Most of us, at some point, have had the desire to smash a computer. Perhaps our own personal computer, after the umpteenth crash, after we watch hours of work disappear with a single little blip. Maybe someone else’s computer–the one at school, storing a grade you’d rather forget; the one at the Department of Motor Vehicles that remembers your tickets so persistently.
In a recent article in the Nation, in fact, Sale applauds the central message of the bomber’s long treatise. While politely distancing himself from the bomber’s methods–Sale at the moment limits his violence to inanimate objects–he does suggest that the bomber’s manifesto, though dully written and not terribly original, contains “a crucial message at the core…for those with fortitude enough to get through it, and unless that message is somehow heeded and acted upon we are truly a doomed society hurtling toward a catastrophic breakdown.”
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The Unabomber has few explicit fans, but some of his cothinkers regard him with a certain respect: at least he knows how to get attention. “When I first saw a couple of phrases in [the Unabomber’s] letter, I was amazed,” anarchist writer John Zerzan told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Here I’ve been, laboring in the wilderness and publishing things for years. And then this comes along. It’s ironic–the newspapers wouldn’t be up talking to me if [the Unabomber] hadn’t been blowing people up. I’m just struck that these ideas are getting out.”
If anything, Sale is more enamored of violence than the bomber himself–at least at the level of philosophical abstraction. While the bomber’s argument for his violence is a utilitarian one, pure and simple, Sale’s philosophy is based upon an almost Nietzschean irrationalism. In his first Nation article, Sale waxed eloquent about the irrational powers of feelings buried “down deep in the English soul,” urging people to take up resistance “because somewhere in the blood, in the place where pain and fear and anger intersect, one is finally moved to refusal and defiance.” Only now does he say: hold it–that’s not what I meant at all.
And so some have. Whenever a doctor is shot or harassed, whenever a clinic is bombed, the more respectable members of the antiabortion movement come forward to denounce the violence. Given the logic of their rhetoric, their denunciations ring false. Meanwhile others, perhaps more quietly, celebrate the violence. “The question for each of us,” one Operation Rescue member commented after the shooting of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida in 1993, “is, do we really believe our own rhetoric?” The politics may be reprehensible–I certainly think they are–but the question is at least an honest one.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Jim Flynn.
