My friend Adam has a way of digging up stories that make me want to give up on America. I mean, okay, it’s possible that this kind of story isn’t crazy, right? Look, a title like Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding, I could take that seriously enough. Or, I used to be able to. Any kid planning an attack on his high school would claim it was a misunderstanding if he were caught before the fact, wouldn’t he?

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the “writings” that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole’s home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

But, you see, the story is about zombies. Grandma and Grampaw turned their son in for writing a story about zombies taking over his high school, and presumably people fighting back against the zombies.

And the cops took the kid into custody, for writing a story about zombies.

And the judge is not only taking the charges seriously, but he even pumped the kids bail up to five times the original amount, because of the “seriousness” of the charges.

Charges based on notes written for a zombie-monsters-attack-the-high-school story. What the hell do these idiots think, the boy has the power to raise the deceased into undead servitude? That he is imagining his teachers as zombies the better to murder them? (Problematic since he claims no real people are mentioned in the story.) That he is just weird and weirdness needs to be punished, and severely?

If there’s anything the writers of America should rally around, it’s this… even despite the fact that kid don’t know no good grammer and cain’t speak wurth a damn. I’m telling you, fiction—especially dissident fiction—is going to be under attack very soon, and this only opens the doors on it. Publish a book mapping out how the stupidities of the current administration could result in disaster, and you’re writing a roadmap for terrorists. Critique the government and you’re “against America”. Mix the kind of stupidity we see in this case with other branches of the Administration and you’ll get exactly that. I hope to see Ursula K. Le Guin ranting about this soon.