launched the Starion line of home-targeted personal computer systems. • Hayes Microcomputer Products filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. • Apple Computer launched the Power Macintosh 8100/100, as the industry’s fastest, most powerful PC. • Apple Computer, Motorola, and IBM announced that they would create a computer platform to run all major operating systems, except the intel-based Microsoft Windows 3.1 and successors. • Apple Computer declares its intention to openly license the Mac operating system. • IBM shipped the 100-MHz PowerPC 601 processors and the 66-MHz and 80-MHz PowerPC 603 processors. • Cyrix announced the M1 next-generation x86 processor. • Sun Microsystems announced the Sparcstation 20 Model HS11, using a 100-MHz HyperSparc processor from Ross Technology. • Digital Equipment introduced its AlphaStation computers, with 166-MHz and 233-MHz Alpha AXP 21064 processors. This line incorporated the PCI bus, and sold for US$7,000-$16,000. • Apple Computer delivered QuickTime 2.0 for Windows. • The intel Corporation acknowledged that about 2,000,000 Pentium chips had been shipped with a defective floating-point unit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

December 10, Saturday: In North Caldwell, New Jersey, advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller was killed as he opened a package from the unknown UNABOM perpetrator.

At Nuclear Reactor #2 in Pickering, Ontario, there was yet another loss-of-coolant accident when 185 “tonnes” of heavy water spilled. The emergency core cooling system activated, and there wasn’t a meltdown.

CLOSE CALLS

At the Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario, a site which, with 8 CANDU reactors 2 of which are now shut down and defueled, qualifies as one of the largest in August 2, 1992 the world, Nuclear Reactor #1 leaked 2,300 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium as heavy water into Lake Ontario, producing increased levels in the drinking water of Toronto, Canada.

At the Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario, a site which, with 8 CANDU reactors 2 of which are now shut down and defueled, qualifies as one of the largest in the world, there was yet another loss-of-coolant accident, in Reactor #2, one in which December 10, 1994 185 “tonnes” of heavy water spilled. The emergency core cooling system activated and there wasn’t a meltdown, but the Parliament’s Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources would during June 2001 declare this to have amounted to the most serious accident in Canadian history.

Norway launched a Black Brant XII research rocket to study the aurora borealis. Beforehand they had been careful to notify Russia and a number of other nations. However, Russian radar operators were not informed and, when they detected the January 25, 1995 launch, Russian President Boris Yeltsin made himself the 1st world leader to activate a nuclear briefcase. Russian strategic ballistic missile submarines were put on alert to prepare a possible retaliation but, as soon as it became clear there was no larger attack and that this rocket posed no threat, military forces were able to stand down. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

1995

April 20, Thursday: Threatening letters were posted to geneticist Phillip Sharp of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Richard Roberts, research director at New England Biolabs in Beverly, Massachusetts, Nobel laureates who had shared the 1993 prize in medicine for discovering that genes could be spread over several, separated DNA segments.

The “terrorist group FC” posted a letter to The New York Times: Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields . (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won't say how or why it was botched because we don't want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.

The ashes of Marie Curie were placed in the Pantheon in Paris (she was the 1st woman so honored).

Blessed days of blue for flute, strings, mandolin, guitar and harp by Jonathan Lloyd was performed for the initial time, at Malvern College, Malvern.

Family Tree: Musical Verses for Young People for narrator and orchestra by Toru Takemitsu to words of Tanikawa was performed for the initial time, in New York.

“Official: Enola Gay Response Unexpected,” by Julie M. Klein, Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/20/95, A7 Tom Crouch is described as “largely unrepentant.”

“Exhibit Debate Looks for Understanding,” by John Niyo, Ann Arbor News, 4/20/95, C1 WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

April 24, Monday: A radio station in Charlevoix, Michigan suspended conservative commentator James “Bo” Gritz because he suggested on the air that the Oklahoma City bombing had been a work of art.

In Sacramento, California, timber industry lobbyist Gilbert P. Murray was killed by a device made by the mysterious unknown UNABOM perpetrator. The package had been addressed to his predecessor as President of the California Forestry Association, William Dennison.

Ted Kaczynski, who had sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines killing 3 people and injuring 23, posted on this day an anonymous letter promising “to desist from terrorism” if either The New York Times or the Washington Post were to make available to the general public a manifesto he had created, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a manifesto in which he defended his bombings as a necessary way to attract attention to the erosion in our human freedom that was being produced by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.5

Convicted felon and conservative radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy advised listeners on how to shoot federal agents if their homes were invaded.

“Historians Meet Uncertainly over What History Is All About,” by Julie M. Klein in the Philadelphia Inquirer. ENOLA GAY ATOM BOMB WORLD WAR II

April 26, Wednesday: Turkish forces withdrew from Iraq after destroying Kurdish camps.

Following are excerpts of the letter received by The New York Times on Monday from the self-designated terrorist group FC, claiming responsibility for the serial bombings that the Federal Bureau of Investigation attributes to a single person or group in the case known as UNABOM. The document is presented verbatim, with original spelling, emphasis and punctuation. Three passages have been deleted at the request of the F.B.I. [Passage deleted at the request of the F.B.I.] This is a message from the terrorist group FC. We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a Burston- Marsteller executive. Among other misdeeds, Burston-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez incident. But we attacked Burston-Marsteller less for its specific misdeeds than on general principles. Burston- Marsteller is about the biggest organization in the public relations field. This means that its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people’s attitudes. It was for this more than for its actions in specific cases that we sent a bomb to an executive of this company. 5. Since we lack evidence that Ted had previously made any attempt to obtain publication for his manuscript, it is hard to take seriously the notion that obtaining an audience was what this string of anonymous killing had been about. It is to be noted that subsequent to the publication of Ted’s oeuvre, he would fail to abide by this offer, since at the time of his arrest in his mountain cabin he was in the process of fabricating yet another explosive device. Neither the FBI nor Attorney General Janet Reno had any problem with this “Manifesto” — indeed, publication would prove to be the break so badly needed in their long investigation, for it would lead directly and immediately to his sister-in-law, and then his brother David Kaczynski, alerting the FBI to similarities with their relative’s beliefs and style of writing. (As to its persuading anyone of the correctness of such attitudes — well, if you’ve attempted to read it you know that it’s a hard slog and nowhere near persuasive. Kaczynski may have been a mathematician, but it is abundantly clear that nobody ever taught him how to think.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won’t say how or why it was botched because we don’t want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb. In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since “anarchist” is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don’t see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system. The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut. We won’t waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts, but we certainly are not isolated. For security reasons we won’t reveal the number of members of our group, but anyone who will read the anarchist and radical environmentalist journals will see that opposition to the industrial- technological system is widespread and growing. Why do we announce our goals only now, through we made our first bomb some seventeen years ago? Our early bombs were too ineffectual to attract much public attention or give encouragement to those who hate the system. We found by experience that gunpowder bombs, if small enough to be carried inconspicuously, were too feeble to do much damage, so we took a couple of years off to do some experimenting. We learned how to make pipe bombs that were powerful enough, and we used these in a couple of successful bombings as well as in some unsuccessful ones. [Passage deleted at the request of the F.B.I.] Since we no longer have to confine the explosive in a pipe, we are now free of limitations on the size and shape of our bombs. We are pretty sure we know how to increase the power of our explosives and reduce the number of batteries needed to set them off. And, as we’ve just indicated, we think we now have more effective fragmentation material. So we expect to be able to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pack deadly bombs into ever smaller, lighter and more harmless looking packages. On the other hand, we believe we will be able to make bombs much bigger than any we’ve made before. With a briefcase-full or a suitcase-full of explosives we should be able to blow out the walls of substantial buildings. Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn’t appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke. The people who are pushing all this growth and progress garbage deserve to be severely punished. But our goal is less to punish them than to propagate ideas. Anyhow we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain. We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want to have published. If you can get it published according to our requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities. It must be published in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, or in some other widely read, nationally distributed periodical. Because of its length we suppose it will have to be serialized. Alternatively, it can be published as a small book, but the book must be well publicized and made available at a moderate price in bookstores nationwide and in at least some places abroad. Whoever agrees to publish the material will have exclusive rights to reproduce it for a period of six months and will be welcome to any profits they may make from it. After six months from the first appearance of the article or book it must become public property, so that anyone can reproduce or publish it. (If material is serialized, first instalment becomes public property six months after appearance of first instalment, second instalment, etc.) We must have the right to publish in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, each year for three years after the appearance of our article or book, three thousand words expanding or clarifying our material or rebutting criticisms of it. The article will not explicitly advocate violence. There will be an unavoidable implication that we favor violence to the extent that it may be necessary, since we advocate eliminating industrial society and we ourselves have been using violence to that end. But the article will not advocate violence explicitly, nor will it propose the overthrow of the United States Government, nor will it contain obscenity or anything else that you would be likely to regard as unacceptable for publication. How do you know that we will keep our promise to desist from terrorism if our conditions are met? It will be to our advantage to keep our promise. We want to win acceptance for certain ideas. If we break our promise people will lose respect for us and so will be less likely to accept the ideas. Our offer to desist from terrorism is subject to three qualifications. First: Our promise to desist will not take effect until all parts of our article or book have appeared in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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print. Second: If the authorities should succeed in tracking us down and an attempt is made to arrest any of us, or even to question us in connection with the bombings, we reserve the right to use violence. Third: We distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. By terrorism we mean actions motivated by a desire to influence the development of a society and intended to cause injury or death to human beings. By sabotage we mean similarly motivated actions intended to destroy property without injuring human beings. The promise we offer is to desist from terrorism. We reserve the right to engage in sabotage. It may be just as well that failure of our early bombs discouraged us from making any public statements at that time. We were very young then and our thinking was crude. Over the years we have given as much attention to the development of our ideas as to the development of bombs, and we now have something serious to say. And we feel that just now the time is ripe for the presentation of anti-industrial ideas. Please see to it that the answer to our offer is well publicized in the media so that we won’t miss it. Be sure to tell us where and how our material will be published and how long it will take to appear in print once we have sent in the manuscript. If the answer is satisfactory, we will finish typing the manuscript and send it to you. If the answer is unsatisfactory, we will start building our next bomb. We encourage you to print this letter. FC [Passage deleted at the request of the F.B.I.]

April 29, Saturday: The New York Times corrected a report it had made on the 26th, of a letter that had been mailed to it on the 20th from UNABOM perpetrator(s) currently being pursued by the FBI, a terrorist or terrorists still at large: An article on Wednesday about a letter received by The New York Times from a person who took responsibility for 16 bombings in the Unabom case misstated the location of the first bombing. It was at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., not at the university’s Chicago campus. In some copies the article also misstated the date of that bombing. It was May 25, 1978.

June 24, Saturday: Violin Concerto no.2 “Metmorphoses” by Krzysztof Penderecki was performed for the initial time, in Leipzig.

A Whitman Triptych for mezzo-soprano and orchestra by William Bolcom was performed for the initial time, in San Francisco.

Ted Kaczynski, who had dispatched 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines killing 3 people and injuring 23, on this day mailed copies of “Industrial Society and its Future” to The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Penthouse. An eager reading audience would soon be discovering that he was able to voice no ideas that had not long before more adequately been voiced by others. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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One of these readers would be Linda Patrik, a professor of philosophy married to Ted’s brother David. She would detect suspicious similarities in style and ideation to materials from Ted with which she already was familiar, and wonder: “Could this UNABOMER be your big brother?” The two would consult with the mother, Wanda Theresa Dombek Kaczynski. Studying a letter Ted had sent his mother, David became persuaded that there were indeed suspicious similarities in style and ideation. They would hire a lawyer to present their suspicions to the FBI (which was of course, given the million-dollar reward, currently receiving a long ton of such communications).

While Kaczynski’s explosive devices varied widely through the years, all but the first few contained the initials “FC.” Inside his bombs, certain parts carried the inscription “FC,” which the perpetrator would later assert stood for “Freedom Club.” Latent fingerprints on the devices never matched the fingerprints found on the letters: One of Kaczynski’s tactics was leaving false clues in every bomb. He would make them hard to find deliberately to mislead investigators into thinking they had a clue. The first clue was a metal plate stamped with the initials “FC” hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in every bomb. One false clue he left was a note in a bomb that did not detonate which reads “Wu — It works! I told you it would — RV”. A more obvious clue was the Eugene O’Neill $1 stamps used to send his boxes.

September: The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, published the UNABOM 35,000-word diatribe against technology “Industrial Society and its Future” (the author was identifying himself as “FC”). Here’s a highlight: The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

(Uh, OK. Ted, are you sure you really needed to kill people in order to get them to read stuff like this?)

In recorded interviews with his attorney Stephen Jones, Timothy McVeigh described his thinking during and after his April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City explosion, killed 168 people, including the 19 children in a day school just inside the front door of the federal building. He reminisced that he “could have gotten away clean [but] determined that the best way would be to continue on as the Paul Revere type messenger instead of the John Brown type revolutionary, that you could accomplish maybe two in one.”

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Diamond Multimedia Systems acquires modem maker Supra, for cash and stock worth US$54 million. • AT&T shuts down NCR, at a cost of US$1.2 billion. • IBM introduced the Aptiva PC. • Intel announced the official name for the P6 chip: Pentium Pro. • Two groups of companies agree on a proposed high density compact disc format. The new format would allow up to 18.8 gigabytes total on a double-sided disc. • One month after the release of Windows 95, an estimated 7 million copies had been sold to end- users. • Six months after its release, 30,000 units of Microsoft’ Bob had been sold. • Intel introduced the 83-MHz Pentium OverDrive processor, for replacement in 33-MHz 486DX and 486DX2/66 systems. Price: US$300. • Novell sold UnixWare and the rights to the UNIX operating system to Santa Cruz Operations for US$145 million. • Intel announced the 80486SXSF and GXSF 486 microprocessors, designed for hand held computer products. The GX had a 16-bit bus, the SX a 32-bit bus. Both were 33-MHz, operating on 2.0-3.3 volts. • AT&T spins off its computer subsidiary (formerly NCR) as AT&T Global Information Solutions. • The 1st life radio broadcast over the internet, a sports program put out by Broadcast.com.

October: A letter to Penthouse, “The Unabomber Speaks” (pages 57-59).

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Digital Equipment announced its Alpha 21164 processor running at 333-MHz. • Intel introduced a 120-MHz Pentium designed for mobile computers. • NexGen announced the Nx686 processor. It integrates new multimedia instructions and a multimedia execution unit into the x86 architecture. • Seagate Technologies and Conner Peripherals agree to a US$1.1 billion merger. • Sun Microsystems shipped the 143-MHz and 167-MHz versions of the UltraSparc processor. • Intel released the mobile version of the 120-MHz Pentium processor. • Advanced Micro Devices and NexGen announce a planned merger, in which NexGen would become a subsidiary of Advanced Micro Devices. The cost to Advanced Micro Devices was US$861 million in stock. • IBM celebrates the 1st anniversary of launching OS/2 Warp, with nearly 4 million copies sold. • IBM released the ThinkPad 760CD, with the industry’s 1st 12.1-inch thin-film transistor display on a laptop. The laptop used a 120-MHz Pentium processor. • Motorola announced pricing and general availability of 100- and 120-MHz versions of its PowerPC 603e microprocessor. Prices were US$207 and US$260 each, respectively, in quantities of 1000. • Jim Manzi announced his resignation as CEO of Lotus Development. • Novell announced its decision to exit from the personal productivity applications business, to focus on networking software. • Cyrix released the 100-MHz 6x86 microprocessor (formerly code-named M1). The chip was manufactured by IBM, and priced at US$450 each in quantities of 1000. • Cyrix announced sample availability of the 120-MHz 5x86, available for US$160 each in quantities of 1000. • Six weeks after its release 4 million copies of Windows 95 had been sold. • Microsoft reports selling 7 million copies of Windows 95 in under two months of its release. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 6, Monday: The UNABOM case was no longer considered by the FBI to fit within its “terrorist” profile (they had determined that it more closely matched a “serial-killer” profile). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1996

January: Through Washington DC attorney Anthony Disceglie, David Kaczynski and his wife Linda Patrik, a philosophy professor at Union College, approached the FBI with the suggestion that the UNABOM suspect they had for so long been seeking might well be David’s older brother living in a cabin half owned by David, in a creek bed a few miles south of Lincoln, Montana. The Bureau gave assurances that the information would be held in confidence, that they would not be “outed” as people who had turned in their own relative (despite this assurance, the juicy details would promptly be leaked to an eager press). The Bureau began surveillance of said cabin, in which it would turn out Ted already had under his bed a new post-Manifesto explosive device. HERMITS

Up to this point, the best the Bureau had been able to come up with was to fantasize that perhaps –since the bomber had used $1.00 Eugene O’Neill commemorative stamps on several of his packages– the bomber was a rabid fan of Eugene O’Neill. Following up on this possibility it would open a file on the Eugene O’Neill Society and collect directories of its membership between 1979 and 1992.

(Way to go, guys! –Er, have you considered the possibility that this serial author himself might be the serial killer?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 31, Wednesday: According to CNN News, the 1st suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh, was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the maxim of Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” at the point of his arrest while driving away from Oklahoma City. When CNN correspondent Susan Candiotti interrogated McVeigh’s lawyer, Stephen Jones, about the motto on this T-shirt, the lawyer of course responded:

“Well, if Thomas Jefferson said it, I don’t think it would be incriminating at all.”

April 3, Wednesday: 35 were killed when a US Air Force plane crashed in bad weather near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Among the dead were Ron Brown, US Secretary of Commerce, and other high officials in the US government and business.

Having obtained a search warrant (although it would turn out to be problematic), after a 3-week stakeout the FBI took Ted Kaczynski into custody at his 10-by-12-foot cabin in western Montana and began to inventory its contents: 5 firearms, 3 typewriters, 1 explosive device, etc. Among the several hundred books found in the cabin (more cabin space probably had been devoted to books than anything else) were:

•BIBLE •SPANISH STORIES •TRISTAN AND ISEULT •THE ANCIENT ENGINEERS •THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY • Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS, YOUTH, TYPHOON • Joseph Conrad’s THE SHADOW-LINE • Joseph Conrad’s THE SECRET AGENT • James Fenimore Cooper’s THE DEERSLAYER • James Fenimore Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS • Charles Dickens’s DAVID COPPERFIELD • Charles Dickens’s A TALE OF TWO CITIES • Fyodor Dostoevski’s BROTHERS KARAMAZOV • George Eliot’s SILAS MARNER • Euell Gibbons’s STALKING THE WILD ASPARAGUS • Ted Robert Gurr’s VIOLENCE IN AMERICA • Thomas Hardy’s FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD • Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER • Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLES (Volumes 1 and 2) • Arthur Koestler’s DARKNESS AT NOON • W. Somerset Maugham’s STORIES OF THE EAST • W. Somerset Maugham’s RAZOR’S EDGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• George Orwell’s 1984 • Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz’s SOBRE LA LIBERTAD HUMANA • William Shakespeare’s MERCHANT OF VENICE • Albert Speer’s SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES • John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN • Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND • Chester C. Tan’s CHINESE POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY • Mark Twain’s LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI •Leo Tolstòy’s THE COSSACKS AND THE RAID • U.S. Government National Defense Civil Preparedness Agency’s YOUR CHANCE TO LIVE • Various mathematics journals • Several Harvard University yearbooks HERMITS

May 15, Wednesday: The Associated Press revealed that former mathematics professor Ted Kaczynski was being investigated by the San Francisco Police Department for any links to the Zodiac serial slayings of the late 1960s. Some would leap at the idea that he might have been “the other gunman” in the Kennedy assassination.

May 16, Thursday: The FBI trucked Ted Kaczynski’s 10-by-12-foot Montana cabin to Malmstrom Air Force Base for safekeeping.

June 18, Tuesday: A 21-person grand jury in Sacramento, California indicted Theodore John Kaczynski for 4 UNABOM attacks that resulted in the deaths of 2 Sacramento businessmen and the maiming of 2 university professors. This 10-count indictment was hand-delivered to US Magistrate John Moulds, who issued a warrant to extradite the accused from Montana to California for prosecution. The next step, according to federal attorneys, was to be a removal hearing in Montana, after which agents would have 10 days to deliver him to Sacramento.

June 21, Friday: Theodore John Kaczynski as nobody had seen him in recent years, in khaki pants and a sports coat, groomed and chatty, stood before US District Judge Charles Lowell in Montana. The judge ordered that he be moved to Sacramento, California, where he was charged with 4 separate bombing attacks. To ease transfer the judge dismissed a single Montana explosives count.

June 23, Sunday: Theodore John Kaczynski arrived in Sacramento, California and was taken in a bullet-proof vest under tight security to a lockup where he would await his arraignment on federal UNABOM charges, set for June 25th.

June 25, Tuesday: Unshackled, prim and proper in a green shirt, tan trousers, and tennis shoes, a small bandage on the right side of his face, Theodore John Kaczynski made a 120-second courtroom appearance in Sacramento, California in which he nodded his head to indicate a plea of not guilty to 4 UNABOM attacks (he let the attorneys and the judge do all the talking). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 28, Friday: Three additional bombing indictments, from Utah, Michigan, and Tennessee, were filed against Theodore John Kaczynski. The new charges linked him to the Salt Lake City sketch of a suspicious person in dark glasses, and a hoodie similar to one found hanging on the wall of the mountain cabin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Summer: In an attempt to come to terms with what was happening to him and his family, David Kaczynski turned to poetry.

