Dawn of the Brain Dead.

I took AP English my senior year in high school. My teacher was an evangenical, conservative Christian, and for me and some of my like-minded peers in that class, she had a profound impact in shaping our aversion to conservative Christianity. Her classroom was a choice slice of Reagan's America, truth be told. Creative essays about Patriotism and Jesus were guaranteed A's, while anything that hinted of subversive creativity was a B at best.

She was smug, self-righteous, condescending, smarmy, arrogant, and vindictive. Sitting through her class, if you were a genuinely creative individual, was an exercise in endurance. I deeply regret having had this woman as a teacher, because my love for writing has always been a part of me, and it's a damned shame that there are teachers in the world who go out of their way to stifle creativity.

The class was equally divided between Christians and Godless Heathens, and every Friday she would split the class up, Christians on one side, Heathen on the other, and force us to play Bible Baseball.

Details on this are fuzzy, because it's been 18 years, but the gist of it was something like: the person "at bat" had to answer a Bible question. If answered correctly, the student would move on to first base. If answered incorrectly, the team in the "outfield" got to try and answer it. If they could, the batter was out.

"I'm pretty sure this is illegal in public school," came the rumblings from the Heathen dugout.

We never did more than mumble, however, and it wasn't only because Southern children are raised to not disrespect their elders, no. It was because of the hilarious fact that the Unwashed stomped the Saved into the ground every week.

I'm not sure why this was so, but my theory is that we, the Unbelievers, were all voracious readers and enthusiastic creative writers. We were the ones who produced Calliope, the student literary magazine, as well as the ones who could pronounce it correctly and knew who Calliope was. We also prided ourselves on being intelligent readers and writers in the way that only pretentious seventeen year olds can be, and always recommended books to each other and got in animated discussions about books at each other's houses over the weekend. The boys encouraged the girls to read science fiction, and responded to the girls' complaints of female characters being all boob and no brain by coming back with Douglas Adams and Ursula LeGuin. The girls had the boys read Gone With the Wind and discussed the race and class issues within it. One of the recurring motifs we noticed, from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land to the poetry of Yeats, were the constant Biblical references and use of religion in general. It made sense to us, if we wanted to be writers, to educate ourselves on what was in the Bible. Whether we believed in the Bible as the word of God or not (and some of us did, Heathen status aside), it's undeniable that the Bible has had a profound impact on Western literature. So we read the Bible. We educated ourselves. We discussed it with each other. In short, we gave ourselves the gift of a valuable literary education in spite of the stifling efforts of our English teacher.

It was Liz who brought us the copy of Lolita that she'd pinched off her father's bookshelf. We all read it, we all loved it, and it was Lolita that introduced us to the concept of the unreliable narrator. In my enthusiasm for figuring out that hey, just because Humbert Humbert said he was a nice guy didn't actually make him one, I went to the Post Office and Xeroxed ten copies of the Harlan Ellison short story, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," and forced them on everybody, just to keep that unreliable narrator theme going.

During the extra-curricular Lolita craze, our fundie teacher was teaching us about Odes, and assigned us all to write an ode of our own.

Liz and I sat outside on her back porch for four hours on that assignment. Still caught up in Nabokov, I wrote my ode to Lolita, from the point of view of Humbert Humbert. As fully aware as I am that this is revealing me to be All Things Nerd, I can not tell you how excited I was to write an ode with the narrator of the poem being, well, unreliable.

Imagine if you were an English teacher an had a class with ten students who were All Things Nerd when it came to books and creative writing. Imagine if you had ten students who would spend four hours writing and rewriting a poem for you. Imagine what kind of flaming asshole you'd have to be to give students a D because you didn't like their choice of subject material.

I stood outside the teacher's lounge at lunch, the only free time I had to ask this hosebeast WHY she gave me a D. Intellectually, I knew she gave me a D because that's what the baby Jesus would have wanted, but I was still compelled, with the earnestness of a teenager that really, really tried to write something GOOD, to tell her that that this D did more than hurt my GPA; it hurt my feelings.

I knocked on the door, with my friends Liz and Celeste hidden away and peeking around a corner, and asked her, "Why the D?"

"Because you deserved it," she said, "and don't ever bother me during my break again."

And she shut the door in my face.

Her son, who wrote a trite, saccharine ode to God and America, got an A plus.

I finally understood what the math geeks meant when they said they preferred math because it was either right, or it wasn't. Jesus doesn't squeeze his way inside the quadratic formula quite so easily.

My teacher sucked, yes she did. But you know what she didn't do? She didn't call the police and have me arrested for pedophilia, and it would never have entered my realm of consciousness that she would have. She may have tried to influence our choice of subject matter by punative grading, but she never sought out jail time for our creative efforts. Which is stupid, right? Because that would never happen in America. Nobody in their right minds would arrest a teenager for a creative writing assignment, right?

Wrong.

In case you don't feel like clicking on that staggering link, allow me to sum it up: a high school student was turned over to the police by his grandparents and arrested for writing a short story about zombies taking over a high school.

From the article:

"...police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. 'Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky,' said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill."

Do you remember high school? Do you remember how it was your whole world? Of course a teenager is going to write about something that happens in a high school - it's his entire frame of reference, and you know, zombies are part of today's pop culture, what with Shaun of the Dead and all. Taking a world you are intimately familiar with and introducing an unfamiliar element is a solid, standard angle of creative writing.

This is what we do to creative kids now? Jesus fuck, I'll take that D I got in South Carolina during the Reagan years any day. William Poole wrote a story about zombies at a high school; I wrote a poem about how great it was to fuck a twelve-year-old girl. I guess I should consider myself lucky to get a D instead of being imprisoned at some sort of lesbian pedophile reorientation camp.

I'm so angry about this. I'm so angry that I even feel this compulsion to explain that high school and college creative writing and English classes are places where budding writers try on different perspectives and different writing styles and imitate the voices of Nabokov, Heinlein, Mitchell, and Ellison until their own strong, clear voice emerges. Writing these words now, I understand for the first time the choked rage behind Joseph Welch's frustrated words to Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

And the saddest thing is, William Poole didn't take his zombie story far enough. The living dead haven't taken over his high school, they've taken over his entire town. I hope he makes it out of there in time.

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Thanks to Julia for the link.