An Irishman's Diary

The silicone chip inside her head gets switched to overload. And nobody's gonna go to school today. She's gonna make them stay at home.

Twenty years ago this week, I Don't Like Mondays was heralding a new era for Irish pop music, having reached number one in the UK singles charts.

With lyrics referring to "the telex machine" typing "to a waiting world", it appears, on one level, not to have dated well. On another, however, the Boomtown Rats' anthem was quite prophetic, addressing that peculiarity of American society - the playground massacre - long before it became an almost weekly occurrence.

The song was written after two people were shot dead and eight others wounded at a Californian high school in January 1979. Sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer fired a volley of bullets from her bedroom window at the playground across the road as students were going into their classes.

Lack of remorse

The incident shocked America, not least because of Spencer's apparent lack of remorse. When asked why she did it by a reporter who rang her while she was barricaded into her home during a 61/2-hour siege, Spencer replied: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

Recalling the event today, Bob Geldof says the phrase struck him as "particularly Californian - the idea that there doesn't have to be a reason for what you do. That stuck in my mind - the concept of actions without consequences."

Sweet sixteen, ain't that peachy keen. Now it ain't so neat to admit defeat.

They can see no reasons, 'cause there are no reasons. What reasons do you need?

The reaction to the shooting set a pattern which continues today, with blame focusing on the killers' parents, their moral background, or lack of it, and on violence in the media. The fact that Spencer committed the act with a .22 calibre semi-automatic rifle given to her as a Christmas present by her father went almost unnoticed.

A recent Newsweek survey shows how two decades of school shootings have served only to strengthen America's sense of denial. Eight in 10 respondents said misguided parenting was to blame for incidents such as the murder of 15 people last April in Littleton, Colorado by teenagers calling themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia and the attack earlier this month on a Jewish community centre in Los Angeles. Half of those surveyed blamed violence in the media.

In a recent newspaper interview, the widow of the school principal shot dead by Spencer pointed her finger in the same direction.

"I think it goes back to the parents, the family structure," said Kathe Wragg, who called for Spencer never to be released from prison. "I think some children are insecure and angry, and I guess their needs are not satisfied, and so they strike out against society. Unfortunately, it's a terrible way to get attention."

Like other survivors and their families, Wragg came to question why so much attention and support was focused on Spencer while her victims suffered.

Celebrity

When the Boomtown Rats song was brought to her attention after its release, she complained that it served to turn Spencer into a celebrity.

This scared off the Irish pop group's label, Columbia, from distributing the record in the US. Thus, said Geldof in his autobiography Is That It?, "we fell into that limbo state from which there is no return. We became a cult band."

It remains something of a bitter memory for the Dubliner. "The song wasn't about her and we never mentioned her. Most people thought it was about waking up on Monday morning and not wanting to go to work. Nobody really associated it with that incident, but when Columbia found out the connection they thought they'd be sued by the parents and withdrew it after a week."

And the lesson today is how to die.

As for Spencer, she is serving the 20th year of a 25-year-to-life sentence at the California Institute for Women in Frontera. When she came up for parole in January 1998, the prison board was flooded with opposition letters and videotaped interviews from victims' families.

In a letter, Wragg wrote that her stomach still churned when she thought of Spencer's excuse for the shooting. "We have been so impacted by this heinous crime by an irresponsible, self-absorbed, bored and uncaring thrill-seeker who dared to kill and did," she wrote.

No doubt sensing defeat, Spencer waived her right to the hearing. Parole won't be considered again until 2001.

Drugged

Opinions differ on whether or not two decades in prison have helped Spencer to face up to what she did. She recently claimed that she was under the influence of alcohol and the hallucinogenic drug PCP when she carried out the crime and was therefore not guilty.

She also suggested that the victims may have been hit by bullets fired by police officers and SWAT teams which stormed her house.

In another statement giving ammunition to those who believed she was still unrepentant, Spencer - now 36 and a graduate of a prison electronics courses - alleged she was given mind-altering drugs for two years after her arrest and did not realise until later that she had signed an agreement to plead guilty to first-degree murder.

"I live with the unbearable pain every day of knowing that I was responsible for the death of two people and caused many other physical and emotional pain and suffering," she said. "But I'm not a murderer."