Austin Meredith’s analysis of Henry Thoreau’s parable of the lost hound, the lost bay horse, and the lost turtle- dove appeared on pages 4-5 of Issue #216 of the Thoreau Society Bulletin:

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lost Hound, Horse, and Turtle-Dove? —Not Really Austin Meredith The first question we must ask ourselves of every paragraph in WALDEN, our B.F. Skinners to the contrary notwithstanding, is “Why is this paragraph situated exactly in the context in which it is situated?” For everything in this book is precisely where Thoreau decided it should be, and is doing (if we pay attention!) precisely what Thoreau wants it to be doing. Since the parable of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove is to be found toward the front of the “Economy” chapter of WALDEN, and since one of the most careful and sustained analyses of this chapter is to be found in THE SENSES OF WALDEN, and since Stanley Cavell professed to discover in this chapter one sustaining theme (the theme of deconstruction of our economic concept of “loss”), I should suppose that one of the very first hypotheses we ought to entertain is that in some manner this parable exemplifies this identified theme — that, again in some manner, the parable is helping Thoreau mock the idea that the value of our lives is something which can be measured out upon a business balance sheet. My interpretation is that this parable is not to be understood under the category in which to date we have been placing it, that of “parable,” at all, but is to be understood more as a Thoreauvian joke or jest, a play on words, it may be, a play on words that has not played as well with us as Thoreau expected it would. Cavell has pointed out to us that the controlling thrust of this initial long chapter in WALDEN is to deconstruct, defeat, or destroy the sense we have that the merit of our lives is to be determined in analogy with the business spreadsheet, with our “profits” from living weighed against our “losses” from living. The chapter is offered as one long ridicule of the notion that there is anything in life which corresponds in any manner to the spreadsheet phenomenon shown in red ink or within parenthesis, known as business “loss.” We are forever clutching at things, attaching ourselves to objects and ideas and relations which are going to make us be happy people. But every experience of our lives is our experience, equally, and thus is anyway wholly on the positive side of this grand “ledger” of our life. This “loss” phenomenon must be analyzable as merely an affect which we nourish, for it corresponds to nothing which is independently real. As evidence of that fact, consider the word “loss” as it appears in the context of talk about a mysterious hound, a mysterious bay horse, and a mysterious turtle-dove which Thoreau has supplied just at this point in his chapter. To immediately understand this paragraph of WALDEN, I submit, we need merely put this concept of loss within imaginary quotation marks as we read the parable: “loss.” First Thoreau says he has “lost” a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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hound. So, what precisely is it to “lose” a hound? The woods of WALDEN turn out to be full of such lost hounds. One “loses” one’s hound when it runs off on the scent of something, and one may hear it baying faintly through the trees, and then one may go around suspecting others, as Thoreau says he was suspected of having alienated the affections of someone else’s dog by feeding it and harboring it in the woods. “I lost my hound” means that some person’s hound has run off on more interesting pursuits, with better things to accomplish than hang around and have its ears rubbed by its feckless master. So the “lost” hound returns, or it doesn’t. But then we hear that Thoreau has also “lost” some bay horse not elsewhere spoken of. So what sort of thing might it have been, to “lose” one’s bay? Would this be the same thing at all, as to have “lost” one’s hound? Clearly not, for a “lost” horse might have been stolen by a horse thief, in which case the citizens are going to try to find and hang some particular person, or a “lost” horse might have wandered out into the public thoroughfare like Emerson’s heifer, in which case someone is going to grab it and keep it until the owner shows up to claim it and pay its feed charges, or one’s horse might have died, and then one is going to be obligated by one’s responsibilities to one’s neighbors to dig a deep deep hole in order to bury it properly so it will not stink up the neighborhood — like that dead horse in the cellar hole on the path to Walden Pond which Thoreau mentions in WALDEN: “There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house....” Once when I was in the military, I needed to draw an emergency cash advance against my modest salary, and when the pay officer saw this entry in the ledger he smiled and referred to it as a “dead horse.” I asked what he meant, and he merely commented that I would find out. According to the January 1995 issue of RECREATION, ENGINEERING TECH TIPS, a newsletter of the U.S. Forest Service, here is what to do with the carcass of a horse when it is inexpedient to remove it: First get the horseshoes. Then drape the carcass all over with between 55 and 110 pounds of standard explosive, connected by detonator cord into a chain. Make sure there is at least one stick alongside each foreleg. Place over half of the sticks above the abdomen and rump area, as they are the largest. Total obliteration might be preferred in situations where bears are particularly prolific, or where the public is expected in the area the next day. A “lost” horse is merely stolen, or is merely being held in a stall down at the local livery stable, or has up and died on you and is causing you a whole lot of trouble before you will actually succeed in “losing” your responsibility. In any of these events, we note, the “loss” is entirely different from that “loss” of a hound. The two uses have no overlapping common HDT WHAT? INDEX

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signification. It is this difference, the lack of any overlapping or common meaning in the two uses of the term “loss,” which is what Thoreau was expecting his close readers to notice. To drive this metaphoric nail home, to signal the entire ridiculousness of this use of “loss,” Thoreau managed to “lose” a turtle-dove! So how is one supposed to “lose” a living turtle- dove, which is paradigmatically one of God’s free creatures and never owned? A turtle-dove is not one of those game birds you shoot out of the sky and then take home and eat. Nor is a turtle- dove one of those tameable little birdies that you buy in a pet store, that your child can hold in her hand and stroke and keep in a cage and feed dried seeds and cuttlefish bone to, that if she leaves the door of the cage open can fly away and perch in a tree in a neighbor’s yard until it gets eaten by a neighbor’s cat. This “lost” turtle-dove is merely a vision, which has merely vanished behind a wisp of cloud, like that North Star which had been leading the possessed toward the land of freedom, and then it vanished along with the slave’s dream. In what sense might the “loss” of a turtle-dove be comparable either to the “loss” of a hound, or to the “loss” of a bay horse? In none whatever! The mention of the turtle-dove is a reductio ad absurdum. The single thing these three instances of loss have in common, entirely the only characteristic which they share, the unifying principle here, is that troubling sense of loss, which is to say, it is entirely a matter of the supplied affect structure. And an interpretive framework is something which we ourselves create and apply to our circumstances. There is no objective, material, unifying substrate to these three suspect instances to explain how we are led to ascribe to all three of them the same term, “loss,” a term which we derive from our tendency to clutch. Therefore there is no objective reason for us to suspect, or to act as if we suspect, that there is any such thing, really, as losses in our lives. Nothing in our external circumstances ever requires such of us — which is precisely what, as Cavell points out in THE SENSES OF WALDEN, Thoreau is struggling to express to us in this long, intricate chapter with all his mockery of the Ben-Franklinish “economic” frame of mind. By this wordplay, if this mysterious paragraph is to be interpreted as part of the general thrust of the context in which it is positioned, Thoreau was seeking to distance himself, and us, from our sense of loss. He regarded loss as illusory, but he knew also that as an illusion it functions in our lives by virtue of something in us which perversely insists on misconstruing what is going on in life — something which, if we could, we should learn to do with out, if only to avoid finding that we are leading lives of quiet desperation.6 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 10, Tuesday: Live from Sacramento, California in a New Jersey courtroom via video hookup, Theodore John Kaczynski pleaded innocent to the mail-bomb murder of advertising executive Thomas Mosser. This had been the only attack for which the UNABOM suspect had claimed responsibility in his communication to the FBI. In his letter published in The New York Times on April 26, 1995, the UNABOM suspect had written that “we blew up Thomas Mosser” as an executive with the Burson-Marsteller public relations firm that had helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez ecological disaster in Alaska waters (actually, this Burson-Marsteller firm was alleging that it had never been involved with Exxon in regard to the immense oil spill).

December 13, Friday: In New Jersey, US District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise rejected a bid by the attorneys for UNABOM suspect Theodore John Kaczynski to transfer to California, where he was charged with two other bombing deaths, the New Jersey charges that he had killed an advertising executive with a mail bomb.

Resurrection of David Koresh — at least, according to surviving Branch Davidians (Jordan, Michael. CULTS:PROPHECIES, PRACTICES & PERSONALITIES. Great Britain, 1996, page 113). HERE COME DA JUDGE!

6. This article apparently persuaded exactly nobody. It did not, for instance, persuade the editor of the bulletin, Brad Dean. Thoreau scholar Richard O’Connor is evidently still of the opinion that Thoreau was sending out a coded message which we are to decode as an anagram, with the letters of “hound, bay horse, turtledove” needing to be rearranged by the perceptive to spell out either the message “Henry D. Thoreau doubts love” or, less likely, the message “Henry D. Thoreau loves doubt.” The only known direct response to my article above has been an E-mail from Ralph Chism of Portland, Oregon: My initial thoughts were that since these animals are all fast runners or flyers, Henry may have been comparing our fruitless and never ending pursuit after possessions to that of an impossible chase after these animals. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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DEROGATION OF THOREAU IN 1996 ON THE H-AMSTDY AMERICAN

STUDIES LIST

Subject: Remarkable, the easiness with which unfounded derogations of Thoreau can be published by scholars On Sun, 21 Jul 1996, Leigh Frances Kirkland wrote: > it occurred to me after I dashed off my message in the middle of the night > that part of the problem/misunderstanding, whatever we’re calling it, is > the reading of ‘dependent.’ Did the original quote just say ‘dependent’ > (which is, one hopes, not a loaded term, since we’re all dependent on > someone, even if there’s a monetary transaction) or was there more that > definitely pointed towards ‘financially dependent’?

Oh, it was bad, very bad. Unfortunately, in the originary context what this scholar implied was that Thoreau, a lazy moocher, a taker of advantage, had lived off of others, and for that reason any and all advice which he had to offer as to how we ought to live ought to be disregarded by all responsible persons. I had a very extended dialog with this person involving perhaps eight or ten offline exchanges of messages, in order to verify the malice, before responding publicly in the manner in which I did. I could send you the entire collection of messages, if you’d like to look through them, as I stuck them into a file together. (I’m not sure I have them now in exact sequence, and I think I probably corrected some spelling errors while I was reading in order to make them more intelligible to me, that being my habit, and there might be a few paragraphs which I considered irrelevant, deleted here or there, but otherwise they would be his unaltered words....) On Sat, 20 Jul 1996, Leigh Frances Kirkland wrote: > I think I’ve heard both Robert Richardson and Lawrence Buell —neither of > whom, in my estimation, fall into the category of lightweights— make such > ‘unfounded’ statements in public forums. Once in Tehran, during the Iranian Revolution, I attended a banquet in which a departing American scholar, a sociologist from the University of Chicago, was reporting on his findings in Iran. He stated in this farewell address that he had found an absurd belief making the rounds among the common people, that Iran was going to become the third most influential nation on earth, with the third largest army and the third largest arsenal. —That Iran had a holy mission to get the rest of the world to straighten up and fly right. As I left the banquet I observed several of the Iranian guests being shoved into cars by plainclothes agents. Later I found that the attitudes which this sociologist had been derogating had been common among the Iranian public because they were almost verbatim quotations from the latest book published in Persian by Shahanshah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. I will leave this mysterious reference as is, rather than extrapolate how it might apply to the attitudes of prominent Thoreauvian academicians. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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> And my question would be, why is even implying that Thoreau was in any > way dependent on women a derogation?

Righto. Yet in fact that sort of attitude is all too common among a certain crowd of manly men, which is to say, men with a problem. So we have to deal with two problems at once, on the one hand attempting to communicate to such people that derogation is inappropriate, while on the other hand attempting to communicate that the materials they consider to be derogatory would not, if accurate and important, really in any sense represent the sort of derogation which they fantasize. And how can one hope to communicate with persons such as this quoted derogator, who cannot be expected to walk and chew gum at the same time, on two channels at once?

To: Martin Doudna’s widow > I am a non-scholar replying. I have a distinct memory of having read the > statement that you quote, but I took it in quite a different way as > meaning not that HDT “lived off” his mother, sister, etc., but merely that > they did his laundry, prepared his meals, etc. - - they were his “support > system.” Of course he did earn his way in life. - - Dorothy Doudna

Yes, the bare statement could be taken in that manner. I deleted the sneering context in which the remark had originated and, to spare the guilty, deleted also this person’s name, and as you can see, responded to the group to whom he had written only by citing enough factual detail to set the record straight for them. This wasn’t the only sneering remark this individual had made in the discussion. I only mentioned this one, as an example of a string of several, for purposes of illustration of the phenomenon we are encountering. If you are interested, I could supply you with his full commentary. There seems to be a type of manly man who finds association with women to be a smear, and hilarious. So they run up against a persons such as Thoreau, and what they get is “Oh, a Mama’s boy!” . . . Chad Mannlein[SMTP:[email protected]]: I would have to concur with your recounting of the facts of HDT’s life. Harding’s LIFE OF... is fresh in my mind from a recent browsing and seems to agree with such a summary. If I may ask, who was this scholar and where was this comment published? It sounds as though this person should be scratched of his/her academic credentials and forced to repeat college (and/or high school — for cruelty’s sake). Sorry, I don’t mean to rant but I think the said person’s statement is absurd. Here is the full sentence as it appeared on July 12th on the H-SHEAR list > From: Timothy Scherman > Subject: Re: REPLY: Thanking Thoreau’s Sisters (Meredith) > > ... For everything from religious conviction (their Quakerism did much for his > own rhetoric, if not beliefs) to COOKING, I believe Thoreau did in > fact depend on the female members of his family all his > life —indeed— unless an escaped slave wanted raw muskrat HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for dinner, > I’d say he or she would depend on Mmes Thoreau for sustenance anyway. > > With humor, > Tim Scherman One of the other things which this Tim Scherman humorist did was falsely characterize some of the observations I had made on the list. It had been alleged that only Thoreau’s sisters were involved in the Underground Railroad, and I had responded with evidence that Henry himself also had been involved. Scherman’s response, for which he was reproved by the list moderator, implied that I had asserted that only Henry, and not his sister Sophia, had been involved. It was easy to demonstrate that I had neither said nor suggested any such thing, and that Scherman was making stuff up. In this fracas, however, Scherman never got directly reproved by name for the above animadversion. It is a bit too late to send this guy back to school. He’s already an established academic and a publishing author! . . . Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 From: Austin Meredith To: [email protected] > If everything is a footnote to Walden and Leaves of Grass, even in jest, > then I’d say Michael Barton’s “oppositional” American Studies is quite > oppositional — to women especially (upon whose unpaid labor both Whitman > and Thoreau depended) and also to others who feel we can learn things > from the writings of, say, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and > Fanny Fern, that Whitman and Thoreau couldn’t and didn’t articulate. > And, since I include those writers on my reading lists, I’m not sure > that even my syllabus isn’t announcing something about my politics, > since the “landscape” I cover is apparently quite different.... I must confess that I am utterly bemused by the above remark to the H-Amstdy American Studies list. As I unpack this, one of the allegations it appears to contain is that • a.) Henry David Thoreau, author of WALDEN, depended (in some quite unspecified manner) upon the unpaid labor of women, • and another of the allegations it appears to contain is that • b.) Thoreau not only did not articulate, in WALDEN or elsewhere, but could not articulate, certain (quite unspecified) things we might learn from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Fanny Fern. One way to handle this sort of comment would be to dismiss you as a fool. I’m not ready to do that. Therefore, would you please be very explicit, and instruct me of the manner in which Thoreau depended upon the unpaid labor of women? The only thing I can think of, in regard to your allegation a.), is that, in addition to his Harvard College hardship scholarship, and in addition to his own paid temporary schoolteaching during college breaks, during the 1834-1837 period both Henry’s brother John Thoreau, Jr. and his sister Helen Louisa Thoreau had taught elementary classes and contributed a portion of their salaries toward his minimal college expenses. If, for instance, you might be implying that in his later life Thoreau got a free ride in the family boardinghouse, we know that that is not so because we have on record many of the formal receipts for the room-and-board payments he made throughout his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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brief life, payments which, although they were often made in kind, that is, through specified periods of labor in the family pencil factory, were otherwise quite identical with the payments made by non-family-members residing in that boardinghouse. In regard to your allegation b.), that Thoreau not only failed to articulate, in WALDEN or elsewhere, but could not articulate, certain unspecified things we can learn from the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Fanny Fern, I am very much more at a loss. I simply have no clue where you are coming from. Would you specify, for my benefit, precisely what are these things which we may learn from the writings of each of the personages you cite, things which are not only nowhere to be found in the writings of Thoreau but also quite beyond his comprehension? If you would be so specific, my bet is that I will be able easily to refute each and every such allegation in turn, persuading you otherwise. This process might be to our mutual benefit, since if you fail to respond I have no intention of allowing your published derogatory remarks to go unchallenged.

> While I believe it may have been better for both of us if you had > dismissed me as a fool, I will ignore the belligerent and threatening > tone of your letter to me —which bemuses me because I don’t see myself as > particularly threatening to the venerable status of Thoreau— and offer > this response. > First, put your guns down: I don’t have some specific enslaved female to > pull out of Thoreau’s closet. Women are and have been the unpaid laborers > in a society that Thoreau, like it or not, was a part of and benefited from. > (I don’t believe that Harvard, for example, even admitted women at the > time he attended, but I know that it like all other cultural institutions > was built from the labors of unacknowledged women. Read any number of > feminist scholars if you don’t understand this — you might start with > Virginia Woolf and go from there.) > Second, regarding the content of his writings vs. those of the other people > I mentioned, if you can see no value in, e.g., first-person experiences of > slavery and/or of having almost no legal claim to children whose very birth > might have ended one’s life, then we are coming from such radically > different perspectives that I see no further point in conversing. I know > that Thoreau was a sincere supporter of, e.g., abolition, and was a > committed pacifist, among other things. And I admire and respect his > courage and his ability to articulate his beliefs so clearly. I just also > believe that not everything in Am. literature comes from WALDEN, just as I > also don’t agree that all American novels go back to HUCKLEBERRY FINN. > If you want only to read Thoreau, and no one else, I have no problem with > that — it’s your life. But don’t try to convert me. My sister’s a > fundamentalist, so I get enough of that at home. > Sincerely, > Lori Askeland . . . Subject: Thoreau and Kaczynski HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To: [email protected] On Tue, 7 May 1996 [email protected] wrote: > Thank you for your response. I will pass it along to Brother Joseph. Since sending you the note, I’ve found a place in the database at which the Reverend Brownson, after his conversion, is arguing very contentiously and contemptuously with something or other that Newman had written in defense of Roman Catholicism. So, we can’t assume that because these two guys both converted to the same religion, they had both converted to the same frame of mind. Perhaps Newman was being convinced by the very best things to be discovered in Catholicism while Brownson was being convinced by the very worst things to be discovered there — or something like that. I wonder if we are going to have a situation develop here, similar to Brother Antoninus’s adoration of Robinson Jeffers in this century.... > I have also been following the listserve discussion on Ted Kaczynski’s > relationship to Thoreau. Most people I have talked with do not even want to > discuss the relationship. They crinkle up their faces, pull back their heads > and say, in unison, “That’s ridiculous,” or “That’s so absurd.” Are they > afraid that discussing Kaczynski in relation to Thoreau is equal to making > the argument that Thoreau has actually sanctioned what the Unabomber has > done? I believe that there is some value in discussing this relationship. > An honest discussion would certainly show the differences between the two. > An intelligent person can easily decide for themselves whether or not Ted > Kaczynski is a modern-day Thoreau. The situation is of some relevance to me because I presumably passed by Kaczynzki all the time in Emerson Hall, or at least in the math building next door. What saved me, with such a similar background in mathematical logic, from going down this same path as the Unabomer? If I had to point at any one American’s influence which has been reaching out to me to hold me on the good path, it would have to be Thoreau. Now to see Kaczynski scornfully related to Thoreau just because both had lived in cabins is truly frustrating. > The reason I am bringing up Kaczynski here is because I have been debating > whether to include these articles in the Thoreau bibliography. My first > inclination was to exclude them because they were not articles on Thoreau, > rather, articles on Kaczynski which mention Thoreau. But now, I think I > should include these brief mentions of Thoreau because this issue (of how > the mass public and mass media tend to perceive Thoreau) is relevant to our > overall understanding of Thoreau. So, this is a round-about way of asking > you if you have a list of these references to Thoreau. I would like to > include them in the next Thoreau Society Bulletin.

It is an important inquiry, how this US society makes use of its accumulated cultural materials, such as our collective memory of Thoreau. Attached is the collection of materials I have on Kaczynski. (It’s good to hear from you.) . . . Subject: Henry David Thoreau, Theodore J. Kaczynski, and Austin Meredith It has been exceedingly strange for me to contemplate that I must have been in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the same buildings with Theodore J. Kaczynski, now allegedly the “Unabomer” and the “Harvard serial killer,” in 1960 —the mathematics hall and the philosophy hall (Emerson Hall) at Harvard University— while he was a Junior in mathematics and I a graduate student in mathematical logic, and that then some seventeen years later, while he was in his mountain cabin (allegedly) crafting his first bomb, I was going up into the mountains of California to build my cabin and do my obligatory two years, two months, and two days of imitation of Thoreau. It is exceedingly reassuring to read in the cover story of this week’s NEWSWEEK magazine, “Blood Brothers, The Unabomber Saga: A Family’s History of Loneliness, Fear and Betrayal,” that it is the younger brother, David, the brother who turned Theodore in, who is the admirer of Thoreau, and that evidently no copy of WALDEN has been found in Theodore’s isolated cabin. David is also an admirer of Gandhi, and professes nonviolence. On the facing Op/Ed pages of the New York Times for April 10, 1996 there appeared several references to Thoreau. In a letter to the editor under the header “Unabomber Represents Our Anarchist Within,” Thomas J. Campanella of Somerville MA wrote that while “Our society is obsessed with cheerleaders who march to the beat,” this hermit of Montana “seems a prophet, albeit a misguided one, a Thoreau gone berserk, emitting a hi-tech [sic] yell in the desert.” Facing this was a full column twitting Harvard by Frank Rich, entitled “Grand Old Ivy,” which mentioned Theodore J. Kaczynski, “class of 1962” in connection with “a star alum from the class of 1837.” Then, in the New York Times for April 12, 1996, on these Op/Ed pages, there appeared a column about the culture of the state of mind known as Montana, by Richard E. Nicholls, titled “Westward I go Free.” In the column, after speaking of “a modern tendency to act out relentlessly the most extreme beliefs,” Nicholls cited the source of his column’s title: The West has always been associated with liberty. “Eastward I go only by force, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “but westward I go free.” Then in the Sunday New York Times for April 14, 1996, on these Op/Ed pages, there appeared a letter from John Hols of Spokane WA which had been awarded the header “What Separates Hate and Civil Disobedience?” This letter condemned the Freemen, appropriately enough, as a hate gang, for believing that they have all the answers and holding not only the opinions but also the lives of others to be irrelevant, but then suggested that this “Freemen” moral majority has been bred out of a previous hate gang, to wit, those who have been practitioners of civil disobedience: “the previous generation, whose unlawful, occasionally lethal actions were labeled ’civil disobedience.’” Then in Newsweek for April 15, 1996, on pages 32-33, appeared the following: Kaczynski, who had lived a Thoreau-like existence in a crude shack five miles from Lincoln for 25 years, was known as an intensely private man — polite but aloof, a bearded eccentric who pedaled into town on a battered bicycle and never really talked about himself.... The pattern of his life bespeaks profound alienation — an estrangement so deep it makes Thoreau, with his two-year sabbatical at Walden Pond, look like a social butterfly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Then in the New York Sunday Times for April 21, 1996, pages 45-46, Trip Gabriel had an article titled “Popular Culture Sets Sights on Unabomber” in which Professor Harold Schechter of Queens College, soon to be the author of a Pocket Books volume titled THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS, was said to have “noted that acts of sensational violence are committed often, but that only a limited number of crimes burrow into a nation’s psyche. ‘The criminals who tend to live on are ones who conform to some mythic, archetypal pattern,’ he said. ’In some ways Kaczynski seems like this pure product of America, a guy who goes west into the wilderness to lead a life that is celebrated in texts like WALDEN and ends up descending into madness.’” Now I know there are all sorts of Thoreauvians who are concerned over the technical nature of this “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” project. I use computers, therefore I am unThoreauvian. One once said to me “Thoreau must be spinning in his grave.” Those folks suppose their hero Thoreau to have been, like Kaczynski and like themselves, nothing more than a sort of Luddite enemy of modern technology. Also, I know there are all sorts of Thoreauvians, like Robert Richardson, Jr., who suppose that their hero Thoreau was a man of violence who legitimated violence, like Kaczynski and like themselves. So what I would propose, as a sort of parody, is that we might throw together some of the writings of these neo-Luddites, and some of the writings of these Richardson way-the-world-works realists, and create a Thoreau persona that would react to Kaczynski’s mailing of letter bombs the way they understand Thoreau to have reacted to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. We could have a Thoreau who would be issuing impassioned pleas for the imprisoned Kaczynski as a Christ figure! Wow, wouldn’t that be cute? The current press account is that Kaczynski was not so much of an isolate at Harvard around 1960 as had previously been inferred. He allegedly hung out with philosophy majors who particularly discussed Kantianism. I don’t now recall that I ever did much talking with undergraduates, and I am quite sure that I didn’t talk Kantianism with anyone at all (simply because I would have been quite embarrassed to have it become generally known that as a student of philosophy I had acquired so very little background about such a major historical figure). So, although Kaczynski and I were definitely floating through the same set of buildings at the same time, is seems unlikely that we ever noticed one another. —Which is probably just as well, since, as a public advocate of the high-tech approach to literary scholarship, my name might have gone onto that lengthy hit list they’ve allegedly now found in that mountain shanty. I’ve had an experience with the Earth First! sort of person that resonates, now that the man suspected of having been the “Unabomer,” has been recently revealed to have been in his cabin a peruser of the “Earth First!” type of literature. I once attempted a communication with those “Earth First!” people, sending them a short article in which I parsed one of their questions about environmental destruction versus righteous retribution. What I did was offer this term “mu” as being an accessory to the usual “Yes,” “Maybe,” and “No, quite the contrary” options available in our Western cultures. “Mu” indicated, as I think I expressed it in that context, that none of the options legitimated by an established frame of reference could be accepted, but that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the very frame of reference would need to be substantially altered before any informative response could be made. What they did was delete this definition from my short article, and the reference to the dog’s-Buddha-nature koan, and then alter all remaining occurrences of the word “mu” in what I had written to the words “not” and “no.” They thus were able to publish in their newsletter, over my name, a statement making me out as in entire agreement with their agenda of self-legitimating violence. This was in like 1981, as I recall, while the Unabomer was mailing his bombs. When I wrote repeatedly to the editors of the Earth First! magazine/ newspaper (the name “Dave Foreman” comes to mind, although this I may be misremembering), in protest at this abuse of my name and my attitudes, there was no response either in private mail or in their publication. As the mad cows of England would say, Moo. . . . According to Roshi Philip Kapleau’s THE THREE PILLARS OF ZEN (Anchor Books, pages 76-87), the word Mu comes from a koan listed in the MUMMONKAN (“A Gateless Gate” — see Paul Reps’s ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES), a compilation of traditional zen koans. The koan goes like this: “A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen Master, ’Has a dog a Buddha nature or not? Joshu answered: ‘Mu.’” Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning No Thing or Nay. In the meditation on the koan Mu becomes the mantra. The resolution of the problem of course is not an intellectual one, but an experiential understanding of Mu as Emptiness, or “Original Immaculacy.” In Zen parlance Mu has become a term to refer to the numinous, the ineffable, “Emptiness,” Sunyata, Buddha Nature. Such formal koans as this one, however, are primarily utilized by the Rinzai sect. In the Soto practice, by way of contrast, it is usually the teaching of Dogen, that the koan arises from daily life and everyday practice, that is followed. The resolution for life’s dilemmas whether public or private often involves a willingness and patience to see past dualism and dualistic arguments, viewpoints, strategems. Mu points to a way of seeing into the substantial oneness of things, for the apophatic — that is, for a process of subtraction (Via Negativa) rather than addition, peeling away all conditioned points of view and discovering what emerges unconditionally. . . . Subject: What’s going on at NEWSWEEK? Comparing the recent remarks in TIME about Thoreau and Kaczynski with the remarks in NEWSWEEK, the difference is most noticeable and most remarkable. — Is there some rogue with a red pencil, loose in the halls at NEWSWEEK with an 11th-grade appreciation of Thoreau? Consider that TIME’s issue of April 22 was rather innocuous, even, one might say, relevant and appropriate. On page 47, speaking of brother David Kaczynski at his Texas cabin reading Gandhiji and Thoreau (rather than of brother Theodore John Kaczynski at his Montana cabin making bombs), David Layaco’s “A Tale of Two Brothers” spread says “To a few friends, he was even known jokingly as ’Henry David’ — as in Henry David Thoreau, the literary patron saint of nature lovers and solitary souls.” Then, on page 50, uncritical souls HDT WHAT? INDEX

