Naturally select your brand of authorial hubris, dear reader, and as P.T. Barnum chortled-it's this way to the great egress! Wrap those vestigial paws about the wheel of Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski's unassuming parable "Ship of Fools," in the Autumn 1999 issue of Off!, and you might just sprout fingers. Consider the molecular potential of that wacky Unabomber's latest literary codon, the smug, self-assured mail-bomb gene isolated to the didactic chromosome. Why the zealots must be flipping through their dog-eared "Cliffs Notes" for interpretative fodder, the skeptics laughing long booger trails into their double lattés, for "Ship of Fools" betrays the already lambasted illusion of anything resembling pluralism in that "Unabomb organization" fabricated in Kaczynski's previous manifesto "Industrial Society and its Future" (which, you may remember, was quickly picked up by both The Washington Post and The New York Times). Yet, the deployed rhetoric in this sophomore effort drops the grassroots facade, making our dear friend Teddy about as "I-me-mine" as Donald Trump sporting a Pat Buchanan mask.
And you thought that best-selling broadside was interminably predictable! "Ship of Fools" may have indeed been solicited by the Off! staff to provide the Unabomber a forum, but the advance couldn't have been much. Kaczynski's latest schmaltz ferries a captain and three mates, continuously "smiling and winking" as they manipulate the following caricatures of pluralism: an "able seaman" frozen in his duties, a "lady passenger" complaining about the lack of blankets for women, a "Mexican sailor" sick with the inequity of his pay-scale, an "American Indian sailor" who desires, in one of Kaczynski's attacks on PC language, to "run a crap game so (he) can make some money," and of course a bosun, who, exemplifying the author's writing of sexual difference, desires both not to be called a "fruit" along with the "right to suck cocks." 1 The captain and three mates placate the hopelessly PC crowd of workers and passengers by acquiescing to their demands for equal rights only enough to keep them productive as the ship continues its voyage to the murky "north." The lone voice of "reason" is the lowly cabin boy, who advocates suppression of all complaints until a violent mutiny can reorient the vessel, but he is ignored time and time and time again until the predictable end. Kaczynski inscribes his readers with a chilling rejoinder to the Brothers Grimm tradition he so obviously descends from:
Once upon a time, the captain and the mates of a ship grew so vain of their seamanship, so full of hubris and so impressed with themselves, that they went mad. They turned the ship north and sailed until they met with icebergs and dangerous floes, and they kept sailing north into more and more perilous waters, solely in order to give themselves opportunities to perform ever-more-brilliant feats of seamanship.2
For all this blueprint mediocrity, "Ship of Fools" earns its cliché-ridden diploma from the Aesop-Hegel distance education school of subject position, where instead of drawing the turtle or pirate in the back of a comic book, the student files his reports over the three people he had to kill just to write the "personal statement." The user-friendly parable politics of "Ship of Fools" (contrasted against the word-hoard acupuncture of the earlier manifesto), attempts to electrify these new needles and pins as the promise
of an imploding differend, collapsing the seedy mucous membranes of the whole fast food hegemony-top-loading extra fries under the skin of both Unabomber and Unabombed, comptroller and plebiscite, philosopher and Madison Avenue junky, prisoner and purveyor of those prurient, pop culture panopticons. Yet, for all his overtures to the salvation of humanity from its technological excesses, Kaczynski's humors hides itself in both pew and pulpit-which makes totaling the collection plate sans bean counters all the more difficult.
Case in point is the American prison experience. After being fingered by his brother, who noticed Kaczynski's distinct style of écriture all over the manifesto, the Unabomber's family received their check for fifteen minutes of fame from "60 Minutes," while the man behind the document (that reclusive "Unabomb organization"-literally tripped up by the need to reinforce explosion with exegesis) began his media-directed psychoanalysis. Once imprisoned, Kaczynski produced a vague mi-nimalist text in circum-stances very different from the former hermetic but "free" existence that generated the manifesto. The double-bind is of course symptomatic of the Una-bomber's somewhat re-cent fame, and if as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari specify, "a schizophrenic out for walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch,"3 can we read Kaczynski's imprisonment, independently of any mental diagnosis, as anything more than a re-location before a cultural microscope that owes its theoretical perspective as much to Dr. Ruth and Dr. Spock as Dr. Freud?
Thus, the pop-psychoanalysis of the "60 Minutes" team, followed by the NPR coverage of the Off! piece, make Kaczynski a collaborator in the "madness" of his own fictions. Take a claim from Binghamton's self-proclaimed right-wing publication, that "Ship of Fools" issues from a "evil demented source," followed not ten words later by the charge that the parable's "wisdom" is that of a "demented prisoner."4 Even assuming that this critic possesses an rudimentarily differentiated vocabulary, it doesn't take a Pavlov to isolate the nucleotide linking "evil" with "prison." And while the rare beef of hack journalism may rot with a fading spotlight for Kaczynski-as-icon, the slammer has occasionally engendered spaces for such aesthetic dissent as Don Quixote, The Miracle of the Rose, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in spite of the ubiquitous bell. Unfortunately, "Ship of Fools" is long on conditioned response but short on the searing narrative excitement of Charles Manson's Lie or the über-cogent videotapes of pre-Hale-Bopp Heaven's Gate.
