Opinion: Unabomber -- a life of crime for sale

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Let the bidding begin. But where?

The federal judges of the Ninth Circuit have decided that the Unabomber’s goods and chattels can indeed be auctioned off on the Internet to pay his victims.

No details yet as to how or where they’ll be auctioning off Theodore Kaczynski’s writings, books, and what’s enticingly described as the ‘other possessions’ of a man who supposedly eschewed possessions, but who did own a few guns and the bits and pieces required to make bombs.

Imagination runs instantly to an eBay posting of, say, the only saucepan to be found in his Montana cabin, and from there to a show, ‘One-Pot Cooking With Crackpots.’

And his writings will be up for sale too. His complete works ran to hundreds of thousands of words of manifestos, like the one that newspapers published as one of his demands to stop the bloody, 17-year-long trail of bombs he set, along with diaries about the minutiae of his daily life -- from food to weather. (Penthouse magazine volunteered to print his anti-technology screed, but Kaczynski was fastidious about where his oeuvre appeared; if something so beneath him as a skin magazine ran it, he decreed, he would still reserve the right to bomb one more person to death.)

To give Kaczynski his meager due -- he was a Harvard man, after all, and has a Ph.D in mathematics -- he wrote virtually everything on a manual typewriter, but committed virtually no errors of grammar or spelling. It’s the low-tech version of the truism that just because you can watch a movie doesn’t make you a director, or that just because you can type doesn’t make you a writer.

Curiously, for a man who once couldn’t wait to get his work into print and threatened to kill people if it didn’t happen, he went all shy about it once he was sentenced to prison. From his life-sentence cell in a Colorado supermax prison, he sued to stop the auction, saying it invaded his freedom of expression. The judges obviously disagreed. My sense is that all it may have invaded was his non-freedom to make a buck.

Kaczynski owes about $15 million to his victims, and of course the question is, how much can this auction raise? He’s still right up there among all-time singular American criminals, although his name and deeds have been a bit eclipsed by later criminal minds less destructively intelligent but more productive when it comes to body counts.

People can’t get enough of the artifacts of horror; you’d think that monstrous karma would be enough to ward people off, but no –- and on top of that, there seems to be no end of appetite for the most marginal of connections to infamy. I just read that someone’s auctioning off the bell and collar that hung around the neck of one of Adolph Hitler’s cows.

The centerpiece of any Kaczynski auction would be that Lincoln, Montana cabin of his, which for a brief spell was as notorious as Abraham Lincoln’s was revered. Kaczynski’s cabin became a watchword for nut-cases; in the so-so film ‘America’s Sweethearts,’ a wacko film director played fittingly by Christopher Walken buys the cabin, sets it up in his own back yard, and uses it as his workplace.

Last I heard, it was on exhibit at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C. I don’t know why it isn’t part of the auction. Even in this market, a rustic 1 bdrm, no ba studio with this lurid history might fetch a good hunk of that $15 million. Or maybe the feds could go into the creepy-tourism business. A weekend in the Unabomber’s cabin could raise more money than a night in the Lincoln bedroom.

* Photo of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin being removed from a warehouse in 2003 by Rich Pedroncelli / AP