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have obtained some instant psychoanalysis from one of their usual newsy sources, “Robert Bly on the Mind of the Unabomber Suspect.” The poet alienist was ready to pontificate on bombing as a “regression” into an inner “child- adult”: “Henry David Thoreau went off to live in a cabin he built himself. But while he was there, he studied the classics and complicated literature; he conducted elaborate observations of classified plants, herbs and trees, completed many journals. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Thoreau, he knew the exact date when each plant within 30 miles of Concord would blossom. And he remained close to his family and friends. In the woods he became more adult.” And for their photo caption on page 21, leading into all this, TIME selected a picture caption for a picture labeled “Brother and Keeper of the Week”: David and Ted Kaczynski seemed to live separate lives of quiet desperation. Innocuous. Pertinent. By way of extreme contrast, the latest egregious remark from Newsweek has occurred on page 18 of their May 6th issue, where that anonymous red pencil describing their “mail call” has characterized the alleged Unabomber as having “his defenders”: Some saw him as a misguided modern-day Henry David Thoreau, warning us of the dangers of technology. If this is the best the people at Newsweek can do, one wonders — when are they going to just leave it alone It’s getting annoying. . . . To: “Charles K. Jervis” > Reading a book called GOAT WALKING by Jim Corbett, > in which Thoreau is juxtaposed with a philosopher who > is related to the rise of Nazi influence in Germany > shows that this application of Thoreau’s work to the workings > of extremist philosophies (right and left wing) is not without > precident in sources more thoughtful than the popular press. > Any thoughts on the latter? Let’s discuss this at great length. When I saw the news about the accused Unabomer’s brother David who had turned him in, and how he had gone into this particular strip of desert to build his cabin, of course the first thing that crossed my mind was “Oh, that’s the same region that Jim Corbett went to, I wonder if he knew Corbett or had read GOAT WALKING.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1997

May 5, Monday: Prosecutors in Sacramento, California were ordered to turn over an array of documents to the defense team assigned to Theodore John Kaczynski, including DNA test results and handwriting analyses. Federal Magistrate Gregory Hollows, noting that an FBI analysis of Kaczynski’s writings included the notation “destroy when no longer needed,” cautioned prosecutors not to destroy any documents.

On this date our solar system was anticipated to enter something termed the Photon Belt. Once in this field, something was bound to happen to us. Maybe the world was going to end, maybe aliens would land, maybe humankind would become enlightened or acquire superpowers — or maybe all electrical equipment would cease to work. MILLENNIALISM ASTRONOMY

U.S. News and World Report “NEW & NOTABLE,” “LONE WRITERS” By Thom Geier: Do not disturb: recluse at work Seeking a quiet place to write, Henry David Thoreau retreated to a cabin by Walden Pond. Though he lived there just over two years, he was deemed a hermit. “The mere idea of reclusiveness,” says Thoreau biographer Robert Richardson Jr., “caught the American imagination in an astonishing way.” The literary recluse still holds appeal. Take J.D. Salinger, whose last interview was to a high school reporter in 1953. Several months ago, Orchises Press announced the publication of his first new book in 34 years, a novella that ran in The New Yorker in 1965. After the media frenzy began, the book was delayed indefinitely. Another publicity-shy author, Thomas Pynchon, continues producing new work. This week, the literary giant delivers his first novel in seven years, the 773-page historical saga MASON & DIXON (Henry Holt, $27.50). The jokey tale of the 18th-century surveyors who divided America has won rave reviews and boffo buzz on the Internet, where conspiracy-minded Pynchon has many fans. An author tour is out. (This is a guy who refused to send his photo to Cornell’s freshman register in 1953.) But bookstores will stage readings, Pynchon imitator contests, and even adult puppet shows acting out works like V. and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. “Everyone focuses on having a talking head on Oprah,” says Holt publicist Cathy Melnicki. “But Pynchon is just about the literature.” That’s a welcome change in an age when hype springs eternal. Hermit club. Thoreau fled his mother’s noisy boardinghouse. Salinger hides in New Hampshire. Pynchon loves codes and quests. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 14, Wednesday: Agreement was reached in Moscow between NATO and Russia allowing NATO to expand into the former Soviet bloc.

Turkish armed forces entered Iraq to battle Turkish Kurds seeking safety there.

Federal prosecutors in Sacramento, California recommended that the government seek the death penalty for Theodore John Kaczynski (despite any assurances to the contrary previously made by the FBI to members of the suspect’s family, such as to his brother David who was turning him in).

May 16, Friday: US Attorney General Janet Reno authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty for UNABOM suspect Theodore John Kaczynski Members of the suspect’s family announced that they regretted having helped the authorities, while family members of several victims praised this reneging. Various legal scholars commented that this step was poor judgment in that it transformed members of the suspect’s family into “the ultimate hostile witnesses.”

After 32 years of power, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire stepped down in the face of an imminent rebel takeover of the capital, Kinshasa. He would seek exile in Togo. Many members of his government would cross the Congo River to safety in Brazzaville.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair lifted the ban on contacts with Sinn Fein.

Alternatim for clarinet, viola and orchestra by Luciano Berio was performed for the initial time, in Amsterdam.

Balseros, an opera by Robert Ashley to his own words, was performed for the initial time, in the Colony Theater, Miami Beach.

June 2, Monday: A federal jury in Denver convicted Timothy McVeigh on 11 counts stemming from his explosion at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

National elections in Canada resulted in a victory for the ruling Liberal Party of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, but with a reduced majority.

June 11, Wednesday: Federal prosecutors asserted in court that Theodore John Kaczynski had described his bombing raids in detail in a coded diary seized by authorities in the Montana cabin.

Diogenes Angelakos died of prostate cancer at the age of 77. He had been Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at UC-Berkeley when in a coffee room on July 2, 1982 he had used his right hand to grab the handle of a package. A pipe bomb inside the booby-trapped package had mangled the hand while a gasoline can in the package had failed to ignite.

Northern Alliance troops took Pul-e-Khumri, north of Kabul in Afghanistan.

In Humlebaek, Denmark, “Shard for Guitar” by Elliott Carter was performed for the initial time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 13, Friday: Two popular music entertainers from the group “Naughty by Nature” were charged in New York with illegal gun possession, and reckless driving (and, perhaps, taking themselves too seriously).

Attorneys in the UNABOM case offered that to avoid problems in jury selection the judge should refuse the media access to certain inflammatory pieces of evidence such as portions of suspect Theodore John Kaczynski’s coded diary.

In a federal court in Denver, Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for his part in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. McVeigh would, as a federal prisoner, after being held in “Supermax” in Colorado, be executed at the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. Shortly before execution, according to journalist Dan Herbec, the murderer/terrorist, who had been starving himself so he would seem like a victim martyr, would explicitly cast himself as a modern-day abolitionist: “One of his big heroes was John Brown, who committed some very violent acts during the 1800s in the effort to eliminate slavery in our country.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COMPARING JOHN BROWN AND TED KACZYNSKI

In an email, CBurenStew wrote: > John Brown was a terrorist, regardless of the justice > of his cause, and I believe that most biographies > suggest that he was an “obviously disturbed” man > obsessed with a religiously sanctioned mission. > In many ways, he appears less rational than our > latter day terrorist. I’m certainly not defending > Kaczynski, but I classify the unprincipled Brown > right along with him and claim that Thoreau’s defense > of Brown was a very rash bit of emotionalism. > I wouldn’t be surprised if Kaczynski > finds inspiration in Thoreau. Thoreau’s a cultural > property, after all — and he’s likely to have > relevance for many different folks — loonies > included.

I’m going to take issue with this attribution that Henry Thoreau’s defense of Captain John BrownJohn Brown amounted to “a very rash bit of emotionalism” above. It seems to me that it would help if we made a careful attempt to parse this by constructing a Kaczynski other than the real UNABOM ecoterrorist, a Kaczynski who would indeed be like Captain John Brown. After we had created such a figure, we could more carefully evaluate how support for Brown in the 19th Century as he awaited his martyrdom might be similar to or quite different from support for Kaczynski in the 20th Century. How would we need to change what Ted Kaczynski did, and the situation in which he did it, in order more closely to approximate what Brown did, and the situation in which Brown did it? Well, back in Brown’s day, a significant proportion of Americans were being held against their will in a system called slavery. What Brown did functioned as some sort of limited and imperfect response to this system called slavery. So let us assume that in this 20th Century, there were some computer factory somewhere in America, in which the workers had to labor under fear of being bullwhipped, without pay. In this hypothetical computer factory where the workers have to labor under fear of being bullwhipped, without pay, there is a system of guards and safeguards, to ensure that very few of the workers ever escape from this lifelong abuse. Not only that, but any children which these workers might have, are going to be subjected to the same enslavement in this computer factory, and will be forced in their turn to assemble computers, under fear of being bullwhipped, without pay. Now suppose we were to produce some UNABOM who were to go “Hey, this is just wrong, it is wrong.” And then this UNABOM who arose among us would discover that what the people who were running this computer factory were doing was perfectly legal. You see, they owned the workers in their factory, whom they were working without pay under fear of the lash. Owned them for life. Owned their children after them. So this UNABOM would discover that if he so much as protested this, he or she might get beaten up, he or she might get pelted with eggs and bricks by an indignant American free public who were benefiting from this free assembling of computer components. Worse yet, our federal government might come and arrest him or her and file charges of interference with the private use of private property, and put him or her in a penitentiary. So this hypothetical UNABOM we are constructing here in our 20th Century, making him or her be as like as possible to the Captain John Brown of the 19th Century, would make up a batch of bombs. And he or she would storm this computer factory, and blow down a door, and blow up some of the executives and some of the whip- hands in this factory, and then he or she would shout out to the “employees” of this factory: “Here are enough HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bombs for you all! Follow me to your freedom!” Well, but that’s not even remotely similar to what this Ted Kaczynski is accused of having done, is it? Allegedly, Ted sneaked around blowing technologist’s hands off and putting technologist’s eyes out because he wanted to protest against technology. The similarities are precisely what? Yes, for a Thoreau and an Emerson to honor a UNABOM today as he is being lethally injected would qualify as “a very rash bit of emotionalism.” However, for a Thoreau and an Emerson to honor a Captain John Brown as he was being hanged by the neck until dead did not in any manner qualify as “a very rash bit of emotionalism.” It qualified, instead, within its context of attempting to find some way to deal with a ridiculous, and intolerable, but overwhelming, system of state-sponsored oppression and injustice, as a quite constructive response. I challenge you to suggest some manner in which they might better have responded within that context! You will notice that Henry Thoreau, a lifelong opponent of hanging, did not plead that Captain John Brown’s life be spared. Brown had murdered. In fact the first person murdered during this expedition into the Slaveocracy had been an innocent black man, a porter in the railroad station at Harpers Ferry. Brown was ready to pay the penalty. Thoreau quite agreed with Brown himself, proclaiming that this man John Brown’s highest and best use was to be publicly hanged — and thus to be raised up before us as example and as inspiration. “We are our brother’s keeper.”

July 14, Monday: Attorneys representing Theodore John Kaczynski insisted that the search warrant issued for the Montana cabin had been so broad as to render any evidence gathered thereby inadmissable in court. (Hail Mary, full of grace....)

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced a Bosnian Serb, Dusan Tadic, to 20 years in prison (Tadic had last May been found guilty of crimes against humanity). This had been the initial contested trial by the tribunal in The Hague.

August 14, Thursday: Albanian army and police forces took control of Vlore, the center of violent opposition to the Tirana government.

A federal judge in Denver confirmed the sentence of death to Timothy McVeigh for his part in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Il Rozzo Martello for chorus by Peter Maxwell Davies to words of Dante and Michelangelo was performed for the initial time, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

September 3, Wednesday: When Sacramento, California prosecutors requested court permission to perform their own psychiatric examination of UNABOM suspect Theodore John Kaczynski, attorneys for the defense responded that such would violate the accused’s 5th Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

September 10, Wednesday: Defense attorneys for Theodore John Kaczynski argued against storing the case’s numerous documents and photographs on CD-ROMs — use of such a system might lead to a televised show- and-tell that would only inflame the jury against the accused and would inject a “Simpson-esque” atmosphere into the trial. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 15, Monday: When the attorneys assigned to represent Theodore John Kaczynski, apparently preparing for an insanity plea, asked that the federal government’s mental examination records and/or psychological profiles on the UNABOM suspect be delivered for their consideration, prosecution attorneys responded that there was no record of any such thing. Defense attorney Judy Clarke then suggested that FBI agents may have been guilty of misconduct, by misleading the suspect’s brother David Kaczynski into turning him in under pretense of providing him with mental health care.

For the 1st time, representatives of Sinn Féin participated in multiparty talks on peace in Northern Ireland.

Parliamentary elections in Norway resulted in a loss for the ruling Labor Party. Right wing parties made gains.

September 19, Friday: In Ann Arbor, Michigan, Fanfare for a new President for band by William Bolcom was performed for the initial time.

After two days of talks, negotiations collapsed between North Korea, South Korea, China, and the United States of America in regard to at a peace treaty for the Korean peninsula.

This was a bad day for the defense team in the case of Theodore John Kaczynski. The judge rejected their efforts to suppress evidence seized under search warrant from his cabin, ruled that the government might perform a mental examination of the suspect, and ruled that the prosecution might use a computer system to display evidence at trial.

Meanwhile, David Kaczynski received for his work with troubled teens at Equinox, a social service agency that ran a youth shelter, a “Courage of Conviction” award. He commented that his fondest hope was that his older brother Ted would someday forgive him. Part of what was most hurtful to me about that is it prevented me from telling my brother in my own way, in my own time, that I had turned him in and why. No matter how many people say, “You know, you did the right thing,” it doesn’t make me feel any better....

September 22, Monday: District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. had ruled that the names of jurors in the UNABOM case not be made public because of extensive publicity the case had received. Charity Kenyon, an attorney for several broadcast and print organizations, argued that this was “unprecedented” and would “unconstitutionally infringe on the public’s historic and First Amendment rights of access to this trial.”

When 80 men with hatchets invaded a neighborhood in Baraki, a suburb of Algiers, they killed about 200 residents and injured about 100. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 6, Monday: Ten Bosnian Croats charged with a massacre of Muslims in 1993 surrendered to the UN war crimes tribunal in Split, Croatia.

About 600 potential jurors were summoned to the Sacramento, California fairgrounds to complete preliminary surveys drafted by prosecutors and defense attorneys, as an initial step toward picking a jury for the UNABOM trial.

October 15, Wednesday: A truck bomb exploded in Colombo, Sri Lanka, killing 18 and injuring more than 100. Tamil separatists were blamed for the blast.

Cassini, a space probe sent to orbit Saturn, was launched into space by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

The Jacobite Rising for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra was performed for the initial time, in City Halls, Glasgow, with the composer Peter Maxwell Davies himself conducting.

For the 1st time in the case against Theodore John Kaczynski, his defense attorneys asserted to prosecutors that the defendant was innocent due to paranoid schizophrenia.

October 17, Friday: In Santa Clara, Cuba, amidst solemn ceremony, the remains of Ernesto “Che” Guevara were placed in a mausoleum (although he had been killed in Bolivia on October 9th, 1967, the remains had not been identified until July of this year).

US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. ruled the government’s psychiatric testing of Theodore John Kaczynski could begin on October 25th, but reserved judgment on the number of physicians, the length of the evaluation, and whether this might be videotaped. Prosecutors indicated that they needed this to prepare their case against a possible mental defect defense and wanted to use multiple physicians with lengthy evaluation. The defense argued that only one psychiatrist was needed and that testing should be limited. Judge Burrell indicated that he would probably turn aside the government’s request to videotape the evaluation.

In Poland, Jerzy Karol Buzek, at the head of a 2-party center/right coalition, replaced Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz as Prime Minister.

In Norway, Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Democratic Party, at the head of a 3-party minority center/ right coalition, replaced Thorbjørn Jagland of the Labor Party as Prime Minister.

Etude 16 from György Ligeti’s Etudes for piano Book III was performed for the initial time, in Donaueschingen.

Sequenza IXc for bass clarinet by Luciano Berio was performed for the initial time, in Turin.

Two Voices — an allegory for orchestra and electronic sound generators, by Roger Reynolds, was performed for the initial time, at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 22, Wednesday: Lawyers for the defendant Theodore John Kaczynski, alleging paranoid schizophrenia, were unsuccessful in blocking the prosecution’s proposed psychiatric testing. Siding with prosecutors, the federal appeals court ruled to allow a government psychiatrist to examine the defendant’s mental condition. Psychiatric evaluation of the UNABOM accused was to begin within three days.

The South Korean government announced it was taking over debt-ridden Kia Motors Corporation.

October 25, Saturday: UNABOM accused Theodore John Kaczynski, scheduled to begin 7 days of psychiatric testing, per a conference call his attorneys made to US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr., was refusing to cooperate.

October 31, Friday: Nationwide, a UNABOM mask had been a big seller for Halloween.

Prosecutors in the case of Theodore John Kaczynski said they would attempt to bar defense attorneys from offering an insanity plea because the subject was refusing to cooperate with the government’s psychological testing. With a trial due to start in less than two weeks, defense attorneys asked that US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. resolve the issue as quickly as possible. They indicated that as part of their defense they would call expert witnesses to testify that their client was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

In Poland, Jerzy Karol Buzek replaced Marek Belka as Prime Minister.

In Boston, Fanfare for the Free Man for three oboes and three bassoons by John Harbison was performed for the initial time.

November: Jury selection began in the sanity trial of Theodore John Kaczynski, accused UNABOM serial killer/ ecoterrorist.

November 7, Friday: David Kaczynski said he felt “fear and sorrow” at the federal prosecutor’s insistence on seeking the death penalty for his brother. According to this younger brother, the alleged terrorist acts were due to “illness rather than evil.” The federal judge ruled that the jury might, if it found Theodore John Kaczynski guilty, consider the death penalty.

In London, Night Mail, for speaker and 16 instrumentalists by Benjamin Britten, to words of Auden, was performed for the initial time (derived from his film score for the movie “Night Mail,” released in 1936).

In the Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, Concerto for piano and orchestra by Peter Maxwell Davies was performed for the initial time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 9, Sunday: In Thailand, Chuan Leekpai replaced Chavalit Yongchaiyudh as Prime Minister.

As the November 12th trial date neared, defense attorneys hoped to transport the mountain cabin to Sacramento, California in order to build their defense around this exhibit. They considered that the cramped conditions in which their defendant Theodore John Kaczynski had for 25 years subsisted was ample corroboration for a disturbed mentality. “You really cannot understand this guy’s life unless you can get in that cabin,” offered defense attorney Quin Denvir — “This is not an idyllic, rustic cabin with a refrigerator and a wet bar.” Attorneys for the government suggested that for the trial all that would be needed was a scale model of the structure.

November 11, Tuesday: Mary McAleese became President of Ireland, succeeding the 4-man commission which had taken over following the resignation of Mary Robinson in September.

Apolytikion of St. Martin for chorus by John Tavener was performed for the initial time, at St.-Martin-in-the- Fields, London.

With questioning of potential jurors set to begin, prosecutors and defense lawyers in the UNABOM case sparred over who should take part in the evaluation. Attorneys for the defense argued that only the attorneys, and not the judge, should be involved in the interrogation, because jury prospects would be less likely to bare their hidden biases to a judge.

November 13, Thursday: On the first day of jury selection in the UNABOM case, lawyers started sorting through an unusually large pool of 600 prospective jurors. Over a 7-hour period they managed to interview 11 and excuse 4 for hardship or other causes. The defense zeroed in on the death penalty as its top concern in jury selection. Theodore John Kaczynski appeared before the jurors in a tweed jacket, hair and beard neatly cropped, as if he were still a University of California math professor.

Iraq expelled 6 US members of the United Nations arms inspections team, obliging them to travel surface from Baghdad to Jordanian border.

November 15, Saturday: In order to contradict a previous defense claim that Theodore John Kaczynski was terrified of psychiatrists, the federal prosecutors produced letters in which he had several times sought mental help between 1988 and 1993. In the letters the accused suggested that he and his therapist conduct his sessions by mail, pointing out that he simply could not afford to travel from his remote Montana cabin to these sessions. Actually, I’d even PREFER to handle it this way because, in writing, I can express what I have to say much more precisely, clearly, and completely than I can in speaking.

November 18, Tuesday: In journal entries submitted by the prosecution, Theodore John Kaczynski had written: “I intend to start killing people” and had compared himself with University of Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman: If I am successful at this, it is possible that, when I am caught (not alive, I fervently hope!) there will be some speculation in the news media as to my motives for killing people (as in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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case of Charles Whitman, who killed some 13 people in Texas in the 60s). If such speculation occurs, they are bound to make me out to be a sickie, and to ascribe to me motives of a sordid or “sick” type. To prevent such speculation the UNABOM defendant considered that he needed to create an account of my own personality and its development that will be as accurate as possible. If I succeed in killing enough people, the news media may have something to say about me when I am killed or caught. I would point out that many tame, conformist types seem to have a powerful need to depict the enemy of society as sordid, repulsive or “sick.”

November 19, Wednesday: According to documents filed by the UNABOM defense team, Theodore John Kaczynski was not only refusing to be evaluated by prosecution psychiatrists, but also had ended contact with the psychiatrists working with his defense. Dr. David Foster reported that visits had ceased when he began discussing the various symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and the defendant asserted “You are the enemy.” Another, Dr. Karen Froming, said that initially he had refused to acknowledge her presence, and then had asserted that he expected her evaluation to demonstrate that he was mentally healthy. When she informed him that her evaluation indicated abnormalities, “He informed me in writing the very next day that he would no longer need my professional services.” Her evaluation was that her patient was in deep denial over his psychological shortcoming: “Mr. Kaczynski’s superior intellect should not be confused with sound mental health.”

November 20, Thursday: Theodore John Kaczynski reacted noticeably at the defense table as prospective jurors described their reaction to his UNABOM manifesto — one commented “I read part of the manifesto and quit reading it after a while” and he removed his glasses, crossed his arms, and rocked back and forth in his chair; another commented that he found the 35,000 words “too long” and he stiffened (it’s a good thing he didn’t sneeze, the media would have had itself a field day).

