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.”

*

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

*

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. 

***

* 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.

Into the Wilderness

I have just discovered why I have had lack of success in my life; I have never had anyone on whom I could blame my lack of success. I have not had a scapegoat.

Consider Novak Djokovic. A great tennis player but also a great schmuck.* He has just been booted out of Australia, where he wished to pursue his tenth men’s singles title at the Australian Open, for not being vaccinated and for (let’s be nice and call them) “misstatements” on his visa application. And who was to blame for the errors on the application? Certainly not Djokovic. It was his “agent” and his “support team.”

Novak Djokovic has blamed his agent for an “administrative mistake” when declaring he had not travelled in the two weeks before his flight to Australia and acknowledged an “error of judgment” by not isolating after he tested positive for Covid.

The world No 1 released a statement on Wednesday in a bid to address what he called “continuing misinformation” about his activities in December before he came to Australia in a bid to retain his Australian Open crown. . . .

Djokovic said the incorrect pre-travel declaration of 1 January was “submitted by my support team on my behalf”.

“My agent sincerely apologises for the administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect box about my previous travel before coming to Australia. This was a human error and certainly not deliberate.”**

So, there’s the support team thrown under the bus.

*

Five years ago to the day, I wrote a blog post about plagiarism and the excuses that are forthcoming when the stealing is outed.*** I did not at that time directly cite instances when the convenient scapegoat was produced. He/she was usually a hired researcher, go-fer, or typist who allegedly practiced one-handed shuffling with the author’s file cards. And the anonymous scapegoat, bearing the sins, was released into the wilderness, while the author him/herself attempted to remain in the tabernacle.****

*

You remember the story (apocryphal, of course) about young George Washington and the cherry tree. If George were alive today, the dialogue about the tree would go like this:

Washington Senior: Who chopped down the cherry tree?

Georgie: I cannot tell a lie. It was the gardener.

***

* "There was his encounter with Dr. Igor Cetojevic, a Bosnian Serb, who, while watching Djokovic on TV during the 2010 Australian Open, became convinced that the player’s need for medical time-outs had nothing to do with asthma, as some thought, but with too much gluten in his diet. Not long after, Cetojevic met Djokovic in Croatia, during the Davis Cup, where he asked Djokovic to raise his right arm twice, once while holding, in his left hand, a slice of bread to his belly; the exercise convinced Djokovic that his muscles were weaker when proximate to wheat. There was also, in 2016, his hiring of Pepe Imaz, a Spanish coach who evangelized about the transformative power of long hugs. More recently, there was Djokovic’s friendship with the wellness entrepreneur Chervin Jafarieh, who talks of having lived in jungles and among shamans, sells supplements and elixirs, and, in May of 2020, listened approvingly during an Instagram Live conversation as Djokovic explained that polluted water can be purified by human consciousness, because water molecules 'react to our emotions, to what is being said.'”

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/djokovics-strange-australian-odyssey

** https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/12/novak-djokovic-statement-blames-agent-for-australia-paperwork-mistake-covid-positive-test-result

*** https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

**** [H]e shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering.

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16

The Dog Ate My File Cabinet

. . . and other excuses.

<>

Monica Crowley, the foreign policy adviser tapped for a White House job under President-elect Donald Trump, will relinquish the post, a transition official told Reuters on Monday. 

Crowley had been chosen to serve as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council. Her appointment had been shadowed by reports of plagiarism in news outlets including CNN and Politico. 

“After much reflection I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said in a statement quoted by the Washington Times. 

“I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal."

A CNN review found this month that Crowley plagiarized thousands of words of her 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D. 

In addition, Politico reported that it found more than a dozen examples of plagiarism in Crowley's Ph.D. Dissertation.*

*

Dr. (ha, ha, ha!) Crowley's claim that she has decided to remain in New York “to pursue other opportunities” is a neat revision of the classic declaration by disgraced politicians that they are resigning to spend more time with their families. Actually, her action makes great sense to me; who would trade the opportunity to remain at the home of the Met, the Met, and the Mets for some Washingtonian grilling on the provenance of her paragraphs?

I must confess, though, that I am rather disappointed that Dr. (ha, ha, ha!) Crowley did not own up to the plagiarism and offer some risible excuse that we all could kick around for a while. As much as I hate plagiarism, I love the excuses the perpetrators come up with.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's explanation for her own plagiaristic misdeeds is too long and complicated to quote here, involving as it does attics, boxes, folders, etc.** But her defense actually allows us to level another accusation against her. “Fourteen years ago,” she writes,

not long after the publication of my book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, I received a communication from author Lynne McTaggart pointing out that material from her book on Kathleen Kennedy had not been properly attributed. I realized that she was right. Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not hers.

