By Stephen Kimber
February 7, 2008
My first published short story appeared in a 1976 anthology called Voices Down East, edited by the writer Silver Donald Cameron. The story was called Today I Went Crazy and told the tale of a man who had “come out of the closet of [his] craziness” and murdered his boss. “I cradle the gun in my outstretched arm, savouring his bewilderment,” my unnamed protagonist writes near the end of the story. “I squeeze the trigger. I am free. I am crazy.”
Whatever the story’s literary merits — or lack thereof — it was never intended to be taken literally.
To be honest, perhaps there was some element of fantasy wish fulfillment lurking at the edges of my choice of subject matter. I had just recently been fired from the CBC, which was then — and may be now — the kind of workplace that nurtures occasional homicidal urges.
But officials at the CBC did not report me to the authorities as a likely psycho. In fact, the CBC, being the CBC, offered me a job on a different TV program on the grounds that if I’d been fired from the first I couldn’t be all bad… but that’s another CBC story for another day. The Halifax police certainly did not show up at my door.
It was just a story.
I couldn’t help remembering that blessedly lost-to-the-ages short story this week as I read the tangled tale of 17-year-old Brendan Jones, a Grade 12 student at Heart Lake Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario, who wrote an essay as part of his final exam for his creative writing class. The five-page, handwritten essay was entitled Schools (sic) Out.
His equally unnamed protagonist is a 16-year-old girl who, at the end of the story, traps her science teacher in the basement of her house, picks up a baseball bat and says, “Sorry, Mr. Adams, but schools (sic) out.”
Brendan did not get into serious trouble for mixing up his plurals and his possessives, or even — as his teacher was careful to note in her teacherly way in the margins — for using clichés and violating the inviolate “show-don’t-tell” rule of composition.
No, Brendan’s real crime, as it turned out, wasn’t literary; it was that he had chosen “inappropriate subject matter.”
The next thing he knew, a Peel Regional Police telephoned his father. “We need to come to your house to talk about your son.” Brendan says he was told he was no longer welcome at the school and would be arrested if he tried to come on school property. His father says the principal then called him to say that the matter was being looked into by the school board and he might even be expelled from all schools under the board’s jurisdiction, putting his graduation and his plans to attend university to study — what else? — criminology next year in jeopardy.
The incident touched off a predictable firestorm. Two students started a Facebook group called “Save Brendan Jones,” which had 562 members as of yesterday morning; a student distributed “Save Brendan Jones” T-shirts (students who wore them were warned they could be expelled if they did it again); and the media, of course, was a dog on a bone. “Leave the kid alone,” opined the National Post.
That prompted some frantic backpedaling by the school board, which insisted the Brendan hadn’t been suspended or expelled, just asked to stay home for a few days so the board could “make sure we're doing everything we can to help the student,” as a spokesperson explained. She didn’t explain what they would do to help, or even why Brendan needed help.
The issue, it seems to me, is that in our defensible desire to protect students from actual danger, we have become far too quick to see ideas as dangerous, to confuse imagination with reality.
And — at a broader freedom-of-speech level — to mix up the sort of hateful, dangerous speech (or, more accurately, the dumbass anti-Muslim provocations of right-wingnuts like Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn and the late, unlamented Western Standard’s Ezra Levant) that can, and should be met with rational, logical argument with hateful, dangerous action that must be dealt with by legal sanction.
It’s enough to make want to reach for a … Ooops.
http://www.stephenkimber.com
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. He is also the author of six books, including one novel that should not be confused with real life.
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