William Poole, a high school junior from Kentucky, was taken into custody and charged with threatening to commit second-degree-felony terrorism for writing a story about a horde of zombies who wreak havoc in a school. It seems the boy's grandparents had been reading his journal, found a story he'd been writing for English class and promptly turned him in. According to a police detective, "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function, it's a felony in the state of Kentucky."I read fiction, write it, and teach fiction writing at a small university, and this piece chilled me to the bone. How oppressive is a society which punishes acts of the imagination? It's a terrifying notion.
One of the things that I truly believe about art is its unique value for exploration and understanding. If you can write about something, you likely will not have to actually do it. And in a work of fiction, because it is fiction, and because of what I may have naively assumed about the First Amendment, a writer is permitted to explore anything. Now a teenage boy writing about zombies attacking a school doesn't strike me as particularly odd in the least; in fact, it's hardly a great leap of the imagination, and I discourage such genre writing, preferring that students start with learning to record their own sensory experiences. Still, zombies are fascinating creatures, partially because of their use as metaphor for desensitized citizens in a wholly mediated world, and also because they're, well, scary.
But what is far scarier still is that a teenager could be locked up as a terrorist for simply writing about this. I don't know whether this action by law enforcement is because they are left so little latitude by the statute or because they are so terrified by the prospect of oversight by the Justice Department resulting in some career-ending move, but it's hard not to laugh at the circumstances of this case. Except that it's not funny.
The implications of this episode point toward totalitarian excess, and I'm pretty confident the arrest will be thrown out for the numb-minded exercise in overzealous interpretation that it is. How is a story a threat? Can you imagine this standard applied to all the murder mysteries, disaster movies, and television crime dramas?
Let's hope that the grandparents, the police, and the prosecutors get a grip and let the boy go home. Putting a chill on literary expression can't be a goal of the No Child Left Behind Act, can it?
2 comments:
But you will see that Eric Rudolf, a real live blow-shit-up recidivist, is never, ever referred to in the MSM as a terrorist.
"Terrorist" is defined in practice as "anyone who does bad things and didn't vote for Bush"
How sad and true. Tom DeLay and John Cornyn directly threaten or rationalize violence against federal judges, but it's a kid writing about zombies who goes to jail. Never a shortage of material, eh?
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