Brautigan noted that whilst ‘innocent’ in the 1940s, in 1979 a boy with a gun would mean a pile of bodies and the national guard called out, now pretty much a weekly occurrence in the USA. 

We’ve completed (for now) our exploration of Soviet anthrax outbreaks…so we turn our attention to Brenda Spencer and the need for fairy-tale monsters. Plus the usual tangents…The inspiration if that’s the right word for this part of the 0-1979 project was hearing The Boomtown Rats song ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ which turned Spencer into a traditional maybe even middle class school-girl who for no apparent reason decided to shoot up her class-mates. It’s kind of expected that a poor or working class kid might go off the rails whilst the shock of the ‘respectable’ child going astray still is sold and not just in the Daily Mail/Daily Telegraph worldview. You can see it today. A kidnapped kid from a professional family will garner much more sympathy than one from a housing estate. Though the pain is the same for both the blame of negligence on behalf of the parents, explicit or otherwise is usually not.

98% of mass-shootings are carried out by males and in the US at least sadly seem to be a regular occurrence so female killers are viewed as somehow more unnatural and shocking. As with the anthrax outbreak we’ll be using I Don’t Like Mondays to explore contradiction, blatant sexism and of course fake news. Richard Brautigan and the Apocalypse may very well get a mention too…

Here’s the song for those that may not be aware of it…

More soon…