Young Ted Kaczynski on the left David Kaczynski on the right. Looking at Ted as a teenager, he doesn’t seem destined to become a terrorist and an incel. David on the other hand has already developed into a Park Slope soy boy.

A young manly looking Ted Kaczynski in the hell of American suburbia, those “little boxes made of ticky tacky” Pete Segar sung about. He looks destined to become another Jack Kerouac.

Too bad he never met Neal Cassady and William Boroughs.

The Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, who by any account has led an exceptionally fulfilling life. What if Ted Kaczynski had grown up in Sarajevo and not Chicago? What if he had spent his youth drinking Rakija, hanging out with gypsies, listening to brass brands, and getting laid instead of cramming for Calculus exams and working as an assistant professor at Berkeley?

A Shaggy, unkempt Kaczynski in police custody.

A shaggy unkempt Leo Tolstoy not in police custody.

A shaggy unkempt Emir Kusturica hanging out with the man himself.

Slavs age gracefully into shaggy anarchists. Frenchmen become fat. But whatever you want to say about Monsieur Depardieu, his heart is in the right place. You’d never see him hug President Biden.

And as we all know, Putin kept Emmanuel Macron and his neoliberal cooties at a safe distance.

Andrej Wadja got it wrong when he cast a Pole as rigid uptight totalitarian Robespierre and a Frenchman as the fun loving corrupt hedonistic Danton. It’s actually the opposite. Westerners are naturally uptight, rigid authoritarians. Slavs occasionally become tyrants but they always at least have fun doing it. A Slavic Robespierre is kind of an absurd contradiction.

In the end, they cleaned him up and put him in federal prison for the rest of his life (where of course he belonged). He actually looks more respectable in jail than outside of jail. That should tell you something about the world we live in.

In fact, Ted looks happy in prison, almost as if he knows that unlike most fake American rebels, he struck his blow against the system and now he can relax for decades in protective custody. It’s not like social isolation was much of a threat. I’m sure he thrived in solitary confinement. In the end it’s a much healthier way of getting away from the hell of other people than heroin.