Gotcher "somber imbecility of tyranny" right here:

William T. Vollman, whose novel Europe Central, published earlier this century, impressed the hell out of me (although a judicious editor might have trimmed a hundred or so pages without harm to it), was interviewed on NPR this morning in connection with a piece in the current Harper's (paywalled, unfortunately). It seems that back when Ted Kaczynski was still at large and unidentified, some patriotic informant fingered Vollmann as the possible culprit. Apparently, once you land on a law enforcement database as a potential shady character, it's fairly easy to be granted tenure, because five years after Kaczynski's arrest, the FBI was looking at him in connection with the 2001 anthrax attacks. As a result, he gets detained by our Pogranichnyye Voiska when he crosses the border (sit for seven hours; reading during detention not permitted; supervision required for voiding of bladder or bowels). Here's a link to the NPR story:

http://www.npr.org/b...was-the-unabomber

UPDATE: A little more detail here:

http://www.washingto...as-the-unabomber/

I really haven't much patience with the notion that just because he wasn't shot out of hand as he might have been in Germany in 1942 or the USSR in 1938, then freeeee-dumb! It alarms me that this is the way we live now. It is a reflexive, unthinking, bureaucratic thuggery manifesting itself in the law enforcement and security organs at every level in the polity.

This is a very, very bad trend. It's been in train for a long time. The process is accelerating. People aren't anything like scared enough.

cordially,