(FORTUNE Magazine) – GREAT MOMENTS IN FREELANCE WRITING

Freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system...To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals...Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been...published, they probably would not have attracted many readers...In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people. --From the Unabomber's manifesto.

CREEPSPEAK

One spent a recent weekend hovering over the amazing document quoted above. Titled "Industrial Society and Its Future," the Unabomber's unsolicited manuscript appeared in the Washington Post of September 19 but "technophiles" (his term) like your servant hastened to also download it from the Internet, as the word searches made possible by digitized text are so helpful in documenting obsessional tendencies.

We begin on a somewhat tangential issue thus far scanted in op-ed commentary. The issue: whether the Post's miserable proofreading of his masterpiece could cause its violence-prone author to have a relapse. The manuscript received by the Post was a carbon copy of a document created on a typewriter. The paper keyboarded the text into a computer and admits that its retyping led to garbles and omissions in two paragraphs. However, the Post contends that all other typographical errors in its printed document--we counted 16 of them--were in the original manuscript. This contention seems highly dubious. Most typing errors, after all, result in nonwords (e.g., "teh" instead of "the"). But there were no nonwords in any of the errors we spotted. Every one of the 16 produced a real word (e.g., "heir" when the context called for "their"). This result is consistent with the Post's typists having made a significant number of errors and with many of them being picked up by the paper's computer spellcheckers--which, however, cannot identify typos when they produce real words. The result is not consistent with output generated on a typewriter. Even if you assumed that the chance of an average typo's generating a real word is as high as 50%, the odds against all 16 generating real words would be 65,535 to 1. So we judge the Post guilty of lousy proofreading.

The bomber's thesis is that technology makes life at once too "easy" (thereby depriving modern man of the challenges needed for a sense of fulfillment) and too dangerous (thereby generating feelings of fear and inadequacy). FC, as he calls himself, is deeply preoccupied with the human psyche, not excluding his own. Unlike Martin Luther's 95 theses, his handiwork contains 11 references to self-esteem, 24 to depression, and four to "mental health," a term he always places in quotation marks. The bomber shows signs of feeling threatened by the mental healthers, whom he identifies as thought police with "methods for inducing individuals to think and behave as the system requires." To be sure, it has to be irksome when a fellow's work requires periods of isolation and yet he is surrounded by health cops determined, as he puts it bitterly, "to see to it that everyone has a satisfactory social life." The manifesto contains numerous echoes of R.D. Laing, a radical psychiatrist who attained guru status in hippiedom during the Sixties, mainly because of his insistence that behavior labeled psychotic was merely a rational reaction to life in a crazy world. Thoughts for creeps to live by.

The Unabomber comes across as an idiosyncratic mutation of Sixties radicalism. Most folks who quivered for revolution in that decade eventually settled for left-wing Democratic politics and political correctness, but this guy seems to have kept moving further and further left and now casts himself as an anarchist--an old-fashioned, nonpacifist anarchist determinedly committed to violence. He keeps telling you that he wants not a mere political revolution but an end to modern living conditions: to "the whole stinking system." (His prose style wanders back and forth between barroom outbursts and unlovely academic terms like "technologization.") The destruction we are talking about is physical: "The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc." Electricity, indoor plumbing, and automobiles will be eliminated and "wild nature" (a term that includes human nature) exalted, at which point the people will have a shot at recapturing autonomy and attaining fulfillment as they trudge through the snow to the outhouse.

R.D. Laing's ideas are not the manifesto's only reach back to the Sixties. Leaned on heavily (without acknowledgment) are the views of French theologian Jacques Ellul, who held that technology shapes society, subverts freedom, and destroys autonomy. Also echoed (again without mentioning the name) are certain postulates of Herbert Marcuse, the Freudian Marxist who saw modern democracies as subtle tyrannies wherein the thought-controlled masses imagined themselves to be free. Like Marcuse, the Unabomber has an expansive view of advertising's power and at one point notes that the average American is "a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn't need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom." The word "advertising" appears in the manifesto 16 times.

