Dystopia continued

To revisit the Dystopia post, one of the things that I didn't discuss there is the shifting from getting alledgedly disturbed teens help to incarcerating them. In the Oklahoma case, if the principle feared that the student was so unhinged as to stage an armed attack on his own school WHY DIDN'T HE CALL A LICENSED PSYCHOLOGIST OR PSYCHIATRIST? Lots of schools have a psychologist on staff. Why not send him over there first and assess the threat? Is sending the kid to jail really going to help him or heal him if he has intense emotional disorders?

The day before the Oklahoma post, mefi had a similar posting about two 14 year old kids in Wisconsin being arrested for having sex. Part of the justification of the arrest was "Not to punish the children, [Kornblum] said, but to help them through various court-ordered services." Well, crickey, it seems like maybe there should be a way to get kids that "come from troubled backgrounds and struggle with...attention deficit disorder and parental abandonment" help without throwing them in jail. It would kind of help to get them aid BEFORE they do something illegal. It would certainly be cheaper, that is if finance is really what you are concerned about. Of course, if these kids were really enterprising, they would have gone to North Carolina where the age of consent IS 14. ( Yet another example of how a little bit of effort could have resulted in an immense improvement in quality of life.) My specific comments about that particular mefi post are available here.

Another aspect of the Oklahoma case that disturbed me that I wanted to address is the confusion of fiction with reality. I began to talk about how a story about an armed take over of a school was taken to mean that this was the secret desire of the author. There is not always, or I think, even normally a one to one ratio with narrator's and author's opinions. Am I to believe that because the narrator of the Tin Drum tells me that he is insane and believes his drum can tell stories that Gunter Grasse, the author, believes the same thing?

When I was in grad school, GRAD SCHOOL, with other educated writers, if a student handed in a story in first person narrative, the other writers always assumed it was autobiographical. This was particularly annoying to me, as I prefer first person narrative. What was amazing was that students tooks this attitude towards stories, even when I made the narrator male. It kind of became a game, how much could I change the narrator and still have people think it was me? The answer was it didn't matter what I did to the narrator, my classmates ALWAYS believed it was me. And if this what educated writers think, I guess I can't expect more sophistication from the politicians and legislators of Oklahoma.


Still there is a different between writing an essay and writing a story, a distinction that I made before, but I would like to reassert. Yes sometimes
narrators or other characters are voice pieces for the author, but sometimes they are not. There should not be an assumption of autobiography. And this is why American needs to give their children a better literary education and I should be paid better.

Harumph.