Unabomber's 35,000 word "manifesto" was published last week, by the Washington Post, New York Times and others, after great deliberation, and under threat of blackmail by "the right" to another killing. Why, then, hasn't the world leapt at this chance to scrutinize it?

It's a stale rehash of the worst of the '70's. It reeks of Saturday Night beer bar philosophy. Any competent freshman could demolish its rhetoric. Indeed, Unabomber warned us not to expect consistency. The complete text is just as garbaged as they say.

We find cynical binges of almost-plausible populism, mixed into a laundry list of inflexible hostilities and cheap prejudices. This is the killer veneer of civility and lucidity with which every madman may greet the world. We can trace idea connections he himself does not see and cannot suspect. Grotesque flaws, both obvious and underlying, give the lie to Unabomber claims of "intellectual respectability". The essay manifests little, and promises less. The man touches and then discards ideas for which people kill and die.

Those unbalanced equations note no existence of human volition, no power in free choice. Greater presences have decimated whole continents in the name of similar geopolitical ideas. The danger is not just in the scale of power sought.

It isn't easy connecting threads in Unabomber verbiage without getting bogged in its rhetoric. A bigger picture shows Unabomber the megalomaniac, around whom the world must revolve or perish, if only to supply proof that he is right, a circularity to which people ought to be made to listen. Compromise just isn't possible with "control issues" so global. Resolution of the conflicted perspective comes only with a position of absolute power, or death.

Unabomber will eventually be captured and removed from society forever. Yet, if the media had instead published a notarized manifesto from El Diablo himself, public reaction would have been little different.

Even with complete access to the very technology he denounces, might this bomb-mailer be waiting for the fuller impact of his "manifesto" to sink into the public consciousness? This will never materialize. Unabomber felt murder and extortion could deliver to the world a doctrine people would simply be "forced" to re-examine, and the world, in turn, simply changed the channel. Scary, but that's a message almost all but Unabomber will see.

© Alex Forbes , La Parola October 1995