Russia and Iraq issued a joint announcement that United Nations weapons inspectors might return to Iraq without conditions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 21, Friday: United Nations arms inspectors returned to their duties in Iraq (looking for a black cat in a dark room at midnight, when the cat’s not there).

US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. indicated that he would probably allow a limited mental defect defense, and ruled that the prosecution needed to ask Theodore John Kaczynski again, to undergo neurological testing. “This has a tendency to undermine the integrity of the judicial process,” the judge indicated, adding that the UNABOM defendant still has a 6th-Amendment right to present his best defense. The prosecution team had asked that any mental defect defense be barred completely because of the accused’s refusal to cooperate. The defense team, which was planning to argue that their client was a victim of schizophrenia, claimed that their tests did indicate a mild impairment. Paul Rothstein, a constitutional law expert and Georgetown University law professor, pointed out that using a mental-defect defense to attack intent might be without previous precedent in federal jurisprudence. In your normal insanity defense, he pointed out, it was up to the defense to demonstrate that their client was legally not responsible for his acts. However, when the defense used the mental-defect defense to attack intent (intent being an element of the crime that the prosecution had the burden of proof to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt), this had the effect of shifting the burden of proof back to the prosecution. Curiouser and curiouser.

November 25, Tuesday: Defendant Theodore John Kaczynski tossed a pen across the defense table as his lawyers discussed paranoid schizophrenia. He then then passed notes to and spoke in a heated whisper with defense attorney Judy Clarke. The only word overheard was “psychiatrist!” The prosecution suggested that the defendant was merely trying to be difficult. Defense lawyers asserted that their client’s refusal of mental examination based on an insistence that there was nothing wrong with him was itself indicative of schizophrenia.7

November 26, Wednesday: UNABOM suspect Theodore John Kaczynski remained in his jail cell, failing to attend during jury selection.

Bent, a film with music by Philip Glass, was released in the United States.

The Red Violin: Chaconne for violin and orchestra by John Corigliano was performed for the initial time, in San Francisco.

Reverie (Reflections on a Hymn Tune) for orchestra by Dominick Argento was performed for the initial time, in Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis (this was a reworking of his organ piece Prelude for Easter Dawning).

7. Catch 22, Lemma 1: “If you think you’re not crazy you must be crazy.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 1, Monday: On the next scheduled day of court hearings after the day of jury selection in which he had remained in his cell, Theodore John Kaczynski returned to the defense table. However, his only behavior was that when a prospective juror said police officers were more likely to be suspicious of anyone who was “different,” he nodded in agreement.

Officials at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana reported that the 10-foot-by-12-foot tarp-covered cabin had been loaded on a flatbed truck to be conveyed to Sacramento, California.

The Supreme Court of Spain sentenced 23 leading members of Herri Batasuna, the Basque separatist party to 7 years in prison for the crime of consorting with terrorists.

A 14-year-old shot up a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, killing 3 students and injuring 5. He was taken into custody.

Music for the silent film Cenere by Phillip Glass was performed for the initial time, in Messina. The music was performed live by the composer and Jon Gibson, saxophone. This would later be made into a soundtrack.

Ballad in Yellow for piano by David Del Tredici was performed for the initial time, in New York.

December 2, Tuesday: A spokesperson for Malmstrom Air Force Base indicated that the previous day’s report, that Theodore John Kaczynski tarp-covered cabin was aboard a flatbed truck and was leaving the base, had been in error. For the time being and without explanation that transfer was on hold.

President Farooq Ahmed Leghari of Pakistan resigned and was succeeded ad interim by Wasim Sajjad.

Cabaret Songs, a cycle for medium voice and piano by William Bolcom to words of Weinstein, was performed for the initial time, at the 92nd Street Y, New York.

December 3, Wednesday: A treaty banning land mines was signed, in Ottawa, by 122 nations. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, but the United States of America and South Korea of course refused to sign any such treaty, because we have a love affair with these neato devices — it’s so easy, not to mention inexpensive, to instantaneously blow off some unsuspecting person’s leg with a land mine!

Former Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi was convicted in a Milan court of fraud in the 1989 purchase of a film company by his firm, Fininvest SpA. He was given a 16-month suspended sentence and fined 60,000,000 lire.

Shortly before dawn the flatbed truck carrying Theodore John Kaczynski’s 10-foot-by-12-foot tarp-covered cabin left Malmstrom Air Force Base heading for California. The wide-load vehicle made its way through Great Falls to Interstate 15, where it could only be on the freeway during daylight hours, and headed south. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 4, Thursday: The tarp-covered, 10-by-12-foot cabin of Theodore John Kaczynski turned into a sort of rolling exhibit drawing cheery hordes of reporters, as it moved along the freeway toward Sacramento, California. Meanwhile in court the defendant was playing Tic-Tac-Toe with his lawyer as jury candidates struggled with what they might decide if they had the option of subjecting the UNABOM suspect to the sentence of death.

December 5, Friday: Turkish forces once again entered Iraq to attack Kurdish guerrilla forces.

Leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano was sworn in as the 1st democratically-elected mayor of Mexico City.

Shortly before noon Theodore John Kaczynski’s Montana cabin arrived at Mather Field, a former Air Force base near Sacramento, California, aboard a flatbed truck escorted by California Highway Patrol officers and a county sheriff’s deputy. The structure was to be stored in an empty warehouse on the decommisioned base until needed by the defense team to bolster their “See, this guy must be bonkers” defense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 8, Monday: In New Zealand, Jenny Shipley replaced Jim Bolger as Prime Minister (Bolger’s own party had sought his resignation due to his government’s low rating in opinion polls).

Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation confirmed their plan for merger. The new entity would be the 2d largest bank in the world, with total assets of $590,000,000,000.

In Prague, Four Songs on Czech Folk Poetry for voice and piano by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, on the 107th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

In Boston, Chansons cachées for piano by George Perle was performed for the initial time.

Thoreau’s seems to have been bigger than Kaczynski’s: Henrietta Bensussen has asked: > Has anyone seen the photo of Kaczynski’s “tiny shack”? > Otherwise known as the Unabomber, K’s cabin, 10x12, looks a lot > like Thoreau’s.... He’s retreated to the woods, a hermit, > he builds a cabin, no water or electricity, & sends long > convoluted messages to the public. Is he a representation of > the dark side, Thoreau as madman instead of naturalman?

I responded to the above by pointing out that to start with, of course, Thoreau hadn’t been any sort of “naturalman,” and anyhow there was, of course, a member of the Kaczynski family who was a Thoreauvian and his name wasn’t “Ted.” Younger brother David, who had turned Ted in as probably the UNABOM terrorist/serial killer, happened to be not only a public-spirited citizen and a decent guy but also, not coincidentally, an admirer of Thoreau.

I offered that I supposed that I could speak with some authority on this since in point of fact I had been at Harvard University while Ted had been there in 1960/1961 and, although I have not preserved much memory of him over the years, we had most definitely been in and around the same buildings (Seton Hall and, next door to it, Emerson Hall). Also, much later in life, I also had found myself in a waterless cabin in the mountains, while Ted was in his, building bombs (despite these being different chains of mountains in different states). I had not been killing anyone, and had been reading Thoreau.

(One activity, it would seem, I pointed out, precludes the other. :-)

Thoreau had not been a knee-jerk foe of technology. He took contract jobs, for instance, for the local Concord lead-pipe foundry, helping in the design of industrial equipment. I would offer that had Ted immersed himself in the Thoreau matrix, such a baptism might have helped him avoid his madness, might have held him back from mailing his bombs. In any event, this would have complicated his single-mindedly inane idea that it is technology that is our fons et origo malorum. Robin St. John Conover questioned: > Wonder what HDT would have made of it > had they trundled his cabin down the Concord Pike? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I responded to the above by mentioning that actually, that is precisely what we suppose did happen to it. After the shanty had been tugged by Waldo Emerson’s gardener Hugh Whelan up to the top of the slope in an attempt to enlarge it and transform it into a rural home for his family –when the bottle had gone empty for this Irishman– the structure had been carted down the Concord pike to be an outbuilding on a farm. Eventually parts of that outbuilding had wound up patching the side of a barn, and now at the Baker Farm media center they will show you a piece of the original wood and some of the square-cut nails.

(All this is not exactly as impressive as a splinter of the True Cross on display in a quartz and gold reliquary in a cathedral in Europe, although presumably these cabin materials are somewhat more reliably provenanced.)

REPLICA OF THOREAU’S SHANTY

I asked, did everyone see on page A5 in the The New York Times yesterday, William Glaberson’s article “Cabin Fever: Walden Was Never Like This”? ... Some commentators suggested that it sounded like a “Thoreau defense,” aimed at tapping an American suspicion of people who forsake conveniences and live apart from society. In his day, Henry David Thoreau’s choice of isolation at Walden Pond over the annoyances of Concord society “was certainly felt to be eccentric,” said John Burt, a professor at Brandeis University, a few miles from Walden Pond outside Boston. Any parallel between one of the country’s most important philosopher-writers and a man whose lawyers say he [sic] was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic would clearly be flawed. But as a master of courtroom tactics, the Thoreau defense has won praise from lawyers. ... Mr. [sic] Burt said the cliché of Thoreau as the archetypal hermit was inaccurate. Though Thoreau, like Mr. Kaczynski, did live in a cabin off on his own, Thoreau kept up with his friends and kept his cabin bare and orderly. And though Thoreau, like Mr. Kaczynski, was critical of technology and industrial society, Thoreau’s complaints certainly lacked the anger and violence of the Unabomber’s writings. Dr. Burt added that there were other obvious distinctions that might not serve the defense well. Mr. Kaczynski, according to the prosecutors, had several HDT WHAT? INDEX

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items in his cabin that Mr. Thoreau lacked: triggers, pipes and chemicals used to make explosive devices and one unexploded bomb. There was one other difference, Dr. Burt added, between the two famous cabins. Thoreau’s was 10 feet by 15 feet, Mr. Kaczynski’s was only 10 by 12.

December 11, Thursday: An international conference in Kyoto, attended by 150 nations, tentatively agreed on a plan to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. Under the agreement, 38 industrialized countries were required to reduce their greenhouse emissions to below 1990 levels. Developing countries were to set voluntary goals. Industrialized nations that created or protected domestic or foreign forests would receive emission credits.8

For the 1st time in 76 years, an Irish republican leader visited the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing St. Gerry Adams and Tony Blair both termed the meeting constructive.

The initial round of jury selection in the trial of Theodore John Kaczynski ended after 5 weeks after culling the citizen pool to 85 potential jurors. From this point the attorneys would need to bring the number down to 12 (plus a pool of 6 alternates), prior to December 29th when their opening statements were scheduled.

December 14, Sunday: The following letter appeared in the New York Times: No Echoes of Thoreau in Unabom Case To the Editor: It is not only Henry David Thoreau’s lack of explosives that distinguishes him from Theodore J. Kaczynski, the suspect in the Unabom case (Week in Review, Dec. 7). After “Walden,” Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” which inspired the nonviolent strategies of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others intent on correcting injustices. Thoreau valued obedience to one’s conscience over allegiance to the state, but here’s his formula for lawbreaking: “If it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” His method of lawbreaking was refusing to pay a poll tax, for which he was jailed until Ralph Waldo Emerson paid the tax. The story goes that when Emerson asked Thoreau, “What are you doing in there?”, Thoreau responded, “What are you doing out there?” STEVEN GEVINSON Oak Park, Ill.

The interesting thing about this letter, to me, is that this letter-writer is able to leap directly from: 1.) an unsubstantiated influence assertion and 2.) a falsehood in regard to the poll tax incident, to 3.) a conclusion that is indeed accurate.

The letter-writer's unsubstantiated influence assertion: 1.) is that Thoreau inspired Gandhi and King.

In fact, although both Gandhiji and the Reverend King did affirm such inspiration, we all know very well that 8. No kidding, this was what was being announced at the time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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political and cultural icons sometimes affirm such inspirations from other political and cultural icons not because it happens to be the truth but because of the influence which such positive and warm affirmations may have upon potential followers. Tolstòy also made such an assertion, and in the case of Tolstòy the assertion seems to have been false — it seems that Tolstòy’s actual influence was from the Reverend Adin Ballou of Hopedale, Massachusetts and that after the fact he had substituted the name of Thoreau (because Americans recognized that name but did not know much about the contemporary activities of Thoreau’s neighbor, the Reverend Ballou of Hopedale). Whether or not there was actual inspiration and influence from Thoreau to Gandhi and King is a matter of conjecture which we may investigate at length, but we need to bear in mind that when asked, Gandhi denied such an influence.

The falsehood: 2.) is that Waldo Emerson did, or would have, visited Thoreau in his jail cell.

At that point in time Emerson considered Thoreau’s self-martyrdom to verge upon madness.

This letter-writer is offering us not facts from history but material invented for a pleasant stage play.

No one visited Thoreau in jail except his jailer, and actually we do not know who it was who paid young Thoreau’s poll tax for him and thus interfered with the example of self-sacrifice this dweller in Walden Woods was attempting to create.

The true conclusion this letter-writer reaches: 3.) is of course that there are no echoes whatever, none whatever, of the Thoreauvian principle of civil disobedience, in this current UNABOM case. Anybody can live in a cabin, just anybody.

We can notice this absence of echoes very clearly by considering a reaction which Thoreau had late in his life to something offered by his friend Ellery Channing the poet, who lived across the street from him in Concord. Ellery had somehow suggested that one could sneak about being civilly disobedient without getting caught and punished for it, and Thoreau took that occasion to insist that Ellery simply didn’t understand. According to Thoreau’s own idea of his tactic of civil disobedience, it was essential –key, vital, unavoidable– that one perform one’s acts of civil disobedience in the public eye without any defense and then willingly endure all of society’s retributions whatever these might amount to. Only in such manner can one demonstrate that one’s civil disobedience is motivated by pure altruism and desire for the public good rather than by selfishness and self-conveniencing!

Did the UNABOM serial killer/terrorist adhere to this Thoreauvian principle? No, he adhered instead to Ellery Channing’s easy but mistaken notion of a self-serving maneuver. What would it take for him now to redeem himself by beginning to live up to Thoreau’s hard ideal of self-sacrifice for a principle? –He would need at the very least to not only proudly confess and proclaim all his actions but also demand execution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 22, Monday: The U.S. imploded its last Minuteman II missile silo. ATOM BOMB

President William Jefferson Clinton received a tumultuous welcome as he visited Sarajevo.

A report by the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva noted an “escalation of repression” by the Chinese in Tibet. They asserted that China was engaged in an “all-out war” against the Dalai Lama.

20-25 gunmen with machetes invaded the Indian village of Acteal in Chiapas state, Mexico, killing 45 residents and wounding at least 25 others. Local officials and other members of the governing PRI party would be charged with the crimes. (The village had supported Zapatista rebels.)

Despite delays while judge, defendant, and defense attorneys met in chambers apparently in regard to difficulties between Theodore John Kaczynski and his defenders, after 5 weeks of selection the 12-person-and- 6-alternates jury that was to hear the UNABOM case had been chosen out of the pool of 600 citizens. Quin Denvir, leading the defense, indicated that he was pleased with the 9 women and 3 men selected to decide his client’s fate.

December 23, Tuesday: The defense team for Theodore John Kaczynski offered to withdraw its mental-illness defense so long as they would still be entitled to use schizophrenia as an argument to save his life if he were to be convicted as the UNABOM culprit. The prosecution declined to concur.

A federal grand jury in Denver found Terry Nichols guilty of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter for the role he had played in Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Peter Maxwell Davies arrived at the Rothera Research Station where he would stay one month in preparation for composing an “Antarctic” symphony. The work had been commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the British Antarctic Survey.

December 29, Monday: In a dramatic move, the defense team for Theodore John Kaczynski –per their client’s wishes– abandoned their plan to use his mental condition as the centerpiece of his defense. They continued to consider that their client was a paranoid schizophrenic, but he had ordered them to drop the mental defect defense or be fired. Meanwhile the federal prosecutors declined an offer that he would plead guilty if spared the death penalty. His younger brother David Kaczynski was extremely disappointed and depressed at the prosecutor’s insistence on seeking the death penalty and pointed out again that the government had pledged to him that this would not happen when he turned his brother in.

La Kha Phieu replaced Do Muoi as secretary general of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

Turkey announced that it had completed its offensive against the Kurds of northern Iraq. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1998

January 3, Saturday: Prosecutors asked that the defense not produce any of the photographs initially taken of a disheveled Theodore John Kaczynski as taken into custody in his mountain cabin, photographs that made him appear so loony. In his cell, the defendant was preoccupied with what seemed to be an additional UNABOM manifesto.

January 4, Sunday: Theodore John Kaczynski had indicated that he wanted to make a “philosophical statement.” The defendant refused to acknowledge his younger brother David Kaczynski who sat weeping next to their 80- year-old mother Wanda Kaczynski in the front row of the courtroom. According to a spokesperson for the family, the mother had not glimpsed her older son for 15 years. Moments before his trial got under way he asked for a chambers meeting with Judge Garland Burrell Jr. and his defense team, to protest his brother’s presence in the courtroom. Four hours later the jury was sent home and court was recessed for 3 days. Up to this point, with a mental-impairment defense ruled out, a conviction had been regarded by everyone as an inevitability; however, at this point there seemed at least a chance that the judge might simply rule the defendant to be insane.

January 6, Tuesday: Theodore John Kaczynski made a bid to hire Tony Serra (a San Francisco attorney who had been portrayed by the actor James Woods in the 1989 movie “True Believers”) because this attorney would sit tight while the defendant used the courtroom as a bully pulpit for attitudes about technology and the dehumanization of modern society. This was rejected by US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr.

The UN called for $378,000,000 in food aid for North Korea.

January 7, Wednesday night: In his cell, Ted UNABOM Kaczynski failed to strangle himself with his underpants.

January 8, Thursday: When Theodore John Kaczynski changed from his prison jumpsuit to the clothes he was to wear in court, sheriff’s deputies noticed that he didn’t have underpants, and they could see red marks on his neck (putting two and two together like good little mathematicians, it began to be clear to his custodians that the previous night in his cell, their charge had been struggling to off himself). In court he was demanding to represent himself because his attorneys were presenting a “mental-defect” defense whereas he did not consider himself to be insane, and because a previous motion to change attorneys had been denied. In a surprise concession, this difficult defendant agreed to undergo the psychological testing which he had vehemently been resisting, in order to demonstrate that he was competent to represent himself.

Why, he was wondering, was there any need for him to be apologetic? There is nothing wrong with violence in itself. In any particular case, whether violence is good or bad depends on how it is used and the purpose for which it is used. So why do modern people regard violence as evil in itself? They do so for one reason only: they have been brainwashed by propaganda. Modern society uses various forms of propaganda to teach people to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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frightened and horrified by violence because the technoindustrial system needs a population that is timid, docile, and afraid to assert itself, a population that will not make trouble or disrupt the orderly functioning of the system. Power depends ultimately on physical force. By teaching people that violence is wrong (except, of course, when the system itself uses violence via the police or the military), the system maintains its monopoly on physical force and thus keeps all power in its own hands. Whatever philosophical or moral rationalizations people may invent to explain their belief that violence is wrong, the real reasons for that belief is that they have unconsciously absorbed the system’s propaganda.

(I did not copy the above out of MEIN KAMPF.)

From this point forward the accused would each night be hooked to a heart monitor in a special cell, a camera recording his every move on 24-hour suicide watch.

At 8PM on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, 31 members of a splinter group of the Solar Temple cult headed by German psychologist Heide Fittkau-Garthe were arrested by police, amid fears that these cultists had been planning a mass suicide. They had convinced themselves that the world would end at this point but that their bodies were going to be picked up by a space ship. (Hanna, Nick. THE MILLENNIUM: AROUGH GUIDE TO THE YEAR 2000. London: Rough Guides, 1998, page 226 and FACTNet) MILLENNIALISM

Michael Kemp Tippett died of pneumonia at his West London home at the age of 93.

A federal judge in New York sentenced Ramzi Ahmed Yousef to life in prison for his part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

It was reported to the American Astronomical Society that the universe was much older than previously thought, 15,000,000,000 years, and would continue to expand indefinitely.

January 9, Friday: US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. scheduled a competency hearing for Theodore John Kaczynski, to take place on January 22d, and designated a prison psychiatrist to examine his mental state. If the prison psychiatrist deemed the defendant competent, the judge would call the jury for opening statements. The judge warned the defendant that if he acted up in the courtroom he would be put aboard a plane and flown off for weeks of observation at “a psychiatric institution.” Defense attorney Judy Clarke gave assurances that her client would cooperate and he nodded vigorously in agreement.

January 11, Sunday: Realizing how embarrassing it would be to lose this case, the US Department of Justice re-opened plea bargain talks in secret with Theodore John Kaczynski’s defense team. The current issue of Newsweek reported that Attorney General Janet Reno did not want to risk a circus trial with the UNABOM suspect representing himself, as that might lead to numerous appeals.

Klaus Tennstedt died at his home in Kiel at the age of 71. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 17, Saturday: In the office of his lawyer office in Washington DC, President William Jefferson Clinton was deposed for 6 hours in the sexual harassment case of Paul Jones.

After spending about 20 hours with Theodore John Kaczynski, Dr. Sally Johnson, prison psychiatrist, needed to request a 1-day extension before stating her judgment as to whether the prisoner was competent to stand trial.

January 20, Tuesday: Defense attorneys demanded to be informed whether the government had discovered in remote areas of the Montana wilderness any “secret shacks” constructed by Theodore John Kaczynski. The defendant’s journals had been noticed to refer to the existence of such shacks, needed so that he would have “one place at least where I can still feel sure of privacy.”

Hutu rebels attacked a bus outside of Gisenyi, Rwanda, killing 34 and injuring 25.

President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic was elected by Parliament to a 2d 5-year term.

Mundus Canis for guitar and percussion by George Crumb was performed for the initial time, in Cannes. The composer played the percussion part.

January 21, Wednesday: Prison psychiatrist Dr. Sally Johnson reported that although Theodore John Kaczynski was indeed a paranoid schizophrenic, he was nevertheless competent to stand trial. Back in court with his sanity a non-issue, the defendant persuaded prosecution and defense to stipulate his legal right to defend himself. The prosecution team announced that it had resumed plea negotiations with the defense team. The judge had not as yet issued a ruling.

Iraq froze all UN weapons inspections.

Pope John Paul II landed in Cuba for a 5-day visit during which he would criticize Fidel Castro for suppression of religious freedom.

Stories began entering the press that, contrary to sworn testimony from both of them, US President William Jefferson Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky had indeed had sexual relations, and that he told her to lie about it under oath. The President angrily denied both allegations, that he’d had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and that he’d tried to get her to lie about it. GOVERNMENT SCANDALS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 22, Thursday: Given to understand that in this manner he could not be accused of insanity and would receive life in prison without parole, 55-year-old Theodore John Kaczynski pled guilty to being the UNABOM offender, and also admitted to some attacks for which he had not been charged. (“Not to brag, but....”)

For the 1st time the Roman Catholic Church made the records of the Holy Inquisition available to be inspected by scholars (except, of course, for the 20th Century, which remained off limits for the protection of the guilty).

Microsoft Corporation and the federal government reached partial settlement of an antitrust lawsuit, by the corporation pledging that it would bring is operating system into compliance with a court order of December 1997.

Evidence of Things Not Seen, a song cycle for four voices and piano by Ned Rorem to words of various authors, was performed for the initial time, in Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall, New York. This had been commissioned by the New York Festival of Song and the Library of Congress.

April 17, Friday: Sentencing for confessed UNABOM killer Theodore John Kaczynski, originally scheduled for May 15th, was rescheduled for May 4th because the pre-sentencing report had already been completed (prosecution and defense attorneys were still, however, in disagreement about the government’s plan to detail his crimes).

Sergei Kiriyenko was turned down a 2d time by the Russian Duma, for Prime Minister. President Yeltsin appointed him for a 3d time.

Canadian Imperial Bank and Toronto-Dominion Bank announced a merger after a stock transaction of C$46,700,000,000.

The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Morton Subotnick.

