Originally Posted by LiLRexen
Well, I was never good at reading deeper into things. Like in English class when they took a classic book and asked you what the author was REALLY saying. Well, I don't know. Black Beauty is a story about a horse and a severed head is a severed head to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if this kid was so politically astute then he should have realized the possible implications of his drawings. In highschool, we would draw symbols on our foreheads, peace and anarchy signs and whatnot. But not one of us ever drew a swastika, realizing the possible backlash it would receive. There is a certain amount that people can be pushed and when you cross the line you need to accept the consequences.
No reading deeper into things needed here. It says right there in the article that the head was an effigy and not an actual severed head. If anything the guy is holding a poster of Bush's head on a stick, like at a protest. There is in fact an event which this references, where people in various arab nations including Iraq protest American policies by holding up effigies (i.e. giant papier machet figures) of our leaders and doing assorted things to them.
The kid didn't make any public statements that would incur some kind of backlash. For all we know the only person he showed the notebook to was the teacher who told him to do the assignment in the first place. I mean fer chrissakes, it's not like he ran around sticking posters up on the walls of his school trying to foment a rebellion. He was supposed to keep an art notebook and this is the subject matter he came up with.
When the kid was asked about it by his school district and he told them that it was an effigy of Bush and not actually his severed head, that should have been the end of this.
Although I must say you've demonstrated what this kid's problem is: certain folks' inability to think subjectively. "It's a severed head!" was your initial reaction even though that's not even what the article said in the first place. After several times of me pointing out that it was not actually a severed head not only are you still saying it's a severed head, but also that the kid
deserves to be punished for expressing a viewpoint that you don't agree with in the first place and in a manner that you perceieve to evoke something that he didn't intend but in your mind he still did. That is exactly the kind of attitude that screwed over this kid and got him in hot water.