Originally Posted by MrFatbooty
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.
I dunno. I didn't really see the cartoon. And I'm not sure what an "effigy" is, but I suppose if the people who wrote the article want to say it's an effigy, then they can say it all they want. But IMO, a disembodied head of a person stuck on a pike is a pretty clear statement. I believe it was Vlad the Impaler who used that tatic to scare the bejesus out of anybody who wanted to oppose him. Now I'm not saying this kid was out impaling people who looked like the president, but I am saying that I don't think the assignment was to draw political cartoons that could be perceived as a threat to the president of the United States. I do agree, however, that he shouldn't have been punished by the school system. I don't believe that it was their responsibility to punish this kid. They handed their concerns to the proper authorities, who then investigated the matter and found no further cause for alarm. End of matter.
*edit* and even though "it's a severed head" was what i decided to think about it, at least it was my conclusion and not the effigy one I am ferociously redirecting as my own opinion.