15 Really Big Minutes of Fame : If Kaczynski is the Unabomber, he’ll say so and take advantage of the media attention to promote his manifesto.

It’s probable that the jail cell in which Ted Kaczynski is now sitting is not much different from the 10 by 12-foot cabin in which he has lived the greater part of the last 25 years. Except, of course, that it has running water and electricity.

Sitting there, he must be brooding over his sudden catapult to fame as the FBI’s choice as the long-sought Unabomber, responsible for three deaths and 23 injuries in what the FBI has constructed as 16 bombings over the last 18 years.

Whether he really is the Unabomber remains to be proved. At the moment, all we know is that the FBI says it has found a trove of bomb-making devices in his shack and a typewriter that may match the one used to type the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto published in the Washington Post last year. According to the agency, it may be months before its elaborate detective work actually ties this man to any of the known Unabomber deeds.

But let’s for a moment assume that Kaczynski is the Unabomber. While he sits there in his cell, he must be torn between two very different choices of how to act.

He can say nothing to the authorities, maintain his innocence, and rely on his public defender to mount a case that, even if he had explosives and pipes in his cabin, he committed no crime and certainly none of the Unabomber assaults. This risks the chance that he will then be found guilty of a felony and have to serve up to 10 years in prison, but it’s better than being judged a murderer.

Or he might want to declare to the world that he is indeed the Unabomber and use the enormous publicity that his arrest has engendered as a medium to spread his message to the world. He was, after all, so keen to get his manifesto published last year that he threatened to keep bombing and killing if it wasn’t printed, so we know he cares a lot about the political reasoning behind his grisly acts. He could use this opportunity now to confess before a judge and the world’s media and explain in rich detail just what led him on this course.

As a slight variation on that scenario, he might decide to maintain his innocence until a trial, waiting until a full measure of O.J.-mania developed around it. Then he could use the witness box as a political pulpit, declaring that he was proud to be the Unabomber and that his bombing career was necessary to get society to realize that its edifice of high technologies was leading us down a perilous road to social and environmental disaster.

That would get him convicted, no doubt, and, probably a death sentence, but it would also give him a lot more than 15 minutes of fame. Even filtered through media that find it nearly impossible to convey messages of any complexity, his ideas would get unprecedented publicity and would be a lot more accessible than his eye-glazingly dense manifesto.

If Kaczynski has been allowed to read newspaper accounts of his arrest, I think he’d be inclined to take this latter course. Especially because even now, six months after the manifesto has been available for scrutiny, news accounts keep missing its point. One report said it reflected “an obsession with science” and another that it emphasized “the history of science,” when that makes up only a tiny fraction of the statement. It was also labeled “an anarchist tract,” though it has almost nothing to say about anarchism in any recognizable form--a little like calling “The Bridges of Madison County” a photographer’s manual.

Worse still, the New York Times keeps referring to the manifesto as having to do with “the nation’s post-industrial system” and a “post-industrial society.” The manifesto’s entire argument, however, is against industrial society, or what it calls “industrial-technological society”--nothing “post” about it. The Unabomber might acknowledge that ours is a post-smokestack society in many places, but his point is that it is thoroughly industrial, in values and beliefs and practices, no matter what high-tech veneer it now possesses. It is his hatred of this that inspired his long, mad bombing campaign.

So there he sits, weighing 10 years in prison against execution, silence against publicity, persistent misreadings of his message against a chance to correct the record with fanfare. It’s hard to read this reclusive man, but my guess is that, if he is our Unabomber, he’ll stand up and say so, going head high and eyes ablazing into history.