This Speaks Poorly For America

A poor grammatically challenged teenager in Clark County, Kentucky is being held on a $5000 bond because of the contents of his journal. He faces second-degree felony charges for making threats and possibly being a terrorist as well.

While it is nice to know that rural Kentucky does not wholeheartedly subscribe to the terrorist=A-rabs equation, there's a troubling reality here.

I'm sure that the boy's grandparents are kind, caring people who want to do what's best for everyone, and agonized over their decision to imprison their own flesh and blood based on a faulty interpretation of his private writings...but this is indicative of a bigger, more frightening picture for the rest of society.

Steven King wrote a telling story called "Rage" under the pseudonym Richard Bachman sometime in the late seventies. It was about a frustrated, misunderstood teenager who took his high school class hostage and shot a few students before being taken down by the cops. King was, himself, a high-school English teacher. I don't think this story was meant as a plan to incite revolution among teen boys at all.

King built his career off of a brilliant ability to tap into the fertile territory of social aggression and manipulation present in all high schools...Carrie, Rage, Christine, and countless other tales work off of the same themes, and they've made King a multi-millionaire. Under today's codes, he may have been imprisoned for life as a virtual serial-killing terrorist.

King's stories have been told and retold by generations of frustrated sub-alpha males who suck at sports and use English and Art class to get their aggressions out. Most of these derivative tales have little literary merit, but serve as incredibly healthy outlets for their authors. I benefited greatly from the freedom to spray some invisible blood and guts through my creative writing, paintings, and embarrassingly wretched heavy-metal lyrics as a teenager.

Teenage boys have long had a penchant for blood-soaked fiction, and it's a normal, natural way of purging aggression without actually harming anyone. While it is important for parents/parental guardians to be involved in their child's life, it's crucial that they understand the difference between unpleasant, possibly tasteless but harmless creative expression and actual malicious intent.

It may seem like a fine line, but if one is willing to go so far as to read a kid's journal, it's worth going the extra mile and learning the difference between the Klebold child's maps of Columbine and entertaining zombie schlock. It is possible to deduce that we are living in a new age of McCarthyism, with "reds" replaced by "terrorists." If there's one thing I learned while growing up and attending college in the South, it's that people who interpret the Bible literally also find it very hard to understand fiction...and these people are running the country.

posted by Jeff Simmermon @ 10:56 AM