Slashdot Mirror
In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment For a Novelist
An anonymous reader writes A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report — "taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future."
Book burns you.
I don't know. It sounds like they kidnapped him in the night, forced him to leave hims hometown, and have imprisoned him somewhere against his will, just based on a fictional novel --- probably a jail or psych ward, where they are already administering drugs, so he won't have the mental faculties left to pursue any action, not that he could without ability to travel and speak to an attorney.
McLaw was suspended by the Dorchester County Board of Education pending an investigation and is no longer in the area. He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere.
As if the story itself could not be more horrible I can't believe the books were published in 2011 and 2013 and just now they decide to go after him. Either he pissed off someone high up and they just found a reason to go after the guy or some bored cop just got around to discovering fiction...
Unbelievable!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Instead of 900 years in the future, he should have set it in the past. Or at least included dinosaurs. You'd never get in trouble for writing about Dinosaurs... Oops, sorry. Forget about that.
In all seriousness, though, school shootings are a problem. However, I'm much more afraid of my oldest son (who begins middle school in a couple of days) getting in trouble for someone mistaking something he says/does as being a threat against the school than I am afraid that someone will walk into the building and kill a bunch of people. (My oldest is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and anxiety disorder. He can tend to be clueless about "other meanings" to the things he says or how people might take offense to certain phrases that he means in an innocent manner. Not a good combination with overzealous administrators who are jumping at the slightest whiff of trouble.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wow. Talk about a lawsuit that you are *guaranteed* to win.
This guy is going to make millions.
My best friend is an attorney and we've known each other for years. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA (I live in the US too by the way). Literally anything can happen in court. You may be right in that the odds may be good that he'll be able to sue and win, but it all depends on factors we can't control or predict. The judge the case gets is important. If it's a jury trial, the outcome may have more to do with the abilities of the lawyers involved than the actual merits of the case. Then if you don't like the verdict and appeal it, you go back to square one because some appellate judges tend to favor one side over the other. You get a really conservative appellate male judge in the Scalia mold and you could find that he'll basically allow the government to do anything if they feel that public safety was potentially at risk. Keep in mind too that the author may be greatly exaggerating what happened to him and what really happened may be a lot less sensational than the news report.
It's awesome that his pen name was Voltaer which sounds like a reference to Voltaire who was fighting for civil rights and had his books burned.
It sounds like this guy is brilliant. He was smart enough to use a pen name to hide his writings from his students, and also smart enough to choose a pen name that mocks anyone who uses these writings to defame him. Clearly, Voltaire should now be required reading by Dorchester county students.
They aren't comparing his getting fired to Soviet-style punishment. The comparison is to the forcing him, against his will, to "an emergency medical evaluation" in a location that only the police know of and won't release any details about. Making a guy disappear because he's suspected of bad behavior isn't something that's supposed to happen in the US. (That last statement might sound a bit naive. Take it as a goal for how our country should operate instead of the totalitarian method of just letting the authorities do whatever they want for whatever reason.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Well, there was the Declaration of Independence, but those people followed up the petition with gunfire.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
America.... home of the fr... yeah right.
Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Hamlet by Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
So lets see... underage sex, murder of your relatives, regicide, racism, lynchings, rape, adultery, organised crime, a mentally-ill killer and of course - lawless schoolboys killing each other! What's not to love about the American school system, yeehaw!
Does that help?
Yes, that helps, since these sources contradict many of the "facts", and the main theme, of TFA:
- His book The Insurrectionist was published more than three years ago.
- School authorities have been aware of the book since it was first published.
- His book had little or no influence on the decision to place him on administrative leave.
- The main reason for his suspension was a "bizarre" four page letter that he wrote to county officials, that raised mental health concerns.
- He has not been arrested, and is not being charged with any offence (TFA does not say he was, buy many commenters here have assumed this).
- It does not appear that his mental health evaluation was mandatory or coerced in anyway other than as a condition of returning to work.
So it appears that there were some legitimate concerns about his mental health, and that authorities' response to those concerns was measured and reasonable.