The Poodle Pants: Is the Future So Dark Because I’m Wearing Unabomber’s Shades?

PANTS ON FIRE: Two weeks ago, Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber who for 18 years made Americans change the way they boarded planes and opened their mail, checked out once and for all in a North Carolina prison, where he was serving a sentence of four lifetimes plus 30 years for good measure. While authorities aren’t releasing details, it’s known Kaczynski committed suicide. Based on a previous attempt, it’s likely Kaczynski hung himself with his prison-issue underpants. Given the extent to which the human species has so totally and literally hoisted itself by its own petard — which, translated, refers to a bombmaker blowing himself up with his own creation — this seems a perfectly fitting way for the Unabomber — was he a serial killer or was he a terrorist? — to turn out the lights. 

From 1978 to 1995, the Unabomber — indelibly seared into our collective consciousness by a police sketch artist who rendered him as a triangle-shaped face dominated by a pair of aviator sunglasses and framed by the perpetual cowl of his sweatshirt hood — delivered a total of 16 artisanal, hand-crafted pipe bombs throughout the country. These bombs, painstakingly crafted out of such DIY ingredients as match heads, razor blades, roofing nails, and household batteries, claimed the lives of three people and wounded 23 more.

By contemporary standards, these numbers pale in comparison to the body count of even the most underachieving mass shooter with the easily obtained military-style hardware to do it. Even so, the FBI had spent more time and money trying to track Kaczynski down than  they spent on any other manhunt in bureau history. Even with 150 investigators on the case at one time, they never got close. When Kaczynski was finally captured in his Montana cabin in the woods — no water, no electricity, no mattress — it was because his brother and sister-in-law dropped a dime on crazy Uncle Ted.