A major weirdity of the document is its obsession with "leftists" and "leftism" (194 references). Presumably the bomber doesn't like other leftists because they tend to be collectivist while his anarchism is of the individualist persuasion. Even so, one would expect his animus to be directed mainly at moguls atop the technological system (several of whom have received his bomb packages). Yet in the manifesto it gradually becomes clear that his deepest stores of rage are reserved for a whole lot of politically correct characters on the left--feminists, animal-rights people, gay and disability activists, even environmentalists--whom he has presumably bumped into in his sojourns on various campuses. A long section at the beginning, and then another one at the end, tell you at considerable length that such leftists are despicable for their weakness, guilt feelings, self-hatred, hypocrisy, and power-grabbing impulses. Your servant admits that he found himself nodding along with some of these formulations even while wondering what they had to do with the bomber's main point, i.e., the evils of technology. One senses that the rant about leftism is in there only because our obsessed author just couldn't keep it out.

As we propel this phosphor onto the screen of the beautiful new 17-inch monitor that Dell inveigled us into buying, concerns about publishing the manifesto center on the dangers of setting precedents for freelance writers who also happen to be serial killers. But another danger is also discernible: His message could actually gain him a lot of followers. When we logged onto the Internet the other morning, we were greeted by the question of the day: "Is there a little of the Unabomber in all of us?" His back-to-nature screed, enveloped in 34,567 words (according to the XyWrite word-count function) of fake profundity, make the guy a natural for cult status. To be sure, this concern will become academic after he gets caught. At that point all we need to worry about is his worldwide stardom with the manifesto reaching billions in a televised trial that could outdo O.J.

A FORTUNE article this summer (August 21) mentioned the FBI's assumption that the Unabomber has a job and might ultimately be found via corporate personnel records. Maybe--but our present hunch is that the guy has a small store or service company of his own. This thought vaulted into the cortex after our exposure to six "small business" references in the manifesto, several of them incorporating groans about excessive regulation. "People in business for themselves have only limited autonomy...their hands are tied by excessive government regulation." All true and obvious enough, and yet he didn't need to put small businessmen onstage to make a general point about regulation. Just a thought.

SCALPING LIVES

Fans of market forces and foes of price-fixing have cause for guarded optimism: It is increasingly acceptable in the land to match up willing buyers and sellers of theater and sports tickets. Scalping is getting better ink than usual these days--in part, no doubt, because conservative ideas are on the march but also because of news stories indicating that the industry creates jobs for the homeless. When the Atlanta Braves announced that postseason ticket sales would begin on Saturday morning, September 16, the line outside Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium began taking shape late Friday. The street people who stood on line all night were apparently paid around $50 each for buying the maximum of 12 playoff tickets plus four league championship and World Series tickets.

Scalping never stops. One learns from a Nexis search of scalping-related stories in September (there were 153 of them) that the asking price for tickets to the Monet exhibit in Chicago was $100. Also that $275 was paid to sit in a rather ordinary seat at Camden Yards the night Cal Ripken passed Lou Gehrig. A pair of tickets to a Tony Bennett concert in Atlantic City went for $75 each on the boardwalk. The early quote on good Super Bowl seats is $1,450. The preliminary line on the Pope's appearances in the New York City area was $200. Despite bearish pressure from certain reluctant grownups one could name, the market on the Central Park showing of Disney's Pocahontas closed at $50 per person. Good seats at the U.S. Open finals were available for a surprisingly low $500. The LSU-Auburn game commanded only $100 this year.

No doubt because of the deregulatory winds whooshing across the political landscape, politicians are actually beginning to decriminalize scalping. It has happened in Texas, California, Illinois, Indiana, and, just recently, New Jersey. It is happening even in New York State, where a quite remarkable piece of legislation--backed, amazingly, by Democrats as well as Patakians--showed some good moves in the legislature this year before not quite making it in the end. The proposal was to allow price fluctuations in a ticket aftermarket in which prices would be no less free than those of commodities on Wall Street. Anyhow, optimism prevails here at the Keeping Up social policy desk, which is still looking into the question of whether the Fair Labor Standards Act requires overtime for standing on line all night long.