April 28, Tuesday: While the sentence had already been decided, prosecutors released a 30-page sentencing memorandum in regard to Theodore John Kaczynski’s crimes. Quoting extensively from unreleased writings, the culprit was depicted as having revealed himself not as an anti-technology Luddite who had been acting on principle, but as merely yet another garden-variety revenge seeker. “I act merely from my desire for revenge,” the perp had noted during April 1971. “I believe in nothing.... I don’t even believe in the cult of nature worshippers or wilderness worshippers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 30, Thursday: The Irish Republican Army announced that although it supported the peace agreement it would refuse to surrender its weapons.

Triodion for chorus by Arvo Pärt was performed for the initial time, in Westminster Abbey.

CBS News reported that while Theodore John Kaczynski was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Michigan, he had been having such difficulty getting close to women that he briefly fantasized about having a sex change operation so that he would be able to touch a female. He had gone as far as making an appointment to see a psychiatrist at the University Health Center, planning to ask whether sex change would be right for him. In the waiting room, however, he had lost his nerve, and wound up telling the psychiatrist he was depressed about the possibility of getting drafted. Later, he would be able to manage his shame through fantasizing the murder of this psychiatrist: Why not really kill that psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.... I suddenly felt that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal.

May 4, Monday: Having “acknowledged responsibility,” 55-year-old Ted Kaczynski received from US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. 4 sentences to life in prison, plus 30 years, without the possibility of parole (these 4 sentences to be served concurrently). An order was issued by the court that he pay $15,026,000 to his victims — an order that would be useful in auctioning off various of his seized possessions that no longer needed to be preserved as evidence, such as his cabin library, at inflated prices to the morbidly fascinated. As the convict began to address the judge, the family of Gilbert Murray, last of his victims, stood and exited the courtroom. He observed that the federal government had “discredited (him) personally” and indicated that at a future date he intended to make a response to the misrepresentation leveled against him and his political ideas.

May 5, Tuesday: Theodore John Kaczynski was assigned to the Supermax $60,00,000 prison near Florence, Colorado that had since November 1994 been warehousing some of America’s most dangerous federal convicts. There he would become Register Number 04475-046.

Technically, the mountain cabin that had been offered in evidence belonged to the Kaczynski family. David and his aged mother were considering putting it up for auction as a curiosity piece, thereby raising funds for surviving victims and their families.

Riots broke out in Medan, Indonesia in protest against the price increases that were taking effect, rises that were resulting from the International Monetary Fund requirement that Indonesia sharply reduce its subsidy of energy.

Wake up...and Die for cello and cello ensemble by John Tavener was performed for the initial time, in Beauvais. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 7, Thursday: Daimler-Benz AG and Chrysler Corporation announced plans to merge in a stock deal reported to amount to $38,300,000,000. The new company was to be known as “Daimler-Chrysler.”

Vickers PLC announced it was going to sell Rolls-Royce Motor Cars to Volkswagen AG for £430,000,000.

Voters in London approved a plan to create a government for the entire city.

In Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall, Tambor for orchestra by Joan Tower was performed for the initial time.

In San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, A Reel of Seven Fishermen for orchestra by Peter Maxwell Davies was performed for the initial time.

US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. revealed that at one point during his trial Theodore John Kaczynski had faked an argument with his lawyers and staged an attempted suicide in order to improve his chances of striking a deal with prosecutors and thereby avoid the death penalty. His maneuvers, the judge imagined, had been “strategies that enabled him to delay the trial proceedings and to improve his settlement prospects with the government.” Additionally, Ted had made a conscious decision “to employ trickery” to prevent the jury from hearing the very sordid details of this criminal conduct.9

June 4, Thursday: A federal judge sentenced Terry Nichols to life in prison without the possibility of parole, for having in 1995 helped Timothy McVeigh carry out the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservative paramilitaries in Colombia confirmed that they had killed 25 hostages they took in May from Barrancabermeja.

Defense attorney Quin Denvir argued against making prison psychiatrist Sally Johnson’s evaluation of Theodore John Kaczynski public, in that it contained private information potentially embarrassing for the murderer’s family. US District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. agreed to delay release of the report until June 11th.

June 10, Wednesday: Defense attorney Quin Denvir argued before the 3-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that prison psychiatrist Sally Johnson’s evaluation of Theodore John Kaczynski should remain confidential because it contained private information potentially embarrassing for the murderer’s family. The appeals court temporarily blocked release of the report and scheduled oral arguments for June 30th.

Bradley P. Dean, Ph.D. has provided us with an account of the grand opening of the Thoreau Institute: Sure, I’ll say a bit about the grand opening, prefacing my remarks with the observation that it was a spectacular event. We were blessed with almost unbelievably wonderful weather (sunny, low humidity, pleasant breeze), lots of laudatory talk about Thoreau, lots of laudatory talk about those of us involved in getting the Institute going, a truly stunning new building, 9. These are I suppose intriguing questions, or at least, they were of interest to this law dude Burrell as he struggled to prolong the 15 minutes before sinking back into obscurity. The question I have is, however, very much more practical. How is it that my fellow student Ted became an ecoterrorist or vengeance artist whereas somehow I myself, Austin Meredith, although at that same time simmering with similar fury at personal injustices and full of similar trepidations for the fate of our planet, have been able to avoid that? If this question could be answered with confidence — we might acquire, I suspect, some insight into the course we all ought to follow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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very lovely grounds, terrific volunteers (about 70 of them!), excellent and plentiful food and drinks (from what I heard), and gracious and patient guests (maybe 600 or so), some of them quite prominent. It would be very nice, I think, if others who attended the event, in whatever capacity, were to write up descriptions of the event from their particular perspective. If they would send their descriptions to me, I will collect them and, before long, put them on our Web site as part of a special “grand-opening” section of the site. And if they send me photos and other materials relating to the event, I will digitize those as well and put them on our site. Anyway, here goes. In anticipation of the President and First Lady arriving, the Secret Service shut down the entire Institute site Friday at 10:30 a.m. Everyone had to leave the site during the sweep, which was conducted by agents and dogs. The Secret Service opened the site back up just before noon, and staff and volunteers and service people and others participating in the day (students for the videoconference, for instance) started filing back onto the site after waiting atop Pine Hill, about 500 yards northwest of the Institute, or waiting on the path on the southeast slope of Pine Hill. Guests began to arrive around 11:45 or so and parked at the Codman House, about three-quarters of a mile south of the Institute, near Lincoln Center. Some VIPs parked in the lot down near Walden Pond, and a very few high-profile V-VIPs were driven up Baker Farm, the road leading to the Institute, to the Institute grounds. Vans shuttled the non-V-VIP guests from the

Codman House and the Walden parking areas up to the top of Pine Hill, which is directly east of Walden Pond along Route 126 or Walden Road. There’s an access road, usually locked, leading HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from Route 126 next to the pond to the top of Pine Hill, and at the top of the hill is an area to turn a vehicle around and a large water reservoir, built in the 1930s, I hear. As guests got on the vans, they were given a descriptive flyer telling them about the significance of Pine Hill to Thoreau. Guests were dropped off at the top of the hill, and then they walked down a gently sloping path to the Institute grounds, where they had to go through a metal detector and where they were given a packet containing a lovely commemorative booklet and some other items. (Gift bags for each guest were placed before the event on each seat on the front lawn of the Institute.) Because I had to be down in the Media Center delivering presentations (see the multimedia tour at www.walden.org-a trimmed-down version of part of the presentation we gave here, put together primarily by Mark Mosher, Jeanne Morley, and Monroe Poteet, all of Colorado Springs, who very generously donated their time and efforts), I did not see much of what was going on out on the front lawn, but I hear reports that all went very well. The President and First Lady had attended the MIT graduation, where he delivered the commencement address, and then they went to a picnic with members of the Kennedy family to commemorate the anniversary of RFK’s death. The President and First Lady were running about an hour late, which threw things off a bit for those of us at the Institute. In any case, the President and First Lady flew in one of four helicopters to nearby Hanscom Field, where their motorcade awaited them. Then they drove to the top of Pine Hill, where Don Henley and a bunch of press people met them. Don, the President, and the First Lady walked down the path from the top of Pine Hill to the Institute, arriving on the grounds, I think, at about 3:50 p.m. (They had been scheduled to get here at 3 p.m.) They joined several others who awaited them at the entrance to the new Research Center, and the party then toured the main floor of the Research Center, went out into the contemplative garden behind the Research Center, and then walked into the back door of the Media Center, where I was waiting with two young ladies (Kim Wing and Allyson Sgro, students from Boston Latin and Concord Middle School, respectively) and a very pleasant and talkative Secret Service agent, Roy Wilson. In addition to Don, with the Presidential party, as I recall, were Kathi Anderson, some aides, Don Henley’s in-laws, and Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Because we were running a bit later than planned, Kathi, who preceded the Presidential party, asked me to cut my presentation in half, so I had the two young ladies show the party the “virtual tour” that is on the Web site and that we projected onto a large screen so that a group of people could view it. (My colleagues and I figured that the President and First Lady would feel better about having two young people show them the technology rather than an old fellow with a reputation for saying untoward things at inconvenient times. Incidentally, there are two differences between what we showed in the Media HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Center and what is on the Web site: during the tours we ran a complete version of the computer-generated “fly-out” from the Institute, over Pine Hill, across Walden Pond, to Thoreau’s Walden house site [Monroe Poteet put that together, and it is wonderful]; and we showed a videoclip of a helicopter fly-over of Walden Pond [put together by Scott Beyers of Minnesota from footage shot by the Rendon Group of Boston, a long-time donor to the Walden Woods Project] where on the Web site there is simply a partial panorama showing part of Thoreau’s Cove and a portion of the pond.) After leaving the Media Center, the Presidential party went upstairs, where the President and First Lady placed an original brick from Thoreau’s Walden house site into the south wall of the Research Center. The brick came from the collection of Roland Wells Robbins, which is now in the archives of the Research Center. The President and First Lady then went into the Executive Director’s office on the main level of the Research Center and relaxed for a few minutes before joining the video conversation that was taking place in the library of the old building between that location (where students from three local schools were assembled) and a school in St. Petersburg, Russia. During this time the aforementioned young ladies and I walked to the Education Center, the old building here, so that they could participate in the video conversation and so that I could watch the rest of the day’s festivities. I went out to the front lawn, where the 600 or so guests were assembled, and we all watched the President, First Lady, and Don Henley participate in the video conversation, where some interesting things were said. Sometime after that, as I recall, Tony Bennett came out and sang the first part of “America the Beautiful.” Then the two senators and Kathi and Don came out and sat on the platform that was set up out on the front lawn. Then the President and First Lady were introduced and walked to the platform. All the folks on the platform spoke, and everything went real well. Then the President and First Lady left the platform and walked a rope line that had been set up, shaking hands and such. The First Lady broke off early and came into the Education Center, but the President stayed behind to shake hands with guests and with the band that had played earlier. When he came into the house, all the Institute staff had assembled on the steps of the old building’s great hall leading to the second floor, and the President and First Lady came in and had their photo taken with us. They then walked down a receiving line and shook hands with others who had helped make the day so successful. Just as they were ready to leave, the President made an odd, shrugging gesture to one of the Secret Service agents, and the two of them headed off at a trot to the second floor, obviously to find a bathroom that was not being used. That was a nice touch, I thought! A couple of minutes later the President and First Lady got into their limo, and the long motorcade headed out, presumably for Hanscom Field. An hour or more later Air Force One took off, followed shortly thereafter (during the E.O. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Wilson speech that evening and with quite a roar) by the transport plane that presumably carries the Presidential limo. As soon as I am able to digitize materials from the event (press reports, sound bytes, videoclips, photos, and so on), I will put them on our Web site; so check the site once in a while. It probably won’t be for a while, though, because I have to travel to Colorado Springs to meet with representatives of our principal donor, Digital Equipment Corporation, on how to implement the very generous Platinum Service contract we recently signed with them, a donation worth some $650,000 and lasting a full year! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 24, Wednesday: AT&T announced it was purchasing Tele-Communications, Inc. for stock worth $37,300,000,000.

Ted Kaczynski, shopping a proud new anti-technology manifesto10 among New York publishers, posted a handwritten 4-page pitch from his prison cell to Simon & Schuster in the hope they would be interested in selling his side of the mental-defect story, with all proceeds of course to go by law to his surviving victims and the families of the 3 who had not survived (after careful consideration, senior editor Bob Bender would decline this project).

August 20, Thursday: US naval vessels fired cruise missiles at a suspected terrorist site in Afghanistan and at a pharmaceutical facility in Khartoum.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Québec was not free to secede without negotiating terms with the other provinces and the federal government. However, should Québec indeed vote to secede, the other governments would be obliged to negotiate such a separation. “Go thou, and sin no more.”

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco announced it was allowing federal prosecutors to make public Theodore John Kaczynski’s 47-page psychiatric report, prepared by prison psychiatrist Sally Johnson after 19 hours of interviews. Public defender Quin Denvir indicated that he would presumably appeal on the practical grounds that this was a profound piece of legal stupidity: lack of confidentiality would make future clients more reluctant to cooperate with prison mental examinations.

August 21, Friday: Former President of South Africa P.W. Botha was found guilty of contempt in the town of George for refusing to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was fined about $16,000, or to serve one year in jail.

Anthony P. Bisceglie, attorney of record for David Kaczynski and his wife Professor Linda Patrik, received in his law office in Washington DC a check from the Justice Department in the amount of $1,000,000. This was money appropriated by the federal Congress to back up the reward that the FBI had offered in 1993 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator of the UNABOM series of killings. The attorney informed the press that David, who was working as a social worker at Equinox, a shelter for troubled teen-agers in the Schenectedy area, intended –after, of course, federal and state taxes would cancel almost half of it, and then after this attorney would have his bill paid in full– to put whatever money would turn out to be left over into a fund established for the victims of the bombings.11

September 9, Wednesday: Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr presented his report to the US Congress on the conduct of President William Jefferson Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair. He did so because he found “substantial and credible information … that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.”

Release of the prison psychiatrist’s report on the sexual deviance of Theodore John Kaczynski. There were fantasies about mutilating a girlfriend, killing psychiatrists, and having a sex-change operation.12 10. Have I mentioned that this was the year in which the high-capacity DVD-ROM we all know and love was being introduced? Subsequent iterations of the DVD format had increased capacities to 8.5GB for dual-layer designs, to 9.7GB for double-sided, single-layer implementations, and to 17GB for double-sided, dual-layer designs. The new DVD-RAM random access memory drives would allow users to create their own 2.6GB DVDs. Industry opinion was that they would likely skip the write-once format and go straight to designing rewritable disks à la CD-RW technology. Gee whiz! 11. This turned out to be at least half a million and it did happen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 22, Sunday: David Kaczynski told The Daily Gazette of Schenectady that to pay the family’s legal bills he planned to sell a book and movie rights having to do with his mental struggle in turning his brother over to authorities.

Dissident poet Mohammed Mokhtari and his wife were stabbed to death in their home in Teheran. The government was suspected.

Celestial Dinner Music for flute and harp by William Bolcom was performed for the initial time, in Washington DC.

12. It interests me that from start to finish the psychiatric diagnosis of Ted K. has been paranoid schizophrenia, and only paranoid schizophrenia, whereas in the Thoreau literature we have experienced an endless series of scholarly papers down through the decades, each one attempting to make a case for a psychiatric diagnosis of Henry Thoreau, and each one has proposed a uniquely distinct diagnostic category: bipolar illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, Asperger syndrome, mother fixation, clinical depression, repressed homosexuality, what have you. Why this difference? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1999

“Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Tom Tayback in Grizzly Adams and the Legend of Dark Mountain.

In the Hollywood movie P. T. B ar nu m, meanwhile, he was being played by Jeff Watson.

Ted Kaczynski, a mountain man who ate all his furry friends, donated 15 boxes of post-trial documents to the Labadie Collection in Special Collections at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan. Please do make your pilgrimage.

January 13, Wednesday: When the Brazilian government allowed its real to plunge 8.3% in value, world markets declined.

David Kaczynski, whose brother had been classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, set up a fund to distribute about $500,000 to victims of crimes committed by persons with this mental illness. He and his wife Professor Linda Patrik were forwarding the money to the Albany branch of The Community Foundation. “This is the best we can do” — the remainder of the $1,000,000 federal reward had been consumed by federal and state taxes and legal fees. David indicated he was close to sealing a deal on book and movie rights to his family’s story, with any proceeds from this as well going to the families of people his brother had been killed, and to the surviving victims. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 5, Friday: In City Hall, Newcastle, New South Wales, Rockpool Dreaming for soprano saxophone and strings by Peter Sculthorpe was performed for the initial time.

Three of America’s most notorious bombers –Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, and UNABOM perp Ted Kaczynski– saw each other during their daily 1-hour exercise time at Colorado’s SuperMax prison. According to Yousef’s attorney Bernard Kleinman, prisoners Yousef and McVeigh had discussed minor matters such as movies they’d seen on television, and prison food, adding that prisoner Kaczynski had been “there physically, but he really doesn’t discuss what they discuss.”

February 11, Thursday: Ted Kaczynski, considering that he had been unfairly coerced into pleading guilty, hired a new lawyer to help him obtain retrial despite awareness that this might result in a sentence to death.

February 12, Friday: The US Senate voted to acquit President William Jefferson Clinton of both charges brought against him by the House of Representatives. On the perjury count the vote was 45-55. On the obstruction of justice count, the vote was 50-50 whereas a 2/3ds vote would have been needed.

Wood and Reed Transformed for bassoon and wind ensemble by Leslie Bassett was performed for the initial time, at the University of Michigan.

Lux Perpetua for organ and orchestra by Samuel Adler was performed for the initial time, in Dallas.

After unsuccessfully pitching his new 548-page screed to Simon & Schuster and other established New York publishers, Ted Kaczynski signed with Beau Friedlander of Context Media. This would be “an attempt to tell the other side of a one-sided tale that was spun by his family and his attorneys in their attempt to save him from the death penalty.” Any proceeds would go by law to the families of the people he had killed, and to the survivors of his attacks. The book was plotted to hit the shelves during late May or June.

March 1, Monday: It was reported in the media that in a pending 368-page publication TRUTH VERSUS LIES Ted Kaczynski was not only denying being mentally ill but also refusing to acknowledge that he was the UNABOM culprit. In the writing he was comparing his brother David to Judas: “My brother is another Judas Iscariot, except that, unlike the original Judas, he doesn’t even have enough courage to go hang himself.”13

The UN peacekeeping mission in Macedonia officially ended.

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on Their Destruction went into effect with a ceremony at UN offices in Geneva. China, Russia, and the United States of America of course were not parties to this treaty.

13. We reflect, of course, that on the night of January 7, 1998 Ted had summoned the courage to attempt to strangle himself with his own underpants. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 16, Wednesday: Ted Kaczynski appealed his sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole to the federal Ninth Circuit Court. (Consider this “boundary function,” Ted, “when never is too soon, does that tell us anything about sooner than never?” Discuss.)

Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare approved sale of the oral contraceptive pill (Japan, which is in desperate need of more Japanese, had made itself the last member of the United Nations to do so).

Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki succeeded Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as President of South Africa.

July: Dale Schwie and his spouse were in Winona on the Mississippi River where the LaCrosse County Historical Society had an exhibit on steamboats. They were featuring the War Eagle, the steamboat on which Thoreau traveled on from Red Wing, Minnesota to Prairie Duchene, Wisconsin.

At the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, prisoner for life Ted Kaczynski, convicted UNABOM terrorist/serial killer, had been being allowed out of his solitary cell once per day for an 1-hour exercise session in an enclosed wire cage open to the sky, along with other prisoners. There he had been able to associate with condemned perp of the Oklahoma City bombing Timothy McVeigh and with prisoner for life Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, perp of the World Trade Center bombing. Although at first Kaczynski had looked down his nose at Oklahoma City bomber McVeigh, considering his political attitudes as simplistic, McVeigh had taken a liking to him and he had found that he was able to chat with McVeigh about innocuous topics such as languages. Yousef had found that he had been able to engage in intense political discussions with the Oklahoma City bomber, but not at all with the UNABOMer. McVeigh admired the fact that Yousef had stood up on his hind legs at his sentencing and declared “I’m a terrorist, and I’m proud of it because the US government deserved what I did to them.” Yousef would observe in regard to McVeigh: “I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.” However, at this point McVeigh was transferred to a new federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana in preparation for his execution.

July 6, Tuesday: Ehud Barak replaced Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel, leading a center/left coalition.

The United States imposed economic sanctions on the Taliban militia in Afghanistan for harboring the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden charged with directing the bombing of our Kenya and Tanzania embassies.

Michael Mello, author of the recently published THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS. THEODORE JOHN KACZYNSKI, reported breathlessly that the UNABOM culprit had during his undergraduate years at Harvard University volunteered for an experiment in Cold War mind-twisting sponsored by the CIA. At first this would be made to sound like it had been a really big deal (News Flash: Harvard drove Ted crazy for the CIA!) but after some more consideration, this would turn out to have been, as our various government mind-fuck schemes go, a rather banal thingie. Not nearly enough to set the propeller atop someone’s beanie a-spinnin’. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 24, Tuesday: In 1996, Valerie James had written in The European Magazine that “The configuration of planets which predicted the coming of Christ will once again appear on August 24, 1999.” Since actually there isn’t any such configuration of planets predicting the birth of Jesus to be found anywhere in the Christian documentary sources, for sure this nice lady has her head up her ass big time. We may presume, however, that she would have been penciling in this date in her desktop Day Planner, for the Parousia: “August 24th, I’m going to be taken up into Heaven today (cancel all appointments).”

With his 368-page memoir TRUTH VERSUS LIES just about to be released by Context Books, Ted Kaczynski authorized the publisher to release to the Internet an 11-page “Ship of Fools” parable he had created from his Colorado prison cell at the suggestion of Tim LaPietra, a 21-year-old senior at the State University of New York in Binghamton, intended for their OFF! student zine. Ted’s little parable is about the passengers on a vessel controlled by an insane crew, being consumed in griping about personal injustices rather than seizing control over their vessel –then they crash into a couple of icebergs and everyone is dead –sorta like the 2013 Korean movie “Snowpiercer” except it happens at sea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: Ted Kaczynski’s TRUTH VERSUS LIES (Context Books). We learn that Ted’s brother betrayed him out of sibling rivalry: “my parents valued me more highly.” He contended that his family had agreed to a mental- illness defense only to hide their abuse of him while he had been a child. Rather than turn him in to the feds, his brother should have sent him a message threatening to expose him. “If I were the UNABOMER,” he wrote, “that would have been an effective deterrent.”

To win forgiveness, David would need to leave his wife and join a group of “environmental radicals” in their the fight against modern society. “I know how to put him in touch with environmental radicals, and I believe they would accept him if he came to them repentant... In this way he would not only earn my personal forgiveness; what is more important, he would be cleansed and redeemed of his treason against the values that he once held in common with me and many other people.”

Attorney for the Kaczynski family Anthony Bisceglie commented that investigators had looked into these abuse allegation and concluded that they were false. “This is symptomatic of Ted’s illness,” he said, “and it is not uncommon in schizophrenia for this kind of nasty, angry, unpleasant striking out to occur.”

The End of Human Life on Earth, according to Jack Van Impe. (Shaw, Eva. EVE OF DESTRUCTION. Los Angeles CA: Lowell House, 1995, page 131)

Also, according to Escape666.com on the internet, Nostradamus’s King of Terror was to descend on Earth during this September, heralding the beginning of the Tribulation and The Rapture. Escape666 said, regarding Nostradamus’s infamous quatrain X.72: “now we know EXACTLY when he meant: SEPTEMBER 1999.” (However, as the end of September approached they changed their date to October 12th.) MILLENNIALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 13, Wednesday: The French National Assembly approved a measure to give legal status to unwed couples, whether homosexual or heterosexual. This made France the 1st predominantly Roman Catholic country to do so.

For the 1st time, Philip Morris Company executives admitted publicly that its product, cigarettes, was addictive and could cause cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other serious illnesses.

Ted Kaczynski signed a contract with Walt Disney Enterprises giving them exclusive option to make a movie of his life (you understand this doesn’t mean that any movie actually is going to be made: it’s a mere option).

