Kali Tal

Those of us whose art sends "a message about possible future events" really need to beware. Even artists writing about impossible future events better be careful. Remember the kid in Kentucky (see previous MT entry) whose zombie stories got him thrown in jail with bail set at $5,000? No, no, NO. NOT the 16-year-old whack job in Minnesota who went on a killing spree on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, though he also apparently wrote zombie stories, among many, many other things. This is William Poole, another student entirely, whose "journal" (he claims it was a collection of his fiction) featured not only zombies, but also a terrorist organization spanning three states. This journal scared Poole's grandparents and, apparently, the police and judges of his Kentucky country so badly that Poole was arrested and charged with "aggravated terrorism". His granparents, who turned him in, are refusing to post bail, so young Poole will sit in prison until the Clark Country Grand Jury hears his case. According to a 14 March article in The Friday Thing, the public is not allowed to read Poole's story and judge for itself what the boy might have intended. Instead it has been sealed by the court.

(You can find another interesting story about Poole on James Bow's Web Page.)

The issue in all three of these cases is not the criminal actions (or intent) of the artists in question. Let's say (and I don't believe it's true) that all three "artists" mentioned above are or were indeed plotting nefarious crimes. One carried out heinous crimes, so there's no doubt about his criminality. But the correlation between art forms (horror writing, rap music) and criminal actions is not proven to be (and, I believe, cannot be proven to be) causal. In other words, the vast majority of people who write stories about violence (from Le Carre to Stephen King to hopeful amateurs) do not commit the violence about which they write. Most gangsta rappers are all attitude and no action--a genre promoted by record producers who know that gangsta posing sells.

So what's all the fuss? Well, let's not be naive. The right has had it in for the arts (especially edgy arts) since Reagan took office and began to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts. Linking art to crime is yet another way of controlling both the populace in general ("conform or we'll get you") and artists in particular ("say what we want you to say in the way we want you to say it, or we'll get you). Totalitarian and fascist regimes go for the artists pretty early on. In the words of Ice-T: "Freedom of speech: just watch what you say."