We put a UNABOMBER FOR PRESIDENT banner on the huge, abandoned grain warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, because 1). we want to publicize our campaign to convince registered voters to write the name Unabomber in on their ballots in the presidential election to be held November 6, 1996, and 2). we want to call attention to the fact that, for more than 30 years, modern American industrial society just can't figure out a single thing to do with Red Hook's strange and beautiful grain warehouse, other than let it become a depressing, isolated ruin. These two reasons have a lot in common.
For poor and working-class Americans, there is so little difference between the candidates for President in 1996 that it doesn't really matter which one you or I vote for. No matter who we vote for -- either for President Bill Clinton, Republican Bob Dole or third party candidate Ross Perot -- the result will be the same: another rich, white male who doesn't care about you or me will be elected president. We have so little to say about how things are run in Washington, D.C. -- the politicians who run the government care so little about how things are going in places like Red Hook -- that you and I might just as well vote for the Unabomber, that is, if we vote at all! The Unabomber has just as much chance of getting elected President as we have a chance of electing a President who really represents and cares about the interests of the American people today!
It is true that the Unabomber is a terrorist and that he killed some people and tried to kill several more. But these facts shouldn't keep him from being President. Republican candidate Bob Dole is a World War II veteran; 50 years ago he killed some people and tried to kill several more. But no one is saying that this disqualifies him for office, or that this means that the people who want him to be President are "sick." Republican speech-maker Colin Powell is a Gulf War veteran; just 5 years ago he helped kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tried to kill many more. But no one is saying that he is a "violent madman," a "sociopathic genius" or forever "unfit" to be President of the United States. The only thing the Unabomber did wrong was break the federal government's monopoly on violence. All the Unabomber did was take the tool of violence into his own hands, without the government telling him that, under these special circumstances, it is OK to kill innocent people.
Unlike Bob Dole, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and the rest of them, the Unabomber doesn't want politics to be the business of making the organization of the brutal, exploiting society under which we are forced to live "better" than it is. Unlike the professional politicians, the Unabomber isn't interested in the symptoms of what is wrong. In his manifesto, called "Industrial Society and Its Future," the Unabomber said he wanted politics to be the making of a new and better society, a society that is not brutal and exploitative. He said that he wanted to get to the underlying cause of what is wrong with America today. And this is what is wrong: American industrial society puts profits before people. It doesn't value you as a person; it values you for the money you make for it. Everybody who lives here for even a short time knows what this means: the moment you are not making any money for American capitalism, you are worse than "useless" -- you have become a "burden" to society, even though you helped build that very society! And when you are "useless" or "a burden to society" in modern America, you are left alone to die and rot, just like the abandoned grain warehouse in Red Hook, just like Red Hook itself. But we refuse to be abandoned, we refuse to die, we refuse to rot! Join us.
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