Kaczynski's great-white-hope-with-Kung-Fu-grip, the "cabin boy" anti-hero,5 predicates his desperate attempts to boldly defuse the complaints of the pseudo-oppressed crew and passengers on a seemingly divine directive to "get this ship turned around."6 Like some Leonardo DiCaprio given superhuman strength in a gamma radiation accident, like a hyperbolic Archimedes changing into tights in a telephone booth, this kid's working on the worst kind of tragic consumer leverage.
Attempting to sublimate the complainers and their complaints to the telos of "we'll all drown," the cabin boy's protests are ignored because, in the voice of Kaczynski's narrative, "he was only the cabin boy." 7 The desperation of the "bottom-up" ploy creates a less-than-proletariat-hero whose oppression is privileged precisely in its inability to be localized outside the text. Given his current media stature, with Kaczynski as sole component of the entire "Unabomb organization," these pitiful cries that must be heard to save the "ship" from the dangers of the "north" come off as little more than a manipulative device of Kaczynski-the-prisoner overtly rejecting political correctness in favor of action taken to the people. Of course this isn't a case of rapper Jay-Z living the "good life" while still rapping about the streets, but how can the "cabin boy"-ultimately in fear of the revenge of "rude nature" on rampant technicalization ("Look how thick the icebergs are now…. we'll be wrecked and drowned")8-keep it real from the Unabomber's upper deck vantage?
The cabin boy tries to amass street cred in calling the captain and his three mates "madmen up on the poop deck," suggesting that the individual gripes of the over-stylized crew and passengers could be tabled until after the mutiny: "If a few of us get together, make a plan, and show some courage, we could save ourselves…. We could charge the poop, chuck those lunatics overboard, and turn the ship to the south."9 Immediately, Kaczynski calls in the forces of the ideological state apparatus like an air strike, embodied by the "professor" who articulates the "appropriate" reply: "I don't believe in violence. It's immoral"10-a sentiment quickly echoed by the ship's private sector.
Thus, the complaints of the crew and passengers-the "trivial grievances" dominating discourse with the captain and mates-frustrate the ability of the "oppressed" to articulate the supposedly collective cause of their symptoms (which Kaczynski identifies only through the "lowest" representative of a working class). Simultaneously, any blanket disavowal of violence as a revolutionary necessity (by the professor and his followers) automatically accuses such "speech" as a creation of the power mechanism, and thus, a fair target for the Unabomber's call-to-arms to those clear-headed enough to see this "north" for what it is.
Like the Missouri school board member who recently decried the teaching of "evolution" because she could discern no connection between porpoises and monkeys, the Unabomber's fold-in "Book of Revelations" ending where the ship "was crushed between two icebergs and everyone drowned,"11 is filled with a lack of signification big enough to drive a postal truck through. The "north" as representation of the enemy is expressly symptomatic of Kaczynski's own critique of symptoms, so that the desire of the female passenger for extra blankets, the Mexican sailor's call for equal pay, the bosun's desire to suck cocks, et al… limit the potential of any one of these representatives to ever transcend two-dimensionality. Unification behind the instrumental figure of the "cabin boy" is about as likely as a cult of personality forming behind Mr. Clean, as the cabin boy's vague anti-hegemonic authority is ultimately bestowed only by his ability to identify the vague hegemonic "threat" of a natural gag-mechanism, activated not by anything inherent in the "ship," but by the policies of its vector. Reducing this danger to the abstract topology of "north," even in parable form, demeans the entire messaging service-Unabomber and Unabombed.
Since the alternative course, of course, is never charted, Kaczynski's assumption-that the dangerous, chilly ambiguity of northern waters will threaten enough to snap the deluded masses out of their own ambiguity-betrays the connection of his parable's totalizing project to the currents of a Western thought intimately bound up in both the ambiguity of his discourse, as well as the "star system" that keeps this celebrity's story as a silly paean to the force of metaphoric logic. Maybe the Unabomber doesn't get VH-1 airtime or circulation in a national daily for "Ship of Fools," but even if he did this sort of image-text would ring about as true as U2's Bono warbling about world peace, Charlton Heston waving the NRA stone tablets in our faces, or even, god forgive me, Ronald Reagan's always-inspired character acting.
Hmmm… but if that's the case, unpack the vacuous sound-byte platitudes-there's hope for the Unabomber yet! Jack-in to his newsgroup on a chilly northern night, and if the residual fur doesn't keep you quite warm enough, use those newfangled fingers to double click the posts.
Notes
1 Ted Kaczynski, "Ship of Fools," Off!, Autumn 1999, 15.
2 Ibid., 15.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983).
4Robert Zoch, "Way Off," Binghamton Review, October 1999, 6.
5 See actor Chris Elliott's movie Cabin Boy for precursors.
6 Ibid., 15.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 Ibid., 16.
9 Ibid., 16.
10 Ibid., 16.
11 Ibid., 17.
