All Over Again

I have waited twelve days to see if there was anything new in the New Year. The answer is NO. 

I ended 2023 blogging with a post that kept referring to previous items. “Of course, we’ve been here before,” I wrote comparing the responses by defenders of French actor Gérard Depardieu to sexual assault accusations against him and those of defenders of director Roman Polanski to charges laid against him. 

I was hoping to leave the past behind on January first; but no such luck. Everything old is new again.

In today’s mail, for instance, I received the following envelope from Trout Unlimited. 

I have been selected to represent New Jersey in a survey about fishing, and to answer leading questions like 

A few months ago, I was selected to represent New Jersey in a survey about Yosemite National Park. Same old, same old. When are people going to stop volunteering me, asking me to waste my time (and, incidentally, to send a check with the completed questionnaire)? Well, I won’t subscribe to Trout Unlimited’s magazine, even if I have to forego an opportunity to learn about “reading water, casting, [and] identifying insects.”

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But it’s not just 2023 being repeated into 2024. It’s the 1950s. Instead of watching pro wrestling, I spend my time revisiting old New Yorker magazines. I am on my third go-round, having started in 1940, and am now in the middle of 1952. The magazine used to have fillers at the bottom of columns (they are few and far between these days). With some regularity the magazine listed one group of fillers under the heading “Funny Coincidence Dept.” Here’s an example:

Of course, “Funny Coincidence” is a satiric jab; the true expression is “Plagiarism.” 

The incidence of plagiarism—in books, articles, speeches, etc.—in those days was quite alarming.* I selected the above example because in this one a university president appropriated a whole article by another administrator. Although Harvard’s Claudine Gay did not use a scoop shovel like Cornell’s Deane W. Malott to accumulate her “appropriations,” her actions gave me another case of déjà vu, as I had written about plagiarism back in 2017: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

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And then there are the foreigners. In 1949, some politicians were losing their hair over the idea that hordes of aliens were coming to the USA. At least they weren’t coming by spaceship. 

So the current histrionics of Trump, Trumpians, Trumpists, and the rest of that motley crew is same old, same old. Trump’s calling out immigrants and refugees as “vermin,” his nasty remark about fellow human beings, has an echo of a remark by François Mauriac, who was, according to the New Yorker in 1952, “one of the pillars of the Roman Catholic Church in France” and  a notorious misogynist. But at least at one point he backtracked on something he said:

Unfortunately déjà vu fails us here, our most notorious misanthrope has not seen fit to show charity to human frailty. 

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* Because of the change in the magazine and the few fillers, it is impossible to judge whether the tide of plagiarism has receded at all.