THINKPOL

Someone's looking at you…

Yesterday’s acquittal of teenagers Matthew Swift and Ross McKnight proves that rank stupidity is alive and well in the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service). One can only wonder what levels of paranoia and panic are at work when it took just 45 minutes for a jury of 12 citizens to swiftly dismiss the accused in a deeply troubling case with much wider ramifications for the violation of privacy. Even following it from a discreet distance, alarm bells rang as ever-flimsier tissues of evidence gradually emerged.

To briefly recap; the two Manchester teenagers – Swift (18), McKnight (16) – were alleged to have been obsessed with Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves in Colorado on April 20, 1999. Much of the CPS case was based on journals and diaries they kept, containing details of a plan termed Project Rainbow, along with maps of their school, the prosecution alleging that the two boys intended to mount their scheme on the tenth anniversary of the massacre. However, no explosives or firearms were discovered following the arrest of the teenagers in March, which came after Ross McKnight made a drunken phone call to a female friend boasting about the plan. She told her mother, who called the police.

Defence counsel said the journals were the scribblings of teenagers with “over-active imaginations” and the defendants themselves dismissed their writings as fantasy. Swift said Project Rainbow as a way of channelling teenage rage – just a ‘personal joke’ between him and his friend. Roderick Carus, QC, continued: “This was an unnecessary, heavy-handed prosecution against two young lads who could have been dealt with in a more sensitive way… Bearing in mind their ages it’s farcical to think that this was ever a serious design.”

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INSANE

The real problem here is one of supposition. It’s something we’ve all been guilty of at some point or other. Who hasn’t been round to someone’s house for the first time and made certain value judgements on the basis of their host’s record, book or film collection? I once had a nightcap with a female friend whose entire music collection seemingly consisted of tacky supermarket ‘Love’ compilations. And aside from the difficulty of choosing any non-yucky sounds, I wasn’t instantly hot-lining the cool police or fleeing in fear before the cap left the bottle.

Yet so much credence in this case seems to have been placed on a few damning artefacts on Swift’s bookcase – books, one suspects, liable to appear on many teenage bookshelves worldwide. These included William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook (Vietnam counter-culture manual that includes home-made bomb recipes), Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the violent revolution of Andrew McDonald’s The Turner Dairies – the latter said to have chiefly inspired the Columbine Killers in tandem with their penchant for Marilyn Manson music.

If the same investigating officers came around to my gaff they could, frankly, have a field day. There are countless real crime tomes – on Bundy, Gacy, Gein, Sutcliffe, Nielson, the Wests etc – a bundle of fictional pulp from Richard Allen to the brilliant David Peace, plus some more highfaluting sexually transgressive texts from old pervs like Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. Add to that a vast tranche of hardcore gangsta rap, some original black metal (and yes, even some Marilyn Manson) – cue the old joke: I may have some criminal records but I don’t have a criminal record – and a film collection that includes every hard-boiled crime/gangsta caper of note. Though points must be deducted for missing Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine – which Swift’s viewing during a general studies lesson allegedly inspired Project Rainbow.

Yet these are just a one-dimensional fraction of the whole. You’d also find the Bronte sisters, romantic poets, a whole bunch of ’60s realism, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath and a little too much Jonathan Coe, Paul Theroux and Milan Kundera. Alongside the gangsta rap is whole bunch of jangle-tastic indie, some light classical, electronica, old soul and pure pop. Amid the gangster flicks a whole bunch of Disney classics, musicals, rom-coms and some black and white weepies. And that’s only the half of it.

THOUGHTCRIME

The bigger, more convoluted point is that we can’t discern someone’s essential character just by his or her outward tastes. We all consume culture in different ways – some as escapism, some as fantasy, some out of a prurient fascination even we can’t divine – but that doesn’t make us guilty of anything other than having an enquiring mind. And if that’s the case we’re all potentially under siege and all potential victims of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of 'thoughtcrime'.

One hopes that Swift and McKnight (who rather startlingly resembled Ian Curtis in yesterday’s court pictures) will eventually be able to rebuild their lives after this expensive and unnecessary travesty. It’s difficult to imagine the psychological damage they must be suffering after being banged up since March, or even the acute embarrassment at having their silly shared adolescent fantasies made public and treated with such disproportionate weight. It will doubtless haunt them forever.

For today the message is simple: Keep your trap shut. Don’t think. And burn your diaries now.