Present Imperfect

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

November 29, 2006

Once upon a midday dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious online news item of thieving lore...

Since Stephen Ambrose was exposed for heisting whole passages from fellow historians way back in 2002, online journalists and readers alike have taken perverse pleasure in watching The Great and Powerful Bestselling Author go the way of the junior high stoner with a penchant for copying pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica to pad book reports.

This week, British novelist Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarizing Lucilla Andrews, a WWII nurse from whose memoirs McEwan took notes and inspiration for his novel "Atonement."

Last spring, Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan was "was very surprised and upset" when she learned that her novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" borrowed quite heavily from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings."

Can I get a witness?:

Ms. McCafferty writes: "Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b)."

Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him."

My personal opinion? Ambrose is an intentional plagiarist who got drunk on the power of prolificacy. No one who puts out eight books in five years can possibly keep track of what's his and what's not. Viswanathan is an unintentional plagiarist who internalized another writer's work and wound up unintentionally "remembering" the work as her own. And McEwan's not a plagiarist at all, but a Booker Prize-winning novelist who acknowledged his source — a source who, when presented with the plagiarism charge, responded with "I don't give a damn."

But my opinion doesn't matter. What matters is the grand schadenfreude of it all. It's what makes us read gut-wrenching novels like "Atonement" in the first place. We like to watch other people — whether they be fictional or very real — suffer. Train wrecks, congressional page scandals, the "Heroin Twins" on Dr. Phil (or, let's face it, Dr. Phil full stop), novelists who get caught with their pens down...it's all about feeling smarter or luckier or marginally less horrible than someone else.

In cases of well-publicized plagiarism, well, that's like hitting the mother lode of false intellectual superiority: We all want to feel smarter than a smart person, and plagiarism makes smart people look really dumb.

Bipartisan challenges to the criminal deficit? Terrorists.

November 03, 2006

Words are, like, totally snapshots of our, like, culture and stuff. Take, for example, Chirag Mehta’s U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. It should come as no surprise that in George W. Bush’s speeches, “terrorist” is the size of the giant Twinkie over Manhattan in Ghostbusters, but what struck me was the dwindling use of “wise” in these, our modern times. You see a lot of wise guys when the U.S. was still in short pants, and it persists right up until JFK, then...nothing. Wisdom, shmisdom. That shit is for owls and old bearded dudes with gnarly canes.

And what about “youth?” John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington — they all rolled with the “youth.” John Quincy Adams? “Youth”ful. Plenty of the fathers who founded thought it important to reach out to the whippersnappers. But then the youth grew their hair long and started listening to that devil music and talking to them was, I swear, just like talking to a wall.

This tagcloud also reminded me of a recent New Yorker review of a few new Thomas Paine biographies. Now there was a guy. Atheist! Rebel! Populist! There was indeed a time when you could be all three. It was a time that Thomas Paine inadvertently named. It was The Age of Reason. Okay, yes, women were corseted babymakers with no right to inherit property. And let’s not get started on slavery. (Except where Paine is concerned: He never owned any slaves or profited from slavery.) But once upon a time, people wanted to read political pamphlets written by other people who wanted them to be read. In plain English. With enough belly fire to get Joe Colonial off his knickered ass and fight for his right to party.

Paine thought keeping the poor masses under the thumb of the church was a load of horseshit, too, and that’s pretty much what got him banished from two countries. Check it:

”Paine’s religious opinions were those of three-fourths of the men of letters of the last age,” Joel Barlow observed, probably overstating the case only slightly. Paine’s views were hardly original; what was new was his audience. While other Enlightenment writers wrote for one another, Paine wrote, as always, for everyone. His contemporaries believed that radical philosophical speculation — especially critiques of religion — was to be shared only with men of education (and, it was assumed, judgment). The poor could not be trusted with such notions; freed of church-based morality, they would run amok. Paine disagreed, profoundly. To say that he was vilified for doing this is to miss the point. He was destroyed.

Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Paine may have lived in an age where people actually wanted to vote and read and bring down The Man, but the big G. was dangled over everyone’s head as a way to prevent them from doing so. And as words like BLESS get bigger in the tag cloud, the whole thing starts all over again. Dubya would have put an orange sack over Paine’s head and attached his kiwis to electrodes after reading “The Age of Reason.”