The US Senate failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. ATOM BOMB

November 1, Sunday: The London Sunday Times reported that Walt Disney Enterprises was planning to spend $80,000,000 to film its life of Ted Kaczynski. Their plan was to construct a Greek tragedy by focusing on the moral dilemma faced by younger brother David. (Since then nothing has been heard of such a project.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2001

February 12, Monday: The federal Ninth Circuit Court rejected Ted Kaczynski’s appeal of his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. “We’re sorry, sir, but the precedent is clear that on an appeal we are never permitted to extend a sentence.”

August 1, Wednesday: David Kaczynski became executive director of “New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty.”

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore held a press conference unveiling a “Ten Commandments” monument in Vermont granite he had installed in the Alabama Judicial Building to proclaim that “the Judeo- Christian God” had provided the moral foundation of our law (the wording employed on the monument was from the Christian tradition rather than the Jewish). This would lead to a federal judge ordering that it be removed within ten days, to his refusal to obey this order, to his removal from his post as Chief Justice by a unanimous decision of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, to his running as a Republican for election to his former post as Chief Justice, and to his election by the Alabama voters to return to that position — but would never lead to re-display of his monument.

In Germany, same-sex registered partnerships were legalized. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2002

In the TV miniseries “Julius Caesar,” Cato the Younger was channeled by Christopher Walken.

David Kaczynski appeared in a PBS video, “Endgame: Ethics and Values in America.”

March 18, Monday: The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear Ted Kaczynski’s case for reversal of the decision of the 9th Federal Circuit Court that he not be granted a new trial. Federal judicial involvement in the UNABOM situation would, with this decision, terminate once for all. “You’ll need to find something else to fill your casual hours rather than legal appeals. Have you considered quadratic equations? Have you considered blank verse?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May/June: FBI agent Colleen Rowley dispatched a 13-page “whistleblower” letter to Director Robert Mueller describing how certain named FBI agents had thwarted the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer (the agents who had undermined these investigations would get promotions).

Jane Hirshfield suggested in The American Poetry Review that the perennial appeal of Thoreau’s parable of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtledove was “inextricable from its ambiguity.” So, we shouldn’t be struggling to grasp whatever it was that Thoreau was struggling to offer us, for that would be rendering his words unambiguous — which would be an entirely wrongheaded thing to do. (I do not agree. To my way of thinking, Thoreau’s meaning has been right there on the page all along as an “unknown known.” Everybody has always known what he meant –that our “losses” are something we hold desperately onto, are the last things in the world which we would ever sacrifice, that we would throw our loved ones into the flames rather than give up those precious “losses” – but nobody can afford to know that they know this, because knowing that they know this would fundamentally change their life courses and if there is anything they cannot do, is allow their life courses to be so fundamentally changed. Therefore everybody pretends to themselves that this paragraph in the book is an unsolved mystery, and persists in the struggle to come up with one or another trope, one or another stupid trope that I can only characterize in psychoanalytic terminology as an endless series of “screen” interpretations.)

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It never ceases to amaze me, how Harvard University goes on year after year, disparaging and disdaining their most famous alumnus — but year after year, this prissiness about David Henry Thoreau, Class of ’37, goes on and on. The latest example of this Harvard prissiness is to be found in Perdita Buchan’s “’Cliffe Notes” column for the May/June 2002 issue of Harvard Magazine, pages 16-18, a retrospective of college life entitled “A nostalgic look at a bygone world” in which this author writes “Thoreau, doing all that prissy traveling in Concord, was one of the things I didn’t like about English 7” — this, it would appear, in order for the writer gratuitously to segue into a brain-dead quip about that lauded bygone college experience: “But I’d have to say I traveled widely in Cambridge.”

Frankly, I find this annoying. Can you think of any other alumnus whom they habitually beat up on in this shoddy fashion? For instance their famed grad Ted Kaczynski, do they ever mention the handcrafted bombs he labored over as examples of prissy?

Their famed grad Ted Kennedy, do they ever characterize his behavior on Chappaquiddock as having been prissy? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2003

Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange was formed in Vietnam to provide medical care, rehabilitation services, and financial assistance to those impacted by Agent Orange. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Alston Chase’s HARVARD AND THE UNABOMBER: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST (W.W. Norton & Company) connected the dots between Ted Kaczynski’s abusive experiences as an undergraduate under Professor of Clinical Psychology Henry Alexander Murray to his subsequent life trajectory. In fact, however, he was aware that he was being studied and participated in this CIA-sponsored experiment more or less willingly. Although the subjects were lied to, being informed that they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student while actually they were being subjected to a “purposely brutalizing psychological experiment,” Ted could have opted out. During the test he was taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored his physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each subject had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations, and this material had been turned over to an anonymous attorney who entered the room and individually belittled each student based in part on disclosures they had offered. This was filmed and later in the study the subjects’ facial expressions were played back to them several times.

Books intended for little children, such as this one “Henry Climbs a Mountain” by D.B. Johnson published during this year, tend to falsify history by misrepresenting the $1 poll tax that Thoreau had famously refused to pay as having had something to do with human slavery (books intended for grown-ups, to the contrary, tend to falsify history by misrepresenting the poll tax that Thoreau refused to pay as having had something to do with our War on Mexico): “Henry wants to climb a mountain, and nothing is going to stop him. Then Sam, the tax collector, puts him in jail for not paying his taxes. Henry refuses to pay to a state that allows slavery. But being locked up doesn’t stop Henry. He still gets to splash in rivers, swing from trees, and meet a stranger. This bear, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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modeled on the real Henry David Thoreau, roams free.”

D. B. JOHNSON

There are two dangers here. First, to pretend that this $1-per-year poll tax had something to do with human slavery, or had something to do with our War on Mexico –when those factoids are easily demonstrated to be historically false– leaves the doctrine of civil disobedience open to the disrepute, that it was something founded merely upon historical falsehoods and is therefore something to be sniffed at. Second, to presume that you understand the doctrine of civil disobedience when you presume falsely that it has to do merely with disobeying laws that are evil, that it does not extend beyond the domain of evil law, is to presume that you already fully understand something that you have not yet even begun to comprehend. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 1, Thursday: Outside Sacramento, California, Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin was minutes from demolition. The 10-by-12-foot plywood structure had already been wheeled out when Randy Turtle, president of SafeStore, showed up to assert “This cabin will not be dismantled today” (details unavailable).

In New York, Concertino: Baroque Meditations for orchestra by Lukas Foss was performed for the initial time.

USS Abraham Lincoln lay just over the horizon from the naval base at San Diego, California, well within reach of George W. Bush’s presidential helicopter Marine One. However, the President, to make his infamous speech before the “Mission Accomplished” banner, chose to be a passenger in a S-3B Viking landing on the aircraft carrier and then posture in a flight suit as if he had been at the controls of this aircraft. “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished,” he was to inform our boots on the ground in Afghanistan. “Uh, yeah, if you say so.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2005

November 11, Friday: David Kaczynski spoke in Indianapolis, at the Indiana University School of Law, in an event sponsored by Law Students Against Capital Punishment.

Attorneys for Stanley “Tookie” Williams, convicted of 4 murders, asked Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger of California for clemency on the basis of work Williams had been doing as an anti-gang counselor, for more than several decades while on Death Row. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2008

May 12, Monday: David Kaczynski participated in a conference “Race, Media, and Capital Punishment” at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

The US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from Edward Nathaniel Bell, a death row inmate in Virginia who was alleging that although he had murdered a police officer, his attorney had then neglected to inform the sentencing court of mitigating circumstances in his background.

August 13, Wednesday: Ted Kaczynski, convicted UNABOM terrorist/serial killer, learned in his supermax cell that the 10-by-12-foot Montana cabin at which he had been captured was being used as part of a display, and posted a handwritten letter to a 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals objecting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s loan of the cabin as part of G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI’s First Century. “I recently received a page from the Washington Post, June 19, 2008, page A9. This comprises a full-page, full-color advertisement that features my cabin, which is being exhibited publicly at something called a ‘Newseum,’ Since the advertisement states that the cabin is ‘FROM FBI VAULT,’ it is clear that the government is responsible for the public exhibition of the cabin. This has obvious relevance to the victims’ objection to publicity connected with the Unabom case.” The Newseum immediately released the juicy information that this perp had made an indignant protest, indicating that there would be no changes to their exhibit that had opened in June and would continue for a year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

2009

April 20, Monday: David Kaczynski’s essay about his relationship with his brother Ted Kaczynski appeared in a collection of essays, Andrew Blauner’s BROTHERS: 26 STORIES OF LOVE & RIVALRY (Jossey-Bass).

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had attacked Columbine High School in Colorado, on this day 10 years earlier.

The hijacker of CanJet Flight 918 surrendered. releasing 6 hostages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

2010

David Kaczynski’s and Ted Kaczynski’s book of poems A DREAM NAMED YOU (New York: Troy Books).

Michael McCurdy’s WALDEN THEN & NOW: AN ALPHABETICAL TOUR OF HENRY THOREAU’S POND (Charlesbridge).

Feral House’s TECHNOLOGICAL SLAVERY: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF THEODORE J. KACZYNSKI, A.K.A. “THE UNABOMBER,” made up of an interview conducted in 2001 and a collection of correspondence up to 2006, as assembled by Ted Kaczynski and David Skrbina of the University of Michigan at Dearborn.

PARALLEL DESTINIES by choreographer Germaine Ingram, composer Bobby Zankel, and visual artist John HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Dowell, a dance/theater piece about real slavery and real freedom that is a work-in-progress at the Philadelphia Folklore Project. ONEY JUDGE

December 5, Sunday: The 1.4 acre area of Montana land of the UNABOM perpetrator was for sale (not including, of course, the cabin), asking price $69,500. HDT WHAT? INDEX

UNABOM TED KACZYNSKI

2011

May 19, Thursday: The FBI, noting that the initial 4 UNABOM attacks had occurred in Chicago and its suburbs between 1978 and 1980 and that prisoner Ted Kaczynski in “Supermax” had visited his parents occasionally in their home in Lombard, Illinois near Chicago during 1982, requested a DNA sample in connection to the 7 unsolved Tylenol poisonings of that year. The UNABOM ecoterrorist would offer a bargain. An auction of his belongings was being planned, to pay off part of the $15,000,000 he owed his victims and their families, the items to be auctioned including an original handwritten version of his manifesto written on lined 3-hole paper with the current high bid being at more than $14,000, and a later typed draft, expected to command about $2,500. The prisoner would provide a DNA sample only if the auction was canceled.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

July 22, Friday: Anders Behring Breivik electronically distributed a 1,500-page manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” in which he appears to have been copying from the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski almost word for word for the initial few pages, and killed a bunch of people. He altered a Kaczynski screed on leftism and leftists’ “feelings of inferiority,” by inserting terms such as “multiculturalism” and “cultural Marxism.” For instance, where Kaczynski had written “One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general,” Breivik created “One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is multiculturalism, so a discussion of the psychology of multiculturalists can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of Western Europe in general.” (One is reminded, in this, of how the Australian actor Erroll Flynn in 1959 in MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS paraphrased from Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN in the process of fabricating an autobiography: “I am going to China because I wish to live deliberately ... to front the essentials of life ... and above all not to discover, when I come to die, that I have not lived,” and so on in this vein.)

Once upon a time Thoreau spend a night in jail, in a matter involving a poll tax. Breivik would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with narcissistic personality disorder and is as likely as Ted to be spending the remainder of his life in protective detention.

UNABOM “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2012

David Kaczynski became executive director of “Karma Triyana Dharmachakra,” a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Woodstock, New York (1-845-679-5906 x1091, [email protected]).

There are a couple of new books out that I haven’t had much of a chance to take a look at. First there is Professor of English Robert B Ray of the University of Florida’s “WALDEN X 40” (Indiana UP, 2012) is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as “Adopting Henry Thoreau’s own compositional method, Professor Ray takes up several questions posed in WALDEN. Thoreau developed his books from his lectures, and his lectures from his almost-daily journal notations of the world around him, with its fluctuating weather and appointed seasons, both forever familiar and suddenly brand new. Ray derives his 40 brief essays from the details of WALDEN itself, reading the book in the way that Thoreau proposed to explore his own life — deliberately. Ray demonstrates that however accustomed we have grown to its lessons, WALDEN continues to be as surprising as the November snowfall that, Thoreau reports, ‘covered the ground ... and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter.’ ‘The essays often return to the same quotations and ideas, illuminating WALDEN’s darker, more obscure passages from various philosophical and theoretical perspectives — thought experiments that read like a thick layering of superimposed snapshots that Ray has taken from different angles of WALDEN’s pages. ... Ray’s collection of readings never resolve themselves into a single argument, always teetering on the brink of explanation. Yet its evasive technique may be WALDEN X 40’s greatest charm, pointing the reader back to WALDEN itself so that she might engage in her own interrogations.’”

Then there is Associate Professor Maurice S. Lee of Boston University English Department’s UNCERTAIN CHANCES: SCIENCE, SKEPTICISM, AND BELIEF IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (Oxford UP, 2012), which espouses an attitude that 19th-Century American literature participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift from faith in Christian teleology and confidence in rational certitude toward a more modern, more skeptical worldview centered on chance. In this treatise there is a chapter “Roughly Thoreau” that he truncates as follows: “This chapter focuses on the radical empiricism of WALDEN, Thoreau’s journals, and his later scientific writings. As an artist, philosopher, surveyor, fisherman, and naturalist, Thoreau comes to accept the uncertainty of chance and its imperatives for the conduct of life, even as –like John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, and William James– he engages in the probabilistic management of nature. Thoreau learns over the course of his career that natural science is not strictly a positivist enterprise but, rather, a probabilistic pursuit in which to measure under conditions of chance is not precisely to know. Thoreau’s disciplined commitments to the handling of chance distance him from the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and help him bridge the worrisome divide between his science and art.”

May: Climate change deniers made pertinent use of the image of one of those crazies who believe in global warming: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2015

May 21, Thursday: The ears of the righteous are constructed in such manner that, when someone makes a remark such as “The cause of evil is righteousness,” it goes whizzing in one ear and out of the other without leaving any trace through their brains. Sorry, folks, that’s not intended as any insult, it’s just the way things are.

Last night I attended, by invitation, a meeting of the “Earth Care Witness” group at our local Durham, North Carolina monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and spoke out most seriously in regard to the intransigent nature of such “systemic” or “structural” problems as global climate change. Such problems are categorically different from non-structural problems, in that although lesser problems can sometimes be resolved by a bit of social tinkering, structural problems are ever so much more intractable and intransigent. The structural problem that I perceive, I offered, is a very general one: “the more we environmentalists win, the more we lose.” When an environmentalist goes vegetarian, as tonight while we consumed our potato and salad, there’s that much more tenderloin for the non-vegetarian to eat, and at a more affordable price. When a Democratic politician recognizes the reality of climate change, he or she merely makes it easier for some Republican to pretend not to believe in global warming science, and then go accept more campaign $$$ from the pollution lobbyists. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This morning I received in my email inbox the minutes of the meeting as posted to the Durham Meeting GoogleGroup by Friend Susan Tideman. Of course it was as if I hadn’t been there or hadn’t had anything at all to offer. Sue’s brain isn’t the sort of brain that is prepared to register any such thought. We had had a righteous meal of half a baked potato with garnish and a green salad, provided gratis by the committee, and then segued into the main meeting room to watch on DVD a TV special about rising sealevels. While watching the storm surge sweep through New Jersey last evening at the meetinghouse, I of course felt like I was Anthony Comstock sitting around of an evening flipping through the various smut magazines I had seized that day from the US Mail. For the life of me I cannot grasp how this viewing of titillating images of destruction is so very different from other tit-and-ass images. Is this all a matter of consuming images that have a market because they are intriguing to look at? If I have any clue as to what is going on in anyone else’s mind, I would suppose these Quakers had all been sitting there telling themselves that that they were looking at such images of destruction only for the most righteous of reasons?

I pointed out to Bob and Carol Passmore, the Quaker elders who had invited me, “You know, back in the day, back in 1960, I went to school with Ted Kaczynski, so I think have acquired some special insight into some of these things. One of these hard-won insights is that Quakers should not fall victim to survivalist fantasies — and yet this is where affiliations such as ‘Earth Care Witness’ are foreseeably heading. The first corrective that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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is needed for such survivalist fantasies is the plain assertion, that in point of fact we are not destined to survive. Nobody gets out of here alive. Extinction happens to be the fate of every species and it becomes the prompt fate of each species that slips through its network of restraints and overexploits and destroys its own environment. That’s the way evolution works. We have achieved such power over nature that we are in the process, even as we speak, of overexploiting and destroying our own environment. The very idea that we are going to survive, constitutes this fantasy! It’s not an innocent, but a dangerous fantasy, because it is just about the ultimate legitimation for violence — the most ultimate peril calls for the most ultimate sacrifice.”

I reminded Friends Bob and Carol that in point of fact our Durham monthly meeting had already produced one young man, Norman Morrison, who, responding to a relatively temporary and relatively limited and relatively tractable emergency (Vietnam), had turned himself into a human torch in the parking lot of the Pentagon. I mentioned, cruelly, that we can all can thank goodness that he handed off his infant just before striking the match. I pointed out that global climate change is not Vietnam — it is not like Vietnam relatively temporary, or relatively limited, that it is not one of those relatively tractable emergencies. Quite to the contrary it is the ultimate peril and therefore the ultimate legitimation for ecoterrorism. My classmate Ted, I mentioned simplifying somewhat, was an ecoterrorist, for the FBI title UNABOMER stood for “university and airline bomber” and he had gone on to sit in his mountain cabin producing serial bombs to generate publicity for his anti-technology manifesto, an anti-technology manifesto that was of course seriously stupid and was of course being seriously ignored (but would have been even more seriously ignored had it not been seriously stupid).

I reminded Friends Bob and Carol of something I had already mentioned to them, that back when this group had been originated as Friends in Unity with Nature (FUN) in California Yearly Meeting in 1984, I had formally debated its founder and leading light (Friend Marshall Massey) at the Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. He took the position that we must attempt to save the planet before it is too late, while I took the contrary position that we should not as this was a distraction from our existing mission statement that we are to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and bring sight to the blind. I reminded them that I had made Friend Marshall so furious that, to cool off, he had needed to arm-wrestle me on stage. Such fun.

I’ll say this for Ted. He wasn’t as stupid as Earth Care Witness. For instance, he fully understood that the antidote for a poison is never taking a bigger gulp of the same poison. He understood that the peril of excessive impact on nature was not to be resolved through further increasing our power and ability to manipulate nature, which is the fallacy we are sponsoring right now.

The normal trajectory for nonviolenters is to 1.) suffer frustration and 2.) burn out and 3.) become violent. An example of this would be the Doukhobors, who fled from Russia because of persecution of their pacifism (with the financial assistance of Quakers who helped them to emigrate to Canada), where they were granted exemption from military service — and where, after various hardships, their children resorted to bomb- throwing terrorism. Another example would be the Baader-Meinhof-Bande of Germany, made up of idealistic young postwar anti-Nazis who perceived that their new Germany was merely the old one, seriously disguised. What might these folks have done, had they become a real “green” group such as Earth Care Witness, thereby acquiring a real legitimation for the most ultimate violence? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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What’s going to happen to us, when finally we are forced to realize that our recycling of our aluminum soft- drink cans is not saving the planet? We know what such a preoccupation is like before a global catastrophe, because that’s where we are now — we are before the first really serious billions-slaughtering global catastrophe. But, do we know what we are going to be like after our first serious global catastrophe? Are we, or our children, going to be able to contain ourselves?

I had looked forward to that meeting with the Quaker environmentalists with shudders. They make me remember when I was 5 and playing with matches, how striking the matches fascinated me. I think of such innocents as clueless 5-year-olds, without any awareness as to the manner in which their survivalist fantasies can lead the next generation into ecoterrorists. Being in Mathematics Hall in Cambridge at the same time as Ted was a good education for me, although it wasn’t exactly the sort of education that Harvard had been intending. That SUPERMAX in Colorado is a good home for him because keeping an eye on him in this manner has rendered him safe to have with us in this world.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project UNABOM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2017

A most intriguing survey article appeared in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences issue on THE YEAR IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE. It was Bridget N. Queenan, Tomás J. Ryan, Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Charles R. Gallistel’s “On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory.” I was interested to consult this survey of the past half-century of research into the basis of memory, “On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory.” My interest in this began in my undergraduate years of the 1950s during which I was a student in a Psych. Dept. that was doing such things as experiments in memory interference (how memorizing a series of phone numbers that were related in certain ways would create confusion in the retention of previous “discordant” phone numbers). I eagerly tracked the experiments that James Vernon McConnell was conducting during that period at the University of Michigan, with the planarian flatworms he was cutting in half. PLANARIA FLATWORMS

Then in the 1960s I became a fellow student of Professor Willard Van Orman Quine in logic in Harvard’s adjacent Emerson Hall and Sever Hall, along with Quine’s favorite student Theodore (UNABOM) Kaczynski. In our approach to mathematical entities, Ted was more of a Platonist and I more an Aristotelian. That is, Ted was supposing that when he reasoned about numbers, and the logical stroke function of the propositional calculus, he was tracking the sacred musings of the creator deity as He assembled the bricks out of which He was creating this universe — whereas I, when I thought of numbers and the logical stroke function of the propositional calculus, was thinking the thoughts of a flatworm gliding along the floor of a lab apparatus, creating a smelly trace using my own mucus. Ted went on to build his Thoreauvian cabin on a mountain, and mail bombs, whereas I went to my own Thoreauvian cabin on a very different mountain, and without mailing any bombs (we were, of course, unaware of each other). One of the explosive devices Ted so lovingly crafted, in his agenda to simplify this human world, did injury to Professor James Vernon McConnell of the University of Michigan, he who had been cutting flatworms in half, and I think I have some insight into why Ted perpetrated that particular bombing. Ted was not on principle opposed to the cruelty of cutting flatworms in half, but he was not much in favor of our human memories and learnings being treated so shabbily, as merely a bunch of sticky stuff hopelessly wrapped up inside messy transient brain tissue. No, no: when Ted was thinking his thoughts about numbers and the logical stroke function of the propositional calculus, he was thinking the thoughts of God and God needs to be respected rather HDT WHAT? INDEX

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than compared with a slimy flatworm! Memories are not just memories, they are memories of things, things called “ideas,” and according to Plato ideas are little renditions of things that are in the mind of God. To defend numbers and logical functions is to defend the renditions in our minds, and to defend the renditions in our minds is to defend the ideas in God’s mind, and to defend the ideas in God’s mind is to defend God (anything one does to defend God is worth doing, even if one does it by building a bomb).

I am encouraged, in this survey, by the manner in which the authors speak of a need for “the reorientation of existing knowledge” and a hope that someone somewhere may suggest a Kuhnian paradigm shift. They write: Certain answers may be sitting right in front of us, in the territory of conventional biochemistry and physiology. However, a paradigm shift may be required to look at the existing data from a more productive angle. Neuroscience is currently dominated by the metaphor of the mind as a computer. Under this regime, we implicitly look for “bits” that “encode” “information,” terms and concepts that were invented or formalized within the last century. It may be that an organ that arose through 200 million years of cephalization, composed of specialized cells with synaptic connections that originated at least a billion years ago, behaves in a manner similar to our human-made machines. However, the brain is not obliged to compute in a digital fashion. The representations that mediate basic perception and motor action may be stored and transmitted in analog format, or the “computations” may be non-algorithmic. The brain may be a nonlinear system that bears no resemblance to a computer at all. The mind has previously been conceptualized as other fashionable technologies — it has been propelled by hydraulics, driven by mechanical gears, and powered by combustion; it has been imagined as a system of telegraph wires and a GPS system. It will be reimagined as other popular tools and toys that capture our imaginations. Our minds will presumably continue to function regardless of which technological transformation we demand next. ... By adhering too strictly to any dominant model, we severely limit the questions that can be asked and the acceptable answers that can be produced. Any anomalies that arise —observations that do not fit the theory— will be ignored or suppressed, subconsciously as well as systematically. This is because “assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed — until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way — the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.” If past progress is any indication, future HDT WHAT? INDEX

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developments will happen not by subscribing to a theory and pursuing data to support it but by pursuing the central question and respecting anomalies as they arise. I have been tracking these annual survey articles, updating the general scientific community on the most recent year’s progress in research into the nature of memory, for some half a century now. I am annually disappointed and frustrated. I am now in my 80s and my remaining time on this planet is limited. For half a century I have been watching over the shoulders of these funded researchers as their memory project has proceeded year after year, only from disappointment to new disappointment. I have always hoping for the best from them and have annually been frustrated. When I was working in the Twin Cities with an ETA supercomputer, attempting to decipher the vibrations of underground explosions for the detection of hidden oil deposits, the technology with which I was working was (for that period in the 1990s) blazing fast (nowadays, slow). With each cycle of the supercomputer clock, the contents of each 64-bit memory register was automatically bumped one memory register forward in lockstep, all memory registers being bumped one register forward on that same clock cycle. Consider, for instance, the poser “What’s the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? / One you see later / the other after a while.” This would be encoded into the 64-bit registers of the ETA supercomputer as 3 consecutive entries, the 1st being the Dad-Joke poser about the “difference between an alligator and a crocodile,” the 2d being the pause- line “One you see later,” and the 3d being the puncher “the other after awhile.” Imagine these 3 successive portions cascading through the brain’s chains of neurons and synapses not one at a time in series as in an ordinary PC, but all 3 portions stepping forward simultaneously in lockstep as in the ETA supercomputer: tick, tick, tick, hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, bump, bump, bump. When one is looking through one’s microscope to view such a Dad-Joke as an engram in the brain, one would expect it to appear as a chain, as a script, as a series of stuff that is merely flowing through one’s hairball of neurons and synapses. However, while I was thinking such thoughts as the above, I was merely continuing our usual process of obtaining analogies from the recent popular tools and favorite toys that recently captured our imaginations. Such musings as the above went nowhere. I am not recommending them to anyone.

Now, however, I am going to attempt to offer what little I can have to offer by way of a Kuhnian paradigm shift: this falls under the category of looking for the engrams in our brains to appear 1.) more in the manner of “scripts” or “chains” or “flows” or “hairballs” that as discrete bits of information, and 2.) looking for them to appear not as fixed entities but as mutable constructs which inevitably get revised and refreshed each time they are brought back into our mentation (which is to say, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“remembered”). The Kuhnian transformation which I am recommending is a transformation in which the key to the lock which will unlock the puzzle of human memory is not the key of the fixity of our memories, but the key of our progressive alteration and re-alteration of our memories. Each time we bring back a memory, rather than recalling that originary event, what we are doing is merely recalling our memory of the last time we had recalled that originary event. Each time we have this experience, we revise and retrofit on the fly. That’s because our memories are not about the past and not about the truth. Our memories are merely scripts we are fabricating, scripts about the future and what will make our lives work. Let’s say I am remembering a fender-bender I had in San Jose, California in 1973. Since then I have been in and out of San Jose a whole lot, and I have had other experiences in regard to that orange VW beetle such as the time I ran into a deer, and in subsequent automobiles, and I am a very different person now from the person I was back then, etc. The roads have changed, traffic laws have changed, traffic courts have changed, etc. Each time I review my fender-bender, my memory gets updated by ancillary information. This ancillary information, I must note frankly, is not held separate from the original memory, but gets blended into it (sometimes introspection is a technique that works, when one is willing to tell oneself the truth). The Kuhnian transformation which I am recommending for our research agenda of the past half century is that we should begin to focus not on finding the original unchanged memory trace (it simply doesn’t exist any longer), but instead on finding the mechanism by which I keep updating my record of the original fender- bender. In what manner do I persuade myself that I am remembering the original 1973 fender-bender, when actually what I am doing is re-examining a construct which I have endlessly fabricated over the years, a construct that will get me through the traffic court without a fine? If these memory researchers can figure out how I do the updates, and how I then fool myself, that may prove to be their key to the puzzle of the substrate of memory.

The point is, they are faced with two doors in a wall. The door on the left is merely painted onto the bricks, and has no step- up and no doorknob. The label painted on that pseudo-door to the left is MEMORY PALACE and it has a door mat on the sidewalk in front of it that reads WELCOME. The door on the right is a real door and is ajar. The sign on the door reads MEMORY FACTORY / NO ADMITTANCE and there is smoke coming out of the transom and inside one can glimpse some gears and a pot of seething stew. On the doorsteps leading up to this door on the right are mats that read DO NOT KNOCK and GO AWAY and NO STEP. For the past half century these memory researchers have been trying to unlock the door of the fixity of memory, the door on the left, the one that amounts merely to paint on a brick wall. Millions upon millions of dollars of research funds have been thrown against this brick wall. They have been doing this because they have HDT WHAT? INDEX

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been presuming that what they are searching for is the truth — for the trace left in the mind by what actually did happen. They have been failing because it’s the wrong door. They must enter at the other door, the one standing ajar, the door of the mutability of memory. That’s the door that will take our memory researchers where we need to go, and display the richness of our interior processes.

I am having some new thoughts on the nature of human memories, a line of inquiry that might suggest why it is that in the past half century there has not been a single breakthrough in Psychology or Neuroscience that has done anything to explain to us, what a memory is, how a memory is created in the brain, how it persists, or how it is recalled. What I am thinking of is, what if I proclaimed that the reason for half a century of failed research is, we are hunting for something that doesn’t actually exist? What if the experience we have, that we call “remembering,” actually is something quite other that having a mental object that we call “a memory” — and we are chasing a will of the wisp? Remember the story of the frustration of the philosopher, who persisted in groping in a dark room at midnight for a black cat? The 1st order hypothesis that explained his frustration was, the black cat wasn’t there! If “memory” is merely a cover story, then that fully explains why 50 years of brain science have produced nothing whatever. On the other hand, what might memory be, if “having a memory” is just a cover story we tell ourselves? What is being covered over, when we think we are having that experience?

What has given us the idea that we stoke our brains with dead information about the past? Memories are not records of past experiences, because there actually is no appreciable danger that a past alligators is going to jump out of a past swamp and bite us on the ass! Memories are important, but they are important because they amount to dispositions for future conduct. When we suppose that we are “having a memory,” what we are actually doing is rehearsing a script that is to govern our future conduct.

When are our brain researchers going to begin to look for brain structures that are engaged in preparing us for future conduct? My Kuhnian prediction would be that if ever they turn their microscopes in that direction, their discoveries will begin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ANN. N.Y. ACAD. SCI. ISSN 0077-8923

ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience REVIEW On the research of time past: the hunt for the substrate of memory Bridget N. Queenan,1,a Tom´as J. Ryan,2,3,a Michael S. Gazzaniga,4 and Charles R. Gallistel5 1Neuroscience Research Institute, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California. 2School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. 3Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Department of Biology and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 4Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California. 5Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey Address for correspondence: Bridget N. Queenan, [email protected]; Tom´as J. Ryan, [email protected] The search for memory is one of the oldest quests in written human history. For at least two millennia, we have tried to understand how we learn and remember. We have gradually converged on the brain and looked inside it to find the basis of knowledge, the trace of memory. The search for memory has been conducted on multiple levels, from the organ to the cell to the synapse, and has been distributed across disciplines with less chronological or intellectual overlap than one might hope. Frequently, the study of the mind and its memories has been severely restricted by technological or philosophical limitations.However, in the last few years, certain technologies have emerged, offering new routes of inquiry into the basis of memory. The 2016 Kavli Futures Symposium was devoted to the past and future of memory studies. At the workshop, participants evaluated the logic and data underlying the existing and emerging theories of memory. In this paper, written in the spirit of the workshop, we briefly review the history of the hunt for memory, summarizing some of the key debates at each level of spatial resolution. We then discuss the exciting new opportunities to unravel the mystery of memory. Keywords: memory; engram; memory encoding; memory localization; optogenetics; neural labeling; engram cell labeling; neural plasticity; synaptic plasticity; history of memory Introduction How are experiences stored in the brain? The search for memory is considerably older than cognitive science, neuroscience, or psychology. It predates modern medicine and anatomy, the theory of evolution, and our belief in a heliocentric universe. For at least 2400 years, humans have wondered what enables perception and thought and what accounts for learning and memory. The search for the mind has been led by priests and physicians, philosophers and physicists. The lines of inquiry have diverged and the theories have differed, but the central goal aThese authors contributed equally to this work. has remained the same: to understand the world and how we understand it. How has the hunt for memory changed in the last 2000 years? The modern scientific search for memory is critically dependent on the following two HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fundamental assumptions: (1) the memory trace is physical and (2) the trace will be found in the brain. A modern reader may find both of these issues trivial. If someone proposed to look for your memories in your bone marrow, most would consider them a lunatic. However, the search for memory originated in philosophy and divinity, not in science and certainly not in neuroanatomy. Our memories were not always considered a physical entity, nor were they suspected to lie in the brain. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13348

108 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review “Of something or of nothing:”b the physical basis of memory Modern science is less than 500 years old, and almost all of our modern discussions of the mind show vestiges of these prescientific theories. Three theories of human knowledge, all generated before the first century AD, have been particularly influential over the last two millennia: (1) knowledge originates in a foreign entity––humans can accept knowledge in the form-of food or light created by this external source;c (2) knowledge is an innate property of the human mind––we know and remember things that are preembedded and accessed through intelligence;d and (3) knowledge is built up systematically through iterations of the mind experiencing the world. The model of accumulated sensory experience dominates today, having been resuscitated at the beginning of the most recent scientific revolution.e These theories have profound implications for where and how we would look for memory. b Plato’s Theaetetus (369 BC) is a dialogue on the nature of knowledge in which Socrates coaxes a theory of epistemology from the hapless Theaetetus. It contains the following exchange: “Socrates: And you would admit that there is such a thing as-memory? Theaetetus: Yes. Socrates: And is memory of something or of nothing? Theaetetus: Of something, surely.” c One of the most beloved theories maintains that knowledge is found in the fruit trees of the Garden of Eden: “In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (King James Bible (1611), Genesis 3:5). Augustine of Hippo was a notable proponent of the theory of divine illumination. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Just as the earth cannot light itself, but requires the sun, “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth” (Confessions (397–400), IV.xv) d Plato favored the theory that truth was an inborn property of the human soul (see Theaetetus (369 BC)), as did René Descartes: “[W]e come to know [truths] by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience” (1643 letter, AT 8b: 166–167). e The theory was popularized by Aristotle, who maintained that information was written onto the substance of the mind: “What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet which bears no actual writing; that is just what happens in the case of the mind” (On the Soul (350 BC), 3.4 430a1). John Locke and David Hume are widely credited with disinterring Aristotle’s notions and overthrowing Descartes’ regime. However, when each theory was first articulated, no experiments would have been designed at all. Historically, the idea of peering inside you to find memory or the mind was generally considered ridiculous. Many have maintained that the physical material of the body could never give rise to the processes of the mind.f Others have considered the mind and body as interdependent physical entities.g These concerns are referred to as the “mind–body problem,” the (unsolved) mystery of how the physical material of our bodies could generate our mental states. Only in the last 500 years have investigations into the basis of human knowledge and memory migrated into the realm of science. With the transition comes the demand for theories to be tested with evidence acquired through experimentation. If the mind and its memories have no physical basis, then there cannot be a scientific discipline to study them. We can relegate the conversations forever to the territory of philosophy. So the question is: do we believe we will ever find the physical evidence of memory? At the beginning of the 20th century, Richard Semon1,2 invented the term engram to signify “the enduring though primarily latent modification in the irritable substance produced by a stimulus (from an experience).”3 In this theory, interaction with the world leaves a physical residue within the excitable HDT WHAT? INDEX

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substance of the nervous system. Some internal modifications may manifest directly as a behavioral change or memory; others accumulated over time into a learned behavior.4,5 The first internal modification will not necessarily produce the full behavioral readout of memory (the first handful of sand does not a castle make), but the residues will, past some threshold, result in a robust, observable f Descartes is widely credited with the formalized theory of mind–body dualism (Meditations (1641), II.6–8), though he is generally misinterpreted (see Noam Chomsky’s 2014 talk at the Vatican for discussion192). Descartes maintained that the material of the body (res extensa), subject to purely mechanical laws, could not account for the mind. The mind must therefore have a different substrate (res cogitans), a fairly legitimate scientific theory before the discovery of electromagnetism and electrochemical transmission. g Supporters of this theory include the Roman physician Galen, the Buddha, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, and Cristof Koch.

109 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. behavior that signifies that the internal memory is present. Semon’s theory of a physical form of memory was in direct opposition to the “psychical” form successfully advocated well into the 20th century by William McDougall, William James’s successor as chair of psychology at Harvard, among others.6,7 The stomach contains evidence of food, and the liver certainly contains evidence of drink. Why wouldn’t the brain contain evidence of thoughts? Why are we still so mystical about the physical basis of memory? “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix:”h discovering the brain The putative organ of thought has migrated quite a lot over the centuries. Numerous structures or cavities were proposed as the seat of knowledge. In eras where hydraulics were the height of technological sophistication, the suitable organ of thought was a hydraulic pump, the most obvious being the heart circulating blood. Later, the ventricles were observed to be circulating cerebrospinal fluid and the pineal was theorized to be the source of the mechanical propulsion. In light of these technological HDT WHAT? INDEX

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metaphors, the ancient Egyptians and Aristotle (335 BCE) hailed the heart as the organ of intelligence, Leonardo da Vinci voted for the ventricles (1506), and Descartes preferred the pineal (1649). Once the era of electricity began, the most suitable organ of thought would obviously have to be electrical. In our current era, the height of technological sophistication is the computer and, unsurprisingly, the brain is now almost exclusively described as such. Metaphors can occasionally prove useful, but the natural world is not obliged to abide by them.As is so often the case in science, things progress when people use their eyes. The latest scientific revolution, precipitated by Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius, placed the sun and brain at the center of their respective universes.i Both realignments occurred as a consequence of a suddenly enhanced ability to see. The creation of the telescope let people peer into the heavens, while the decriminalization h Arthur ConanDoyle, The Adventure of theMazarin Stone (1921). i Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) andVesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) are widely considered the beginning of the modern scientific era. of human dissection allowed people to peer into the body. Beginning in the Renaissance, artists, scientists, and surgeons began to systematically look for the physical basis of perception. How does the body extract information from the world? First and foremost, the eye was established as the organ of sight. Other senses followed and, suspiciously, all the sensory organs were in direct communication with the brain. The most reasonable conclusion was that the nerve hub was, somehow, important. “The Hollow Men:”j discovering brain areas By the mid-19th century, thought and memory had been localized in the brain, and many were content to stay at organ-level resolution. Those supporting the “holist” view of brain function maintained that brain functions were performed by the brain as a whole, an organ that could not be divided into components. The holist theory of whole-brain function ended not with a whimper but with a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bang, or rather a series of them. Throughout the 19th century, the pioneers of cognitive psychology, including Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, used the damages of stroke, seizure, and head injury to pinpoint distinct brain functions. Through this careful mapping, the misfortunes of a select few were used to create a theory of many. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Great War supplied the many unfortunates to paint a high-resolution picture of brain function.k Localized brain damage did not j T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925). k The ancient Egyptians and Greeks, most notably Hippocrates (see On Injuries of the Head (400 BC)), had also noticed the connection between head trauma and specific behavioral deficits. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the scale of slaughter during World War I, the Victorian obsession with categorization, and the advancements in septic technique in the late 1800s combined to yield an unprecedentedly large population of individuals who survived head injury and could be catalogued. In 1919 alone, the British Journal of Surgery published G. Horrax, “Observations on a series of gunshot wounds of the head” 7(25): 10–54; A. Newton & A. Brown, “A study of gunshot wounds of the brain” 7(25): 72–94; and G. Jefferson, “The physiological pathology of gunshot wounds of the head” 7(26): 262–289. However, the injuries are still generally classified according to type (e.g., scalp vs. penetrating vs. perforating vs. fracture),

110 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review indiscriminately destroy all cognitive capabilities as one might expect under the holist theory. Instead, specific damages produced specific and remarkably reproducible deficits. Brain functions were not all distributed broadly throughout the entire organ, but instead resided in distinct locations. By the mid-20th century, localism had long overthrown holism: the brain had identifiable areas that performed distinct functions, and some were even being removedtherapeutically.lHowever, in the field of memory research, holismwas alive andwell.After a systematic search for memory through a series of cortical lesion studies in rats, Karl Lashley famously concluded: “It is not possible to demonstrate the isolated localization of a memory trace anywhere within the nervous system. . . The engram is represented HDT WHAT? INDEX

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throughout the region.”8 Loss-of-function lesion studies allow brain functions to be inferred by subtraction. However, complementary evidence of positive functions is also needed. Intractable epilepsy, to this day, is one of the only conditions that justifies invasive recording from or stimulation of the human brain. While evaluating an epileptic patient for surgery, Wilder Penfield and Theodore Rasmussen were allowed to stimulate the temporal cortex of a living human. In so doing, they happened to elicit the recall of random episodic memories.9 These findings were tantalizing, but it was the temporal cortex of Henry Molaison that altered memory research most profoundly.Having identified the medial temporal lobe as the source of Molaison’s seizures, the neurosurgeon William Scoville removed the anterior hippocampus, the amygdala, and the surcomplication (e.g., fungal infection, embedded shrapnel), and/or general symptoms (e.g., headache vs. paralysis vs. ability to work) as the preoccupation was with reducing mortality, not conducting science. Gordon Holmes emerged as arguably the greatest neurological hero of the Great War, carefully piecing together delicate maps of brain function while he treated the horrific brain injuries of his fellow soldiers. One hundred years later, the modern researchers of the Human Connectome Project are continuing this work, creating maps from the thankfully intact human brain. l Antonio Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine for the “discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy [lobotomy] in certain psychoses.” See http://www.nobelprize.org. rounding cortex from both sides of the brain. The consequences were severe memory loss in the form of both anterograde and retrograde amnesia for episodic memories.10 Molaison’s overall intelligence was not negatively affected, and his ability to learn motor tasks was intact. Brenda Milner’s and Suzanne Corkin’s subsequent work with “patient HM” launched the modern era of human memory research.10–12 New memories could not be formed without the medial temporal lobe, and the recall of previously stored episodic memories was heavily impaired (for review, see Refs. 13–15). In HDT WHAT? INDEX

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subsequent years, distinct memory systems have been described and localized in humans.16,17 Not all memories are created equal, nor are they created in the same place. Different types of learning occur in different brain areas. But what material actually learns? One by one blossomed the stars:m creating the neuron doctrine By the beginning of the 20th century, the holist– localist debate had been settled at the organ level: the brain had distinct regions with distinct functions. The cortex alone could be reproducibly grouped into 52 territories.18,19,n However, while losing on the organ front, the holist theory had retreated to a different level of resolution, down to the cell. By the end of the 19th century, cellular theory20,21 was widely accepted. However, many scholars of the brain maintained that it was exempt from such rules. Joseph von Gerlach described the brain as an indivisible “protoplasmic network” acting as a functional whole.22 Early supporters of this “reticular theory” included Franz Nissl and the highly respected Camillo Golgi, who devoted his Nobel acceptance speech to a refutation of the neuron doctrine. In a cruel twist of fate, the father of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, used Golgi’s own invention (silver staining) to create the images that convinced the world that the brain was m“Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847). n This year, David van Essen and colleagues, as part of the Human Connectome Project, provided evidence for 100 new cortical areas. See Ref. 185.

111 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. made of cells. The resulting neuron doctrine formally extended cell theory into the nervous system. The brain was built from discrete areas built from discrete cells. Localism won this hand, too. The next logical step would be to extend the holist–localist debate to perception and memory, to information processing and storage. The brain perceives the world, creates and deploys concepts, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and orchestrates behavior. Are these internal representations located in one place or throughout the brain? Again, we find a split decision. In the localist corner, we have the intellectual powerhouse William James, who theorized that “every braincell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about.”23 The theory was later developed into the notion of the “grandmother cell,” the idea that an individual neuron can represent a concept24,25 and will be activated by multimodal stimuli associated with that concept. In the holist corner are proponents of the distributed representation theory, the notion that each stimulus, concept, or behavior is represented in a pattern of neural activity across neurons.26,27 Once again, epilepsy provides the only substantial insights to date. The most spectacular observations come from Fried and colleagues, who performed recordings on epileptic patients and found brain cells that reliably responded to pictures of popular actors, athletes, and movie characters, among others.28 The results have been interpreted to support both the localist (grandmother) and holist (distributed representation) theories. The debate has not been settled.29 The distributed representation theory cannot be tested, because we cannot see. We cannot collect the patterns of individual neural firing from the brains of living humans. However, the scientific community just recently developed the ability to do this in mice. “She would give them order. She would create constellations:”o discovering network engrams When the technology does not exist to extract the requisite evidence, the hypothesis cannot be conclusively tested. If information is encoded in patterns of neural firing across neurons, we have to examine the firing of individual neurons during information o Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). encoding. In healthy humans, we cannot currently do this. A 1-mm3 voxel in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan contains thousands to tens of thousands of neurons.We can observe none of their individual spiking behaviors. From a depth recording HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in an epileptic patient,we can extract the spiking of a random subset of a few hundred neurons. Neither method is sufficient to conclusively determine the mechanism of neuronal information encoding. Recently, new technical developments have made it possible to examine the neural mechanisms of memory encoding in mice.30 The tremendous body of work can be concisely summarized in the following four technical strategies. Technical strategies Transgeneexpression. It is now possible to induce the artificial expression of proteins in mammals through transgenic technology31–34 (for review, see Ref. 35). Genes can be artificially introduced into or deleted from cells, including brain cells.36–38 Using the template of the transplanted gene (transgene), the host cell will create the desired protein capable of performing a function or labeling the cell for visualization purposes. Activity-dependent expression. It is possible to limit the expression of the transgene to specific populations of cells. For example, the transgene can be expressed only in neurons that are active. Immediate early genes (IEGs) naturally turn on immediately after neuronal activity39–43 (for review, see Ref. 44). The IEG promoters can be used to control an introduced transgene.30,45–47 The protein of interest will only show up in neurons that fired, producing activity-dependent labeling of cells. Time-dependent expression. It is possible to limit the expression of transgenes to specific time windows. A transgene attached directly to an IEG promoter would be promiscuously expressed any time the cell fired. However, in a two-component transgenic system, the time window of transgene expression can be controlled, with the aid of a third, exogenous molecule (often an ingested antibiotic (e.g., doxycycline (DOXX)).48,49 An IEG promoter is attached to a transgene that can itself induce gene expression (a transactivator).Neuronal activity produces the transactivator protein, which binds the promoter of a second transgene.Crucially, the transactivator protein is engineered to be either repressed

112 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review or induced by a systemically administered molecule (e.g., rendered inactive by DOX).When the subject is fed a DOX-rich diet, neuronal activity will cause expression of the first but not the second transgene. Only when the subject is taken off DOX is the second transgene expressed, thus labeling the target cells. This method permits labeling to be restricted to a 24-h period during which learning occurs.30 Nonelectrical control of neural firing. It is now possible to activate neurons with light, a technique referred to as optogenetics.50,51 Neuronal firing is controlled by ion channels. These ion gates admit charged molecules (mostly sodium, potassium, and chloride) under the direction of certain amino acids and their derivatives (usually glutamate or GABA) acting on synaptic receptors. Other species, including algae, have ion channels that open and close based not on amino acids but on certain wavelengths of light. It is now quite common to express these light-controlled ion channels in neurons.52,53 Specific colors of light can then turn the neurons on or off as needed.54,55 Critically, a nonelectrical strategy provides away of targeting only certain populations. All cells will be affected by electrical stimulation in a distance-dependent manner. The restricted expression of light-sensitive molecules allows for optical stimulation of neurons selected by activity status, cell type, or timeframe.p These four strategies can be combined in the following way to reveal the neurons participating in a memory.56 An IEG promoter is used to express a transactivator protein in an activity dependent manner. The transactivator causes expression of a light-sensitive ion channel (e.g., channelrhodopsin53) tethered to a visual marker (e.g., green fluorescent protein). The animal is fed a DOX-rich diet to keep the expression of the opsin turned off, even if the host neuron is active. For a brief period of time, the animal no longer receives the antibiotic. During this time window, the animal learns something (e.g., the features of a novel context and/or that the context is pleasant or dangerous). The animal is then fed the antibiotic to stop HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the artificial expression of the transgenes. Within a few hours of training, the light-sensitive ion channel (tethered to the cell marker) will be expressed, p Note: It is also possible to remotely control neurons with chemicals and engineered receptors.194 but only in neurons that were active while the animal was learning.2,30,57 It is therefore possible to see which neurons participated in the learning.56,58–61 Importantly, light can be used to reversibly turn neural ensembles on56,58,59,62–65 (with the excitatory channelrhodopsin) or off60,61,66 (with the inhibitory halorhodopsin). In this way, it can be empirically determined whether those particular neural ensembles encoded the memory. What has been learned from mapping memory in mice? Firstly, when a mouse learns a task, a subset of neurons is activated, not the whole brain, nor a whole brain area.30,58,59 If these neurons are directly reactivated (i.e., with light), the memory, or more specifically the behavioral readout of the target memory, can be elicited.56,59 If the cells are inhibited, the natural cue-induced recall of the target memory is impaired.60,61,66–68 Control experiments have shown that activation and inhibition of these cell ensembles affects the targeted memory specifically, not other similar but nonlabelled memories.56,58–60 If the labelled neural ensembles are destroyed, so too is the memory.69 However, if the cells are not destroyed, they can be manipulated to update an existing memory,58,59,62 including to switch the emotional valence of a negative experience to a positive one.62 These findings, arising independently from a number of research groups, have established that the hippocampal cells that are active during a defined training episode are both sufficient and necessary for the recall of a particular contextual memory, including socialmemory.70 The labelled cellular ensembles represent a component of a bona fide, specific memory engram. It is now possible to search for the mechanism of memory storage. The persistence of memory and plasticity of synapses Engram-labeling studies have shown that certain HDT WHAT? INDEX

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populations of neurons encode specific memories in mice. How, exactly, do the cells encode the memory? Does each neuron contain a memory? Is the memory in the location of the neurons, the firing order, or the relative spike rates? The answer might be none of the above. Ramon y Cajal speculated that structural changes within neurons were the mechanism of learning: “The organ of thought is, within certain limits, malleable and capable of perfection. . . . The cerebral cortex

113 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. is similar to a garden filled with trees, the pyramidal cells, which, thanks to an intelligent culture, can multiply their branches, sending their roots deeper and producing more and more varied and exquisite flowers and fruits.”71,72 Synapses, the remarkably dynamic connections between neurons, have always seemed particularly suspicious in the study ofmemory.73,74 Each neuron has thousands of connections, and they are not static. Almost 70 years ago, Donald Hebb theorized that synaptic connections between coactivated cells change in an activity-dependent manner,75 leading to the postulate that neurons that “fire together, wire together”76 into cellular assembles. Early studies in sea slugs demonstrated that synapses could be directly conditioned,77 bringing synaptic plasticity to the forefront as a plausible subcellular learning mechanism. Since the original Hebbian postulate, an enormous amount of evidence has been compiled to suggest that neurons do, in fact, alter synaptic connectivity in an activity-dependent manner. Neurons can reinforce synaptic connections following rules of spike timing-dependent plasticity.78–80 When an action potential is fired, synapses that were active just before the action potential (i.e., relevant to the generation of the action potential) are reinforced.81 Meanwhile, synapses that were active after the action potential (i.e., irrelevant to its generation) are weakened.81 Synapses can become transiently depressed or overly enthusiastic, through processes known as short-termplasticity.82 The effectiveness of synaptic transmission can also be enhanced or diminished in a semipermanent fashion through processes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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known as long-term potentiation and long-term depression, respectively.83 These persistent forms of synaptic strengthening and weakening, known as associative (or Hebbian) synaptic plasticity, establish patterns of connectivity that are generally thought to encode information.84–86 However, decades later, the coding scheme remains elusive.87 At the cellular level, neuronal codes have been observed: neuronal firing patterns can signal various components of space and time.q At the subcellular level, the code has not q Place cells,195 grid cells,196 head-direction cells,197 boundary-vector cells,198 and time cells199 have all been proposed to represent components of space and time through neuronal firing patterns. Neuronal firing patyet been cracked. How exactly is acquired information (e.g., the location of a food source or the duration of a wait interval) mapped to a pattern of synaptic alterations? How is the encoded information entered into the neuronal operations that underlie goal-directed behavior?87 Until recently, the problem has been intractable. There are thousands of synapses per neuron, and each can be changed through a wide variety of mechanisms: more neurotransmitter can be released;88,89 more receptors can be expressed;90–94 and the properties of the receptors95,96 or the release machinery97–99 can be altered. Additionally, new synaptic junctions can be formed,100,101 and structurally intact but functionally silent synapses can be revealed.97,102–104 It has been difficult to pinpoint which of these mechanisms, if any, results in which “memory.” Confounding the problem is the manner in which synaptic plasticity is often induced. Electrical stimulation is widely used to mimic the natural learning experience and induce synaptic change.105,106 Comparatively few studies have examined the consequences of ethologically relevant learning on synaptic function.107–110 Plasticity studies have focused on artificial stimulation protocols, which recapitulate some but not all aspects of learning induced plasticity,87 rather than actual learning induced changes, because it was not previously possible to identify the cells allocated to a particular HDT WHAT? INDEX

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experience. With these new technologies, we now know where to look. By comparing the physiological properties of engram and non-engram cells ex vivo, it was found that both synaptic strength and specificity of connectivity increased between certain neurons during learning, forming functional coalitions of cells across brain areas that manifest the memory.59 These findings are compelling, but alone they are correlates of actual learning. Importantly, it is also now possible to test candidate plasticity mechanisms by interfering with plasticity and determining the consequences on both engram cells and memory function in a unitary experimental preparation. For example, it has been established for decades that terns within the motor cortices also signal the temporal and spatial components of motor movement of a limb reliably enough that these signals can be decoded and used to guide prosthetic limb movement after injury.200–202

114 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review long-term memory formation requires new gene expression111,112 (for review, see Refs. 113 and 114): when a protein synthesis inhibitor (e.g., puromycin or anisomycin) is delivered to mice immediately after a training experience, amnesia for the target memory results.59,111 Only recently has it become possible to test the mechanisms underlying amnesia, induced either by protein synthesis inhibitors or mouse models of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Anisomycin treatment and early Alzheimer’s produced amnesia that correlated with reduced synaptic strength and number.59,65 However, the specific connectivity pattern between engram cells was altered, and the resulting neural ensembles survived the amnesia.59,65 Importantly, when the amnesic engram cells were directly stimulated with light, memory retrieval occurred, demonstrating the persistence of memory in a latent but reactivatable state.59,65 Thus, a plasticity program including new gene expression is activated specifically in cells undergoing learning, and disruption of this process impairs both synaptic strengthening and the manifestation of the long-term memory as a behavior.59 Alzheimer’s pathology appears HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to attack these synaptic targets,65 as has long been hypothesized.115 However, the memory remained in the amnesic brain, presumably in the altered pattern of neural connectivity, and could be reactivated by direct stimulation of the engram cells.59,65 Using these new techniques, it is for the first time possible to dissociate the mechanisms underlying memory retrieval and those underlying memory storage.When enhanced synaptic strength between engram cells is abolished, the memory is not.59,65 Gross synaptic strengthening can be excluded as a candidate mechanism for memory storage, though it seems essential for natural memory retrieval.1,59 Indeed, a corroborating study showed that amnesia could be induced in rats by depressing amygdala synapses in vivo.116 Remarkably, the artificial re-potentiation of those synapses restored the behavioral response, though such stimulation did not create the conditioned behavioral response in naive animals because no relevant memory was present.116 Similar findings have been reported in sea slugs, where reminder training seems to reverse amnesia through the restoration of the learned synaptic structure.117,118 These findings collectively implicate synaptic strength as a crucial determinant of memory accessibility or retrievability.When synapses are not operational, information––however stored––cannot be extracted from cells. Permanent or widespread disruption of synaptic structure and function would be devastating, producing cognitive deficits from autism119 to late-stage Alzheimer’s120,121 to clinical depression.122 However, subtle disruption of synaptic transmission may be necessary for brain function: recent work has shown that excitatory neurotransmitter receptors are removed and modified during sleep,123 while much more widespread dendritic changes have been found in hibernating animals.124 These results suggest that the brain may adaptively modulate the accessibility of stored information by altering the strength of transmission at synapses. Indeed, several types of systematic synaptic alteration have been extensively studied and characterized, including associative HDT WHAT? INDEX

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plasticity (mechanisms that strengthen or weaken individual synapses during learning125), homeostatic plasticity (negative feedback mechanisms that act more globally across dendritic trees to ensure stability126,127), and metaplasticity (mechanisms that alter the threshold for subsequent plasticity128). These processes of synaptic regulation, operational in excitatory and inhibitory129,130 networks, may be part of a sophisticated and dynamic control system by which information is extracted from or hidden within neurons according to the electrical, chemical, or metabolic state of the network. Determining how the various forms of synaptic control are deployed across synapses, dendrites, neurons, and brain regions may reveal how the brain rapidly and transiently accesses information. However, the empirical findings clearly show that permanently enhanced synaptic transmission does not and cannot store the memory information itself.1 How then is the memory stored? “To see a World in a Grain of Sand:”r is there a memory molecule? The substrate of memory has been at least partially localized within the brain, to certain brain areas, and now to constellations of neurons.We can r “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.”—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1803).

115 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. now address the long-neglected question: how do the residues of past experience encode that experience? Where within those constellations are the memories? Conventionally, the answer has been: at the synapse itself.131 The proteins forming the neurotransmitter receptors change with learning, thus encoding information in their enhanced density, function, and affiliation with synaptic scaffolds, all regulated by the receptor’s phosphorylation status.132–134 Synaptic weight changes can now be excluded as a means of information storage, though they appear to dictate engram retrieval.59,65 What alternate mechanisms could store the information itself? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The most intuitive answer would be long-lived molecules. Candidates for molecular substrates of information storage include the particularly long-lived proteins associated with DNA (i.e., nucleoporins and histones135). These proteins could make permanent changes in how often or under what circumstances a protein is expressed. Alternately, some have suggested that DNA (or the epigenetic modifications on it136,137) is the most suitable candidate for memory, being the cellular storage mechanism for other (lifelong) information.s A more radical speculation is that information might be a stored in genetic material itself,138 though how that could happen at a sufficiently fast rate remains to be described. The physical connectivity within neural ensembles is a plausible new candidate substrate for memory information storage, with many merits, including robustness to insult,59,65 bioenergetic efficiency, stability of information storage in a potentially binary format,139,140 and a high capacity for informational content (see Refs. 1 and 141 for review). If physical connectivity mediates memory storage, how is it maintained? The late Roger Tsien recently proposed the notion that perineuronal nets, the extracellular matrices around neurons and synapses, provide the architecture for information.142 Structural changes in the extra-cellular matrix, mediated by matrix metalloproteases and s It should be noted that many of these theories work within the more conservative paradigm whereby genetic changes operate solely through the modulation of gene expression and its slow effect on late-phase synaptic plasticity. other enzymes, could provide long-lasting information storage,142 delineating the neural constellations that are formed during learning and maintained as connectivity patterns even under amnesia.59,65 This hypothesis addresses a fundamental problem with any theory of channel- or receptor-based encoding: proteins are not long for this world.142,143 Most mammalian proteins live for only a few days144,145 while synaptic proteins can manage up to a week.146 Individual synaptic signaling proteins simply cannot HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“remember” for very long, on either side of the synapse, making them a suitable substrate for short- but not long-term memory. If the engram requires a protein, it should arguably be a fairly long-lived one. The longest-lived proteins are generally structural,143 especially those in the extra-cellular matrix. 142 Despite these theoretical advantages, little is currently known about how neural ensembles are formed and maintained. Even less is known about the code thatmaps the elements of experience to the pattern of cellular and synaptic connectivity assumed to encode those facts. An alternative to storage supported by very longlasting molecules is engram maintenance in short-lived molecules, or molecular states, which exists as part of a long-lived arrangement. Antoine Danchin has famously used the metaphor of the Delphic boat to describe how life emerges from dynamic cellular components. The metaphor comes from a riddle posed by the oracle at Delphi: “If we consider a boat made of planks, what is it that makes a boat a boat?” The question seems simple enough: looks like a boat, acts like a boat. However, “as time passes, some of the planks begin to rot and have to be replaced. There comes a time when not one of the original planks is left. Is it still the same boat? The owner would certainly say yes, this is my boat. Yet none of the material it was originally built from is still there.”t Structures composed of short-lived components could constitute a long-term memory if the configurations were preserved by normal homeostatic replenishment of steady-state components. For example, synapses are built from actin polymers, which restructure with learning.147,148 Embedded within the actin network are scaffolding proteins,149 the sites into which neurotransmitter receptors are inserted. Synaptic proteins could hop t Antoine Danchin, The Delphic Boat (2003).

116 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review in and out of the synaptic lattices just like electrons move within semiconductors. In this model, consistent with the engram connectivity model, the structure of the actin–scaffold lattice (semiconductor) would dictate the behavior of the synapses,84,150–152 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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not the receptors (electrons) that occupy them with some probability. Other theories involve information storage or processing in microtubules,153 the long polarized helices of tubulin subunits that compose the cellular skeleton.154,155 New microtubule tracks are laid directly toward the synapse during activity,156–158 possibly encoding a change in status. The tubulin subunits or helical structure could be modified directly,159,160 or the pairing between microtubules and actin structures could be altered by cytoskeletal binding proteins,161,162 changing the likelihood of synaptic proteins being recruited to the synapse.163 Posttranslational modification of particular synaptic proteins has also been suggested to mediate memory storage by modifying the trafficking and behavior of the molecules.164 The short-term modification could be maintained in the long term by active positive feedback that preserves the altered state. While such a mechanism would certainly be rapid and plastic, it also carries the weakness of vulnerability to disruption and the thermodynamic cost of any necessarily active mechanism of maintenance. Substantial changes in synaptic behavior could also be achieved by altering the biophysical properties of membranes (e.g., the relative compositions of fatty acids and cholesterol would alter the behavior of membrane-embedded receptors) or the dimensions of the synapse itself. Importantly, many synaptic processes are controlled by glia,165 making non-neuronal brain cells potential mediators of memory encoding, maintenance, or extraction. None of the above potential mechanisms need to function exclusively in isolation, and indeed some of them may represent different manifestations of the same substrate. Early studies of memory engram cells have shown that much work remains to done in order to discriminate between the enabling mechanism of memory retrieval and the essential mechanisms of information storage. Recent technological advances, including multiphoton brain imaging,166,167 may permit us to look inside cells during learning to see the cellular events as they occur. Indeed, a tantalizing new model of cellular HDT WHAT? INDEX

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learning has recently been provided. Behavioral results long ago established that animals learn to tell time, specifically the durations of intervals.168,169 A simple instance of interval-duration learning occurs in Pavlovian conditioning paradigms, where a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) predicts an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), which occurs at some delay. Regardless of species, subjects do not learn to simply respond to the CS alone, they learn to respond at the right latency. In eye-blink conditioning, the encoding of the CS–US interval has been tracked to Purkinje cells in the cerebellum. When developing an appropriately timed response, the cerebellar neurons establish new sequences of neural firing170,171 by learning to pause for particular time intervals,172–174 just as we learn to play the piano by perfecting the timing between individual finger strikes. Recently, these cells have been artificially conditioned by direct stimulation of their immediate inputs to learn the CS–US interval, so that the entirety of the paradigm (encoding of CS, association to US, timed response, etc.) has been reduced to a manipulatable experiential fact––the CS–US interval. Using this experimental paradigm, it was revealed that the learned firing pause is initiated by metabotropic signaling cascades that terminate by acting on inhibitory ion channels.175 The results provide a means of dissecting the components of the cascade between the metabotropic receptor and the inhibitory ion channels to determine if and how the previously experienced CS–US interval is encoded and decoded.174,175 Intracellular neurochemical processes are attractive as bioenergetically efficient, local, and flexible tools for neural computation (eloquently discussed in Ref. 176). Cheap, dynamic, and local chemical computation could provide a perfect complement to a one-time expensive investment in infrastructural change (e.g., in reorganization of extracellular or cytoskeletal components) across brain areas. By examining the intra- and extracellular processes that create and maintain neural ensembles, itmay be possible to unite the molecular, neuronal, and circuit mechanisms of neural learning.However, at the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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behavioral level, learning differs significantly across brain regions,16 so it will be important to determine whether conditioned or procedural learning within the cerebellum and striatum, for example, proceed via distinct cellular or molecular mechanisms from learning within the cortex and hippocampus. Indeed, plasticity processes that seem to be crucial

117 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. for information storage have been characterized in mammalian visual cortex cells and in perceptual regions as early as olfactory sensory neurons.177,178 Moreover, synaptic dysfunction in peripheral nerves has been shown to produce learning deficits.179 Tracing the engram ensembles from their peripheral origins may be necessary to understand how information is stored, accessed, and reconfigured over time. It has long been believed that, in addition to any cellular or synaptic consolidation, systems-level consolidation of certain memories occurs via gradual transfer of the representation from one brain area to another,180 notably from the hippocampus to cortex181 or from cortex to striatum.182 However, optogenetic studies have challenged this pipeline hypothesis of consolidation. Recently, neuronal representations of a single contextual memory were shown to form simultaneously in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.183 Over time, the preferred retrieval pathway under standard recall conditions shifted from hippocampal to prefrontal engram neurons, resulting in the apparent “transfer” of the memory to cortical circuits even though the representation persisted in both areas.183,184 Circuit-level redundancies in the initial representation might enhance the robustness of memory, increasing the likelihood of subsequent retention, consolidation, or recall through whichever pathway is available. Strong evidence for such redundancy was first provided by chronic optogenetic inhibition of hippocampal CA1, which demonstrated that contextual fear memory recall can be diverted to other less cannonical structures, including the anterior cingulate cortex.185 Alternatively, the highly distributed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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nature of the engram may represent a hierarchy of informational content rather than a true redundancy, with certain aspects of a global representation becoming more salient depending on the remoteness of the memory or conditions of recall.186 Human functional imaging studies have indicated that the flexibility of modular network organization is predictive of subsequent learning187 and rodent optogenetic systems now offer the ability to watch and manipulate the brain as it flexibly reconfigures. If memory performance depends, at least in part, on the systems-level redundancy and plasticity of representations, not the fidelity of encoding within a specific area, it will place useful constraints on the search for the biological substrate. These are speculations, but they are suddenly testable speculations. After centuries of suspecting, doubting, hoping, and wishing for a trace of past thoughts, modern neuroscientists have been able to map the constellations of neurons forming a memory. It is now possible to look inside and between those cells for residues of past experience. “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars:” the future of memory research In the practice of science, we demand empirical evidence to distinguish facts from speculations and to draw meaningful conclusions.We can now see more clearly into the brains of mice and, accordingly, we can now see where their memories are housed. If memories are encoded in cellular-resolution patterns of connectivity, we may soon be able to decode them. If they are not, we will have to look more closely, inventing new ways of noninvasively seeing dynamic synapses, organelles, or subcellular structures at finer resolutions or inventing new computational approaches to handle the behavior of these networks. Many proposed substrates of memory will remain in the realm of speculation until technologies capable of testing their suitability emerge. Hippocrates once speculated on the future of epilepsy, the “sacred disease:” “It appears to me to be nowise [sic] more divine nor more sacred than other [things], but has a natural cause from which it originates.Men regard its nature and cause as divine HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from ignorance and wonder . . . And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it.”u Over the last several millennia, the symptoms of epilepsy have remained roughly constant. What has changed is the conviction that causes can be determined, mechanisms mapped, and solutions engineered. Because the mind is part of the natural world, there is no reason to believe that it will be any less tangible and ultimately comprehensible than other components. However, there is ample reason to suspect that the answers (or the interpretations) lie outside the current radius of neuroscience. There are three major sources of progress available. The first is the expansion of knowledge through basic research. Perhaps the critical discoveries have simply not been made yet. For example, the formulation of u Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease (400 BC).

118 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Queenan et al. Synapse hypothesis workshop review gravitation and later electromagnetism as fundamental interactions crystallized centuries of observations that had previously lacked a certain coherence. The second is the infusion of existing knowledge from other fields. For example, the discovery of rhodopsin is not recent,v and the rhodopsins are quite commonplace, found in algae, bacteria, and viruses, as well as the retina of mammals, including humans. However, when channelrhodopsin was strategically imported from single-celled algae into mammalian neurons,50,52,53 neuroscience was endowed with a new power to manipulate individual neurons at will. The third is the reorientation of existing knowledge. Certain answers may be sitting right in front of us, in the territory of conventional biochemistry and physiology. However, a paradigm shift may be required to look at the existing data from a more productive angle. Neuroscience is currently dominated by the metaphor of the mind as a computer. Under this regime, we implicitly look for “bits” that “encode” “information,” terms and concepts that were invented or formalized within the last century.w It may be that an organ that arose through 200 million years of cephalization, composed of specialized cells HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with synaptic connections that originated at least a billion years ago,188 behaves in a manner similar to our human-made machines. However, the brain is not obliged to compute in a digital fashion. The representations that mediate basic perception and motor action may be stored and transmitted in analog format,189 or the “computations” may be non-algorithmic.190 The brain may be a nonlinear system that bears no resemblance to a computer at v Beginning in the 1850s, early investigators of the retina, including Heinrich M¨uller, Franz Boll, and Willy K¨uhne, pieced together an understanding of the light-sensitive molecules of the visual system, identifying “visual purple,” which later became rhodopsin.203 w “Information” has only recently become a precise term rather than a hazy concept. In 1928, Hartley attempted a “quantitative measure of ‘information’ . . . which is based on physical as contrasted with psychological considerations.”204 Two decades later, Claude Shannon produced “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”205 which coined the term “bit” and formalized information theory as a field of study, rather than an offshoot of electrical engineering. See James Gleick’s The Information for a full history.206 all. The mind has previously been conceptualized as other fashionable technologies––it has been propelled by hydraulics, driven by mechanical gears, and powered by combustion; it has been imagined as a system of telegraph wires and a GPS system. It will be reimagined as other popular tools and toys that capture our imaginations. Our minds will presumably continue to function regardless of which technological transformation we demand next. According to Thomas Kuhn, “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”191 By adhering too strictly to any dominant model, we severely limit the questions that can be asked and the acceptable answers that can be produced. Any anomalies that arise––observations that do not fit the theory––will be ignored or suppressed, subconsciously as well as systematically. This is because “assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and until that adjustment is completed––until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way––the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.”183 If past progress is any indication, future developments will happen not by subscribing to a theory and pursuing data to support it but by pursuing the central question and respecting anomalies as they arise. The invention of novel experimental techniques and methodologies is allowing researchers to pursue anomalies in the neuroscience of a memory in a way not previously possible, dissecting mechanisms of memory retrieval from those of memory encoding. These investigations will generate useful predictions on the nature of memory storage and novel therapeutic tactics. Sustained progress may soon result in a new theory of memory with enough explanatory value to temporarily satisfy the original question: How are experiences stored in the brain? Acknowledgments The authors thank all participants in the 2016 Kavli Futures Symposium, in particular Hessam Akhlaghpour, David Glanzman, Steven Grant, Germund Hesslow, Fredrik Johansson, Dan Margoliash, and JohnMcGann.We also thank Luke Theogarajan and Karl Deisseroth for helpful discussion. The symposium was made possible by support from the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, the Kavli

119 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1396 (2017) 108–125 C 2017 New York Academy of Sciences. Synapse hypothesis workshop review Queenan et al. Foundation and the Kavli Summer Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, which also received support from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. We thank Ron Mangun and Jayne Kelly for their help. Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. References 1. Tonegawa, S., M. Pignatelli, D.S. Roy & T.J. Ryan. 2015. Memory engram storage and retrieval. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 35: 101–109. 2. Tonegawa, S., X. Liu, S. Ramirez & R. Redondo. 2015. Memory engram cells have come of age. Neuron 87: 918– 931. 3. Semon, R. 1904. Die Mneme. Allen & Unwin. 4. Muller, G. & A. Pilzecker. 1900. Experimentelle Beitr¨age HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: March 24, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.