What Doris Kearns Goodwin is telling us is that she can't tell her own writing from another writer's. “I have no style of my own,” she is really confessing. That's one hell of an admittance for a writer. Now, I cannot read my own handwriting, but I know goddamn well when I see the words printed out, I can tell what's mine and what isn't. I have a memory (I hope not a false one) of seeing a film clip of Salvador Dali walking along an art gallery wall with a big paint brush in his hand decisively making black crosses on canvasses that he recognized as fake Dalis. Whether the scene actually happened or not, it should serve as an example to all creative artists: recognize your own work, and deal with the unfamiliar as necessary.

Kearns Goodwin opened her defense in the article cited below by stating, “I am a historian. with the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am.”*** 

Well, I for one would hope that she recognizes her flesh-and-blood offspring better than her literary ones. 

***

*http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-crowley-idUSKBN15024K?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

(And a tip of the hat to Kathleen Farrell, who emailed me: "Wouldn't you like to know who was on her committee and missed this?")

**http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,197614,00.html

***There's obviously an error in the original, either in punctuation or capitalization. I've copied-and-pasted directly from the Time website.

*

Also:

Consider these excerpts from two articles worth reading.

One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.… 

No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing. 

Plagiarists steal for reasons both profound and mundane. In a few cases, plagiarism flows from some deep psychological wellspring: [Jacob] Epstein, the son of eminent literary parents, stole so much and from such an obvious source that he was clearly "committing literary suicide," writes Mallon. Some writers plagiarize because they are rushing a project through and probably don't think they'll get caught. Some are just exceptionally careless.  

David Plotz,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2002/01/the_plagiarist.1.html

*

[Fareed] Zakaria strongly denied that any assistant or intern wrote his work, and said that his mistake came from mixing up different notes from different sources. That account does not quite explain how the plagiarized paragraph was so closely aligned with its original source, nor how it was unattributed to the writer, Jill Lepore. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/fareed-zakaria-plagiarism-scandal-tough-week_n_1810139.html

Knife in the Back

Many moons ago I taught a class in modern drama as an adjunct at a nearby community college. After finishing our discussions of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, our first playwright, I required an essay paper from the class. Following the precedent of my own undergraduate English department, where we were allowed (or perhaps, forced) to devise a suitable topic for investigation, I had the students choose their own topics. Upon reading the submitted papers, I was dismayed to discover that two of them were dead-on plagiarisms (they were completely identical except for the first verb—one had “is,” the other “was”), while a few others had rather a smell about them.

I had recently taught at a college that had an institutional policy on plagiarism, but I didn’t know if the community college (or the English department thereof) had one, and was, therefore, at a loss at how to handle the issue. Having a friend who had been in the department for a short while, I sought his advice. No, there was no institutional or departmental policy that he knew of, and he advised me to handle the case as best I could.

Having decided that I didn’t want to get into the accusation business or a name-and-shame exposure, I announced at the beginning of the next class session that I had foolproof knowledge of plagiarism and since I could not trust the work of those students, I advised them (without naming them) to drop the class, which they do for at least one more week without academic penalty. It seemed the perfect solution. I could be rid of them without beating them over the head, and they could be thankful to escape punishment. Some hope!

At the end of the class, a very intelligent student (judging by the level of his class participation) came up to me to confess that because he had been pressed for time he had submitted a copied paper (ironically, it was one that I never suspected) and apologized and said he would drop the class. However, the blatant plagiarists went another route—to the office of the department chairman, who did not back me up, but who subsequently called me into his office and on the carpet for my allegedly draconian punishment. I tried—to no avail—to point out to him that, on the contrary, I was being quite lenient, as there was no failing or other punishment being meted out for the students’ deceitful acts. The chairman then mandated that I devise some other way of dealing with the issue.

What to do? I could give the plagiarized papers an “F” grade, but would that be fair to the dull student or two who sweated over an honestly-conceived “F” paper, one that was wrongheaded or foolish? I thought not. And so decided to give the plagiarized papers a double “F.” For some reason the guilty parties did not squeal loudly at that. I have no recollection of what grades the plagiarists ended up with at the completion of the course. But I can report that I never taught at that school again.

A decade or so later, I received a phone call from my friend in the English department to tell me of a letter found at the back of a file cabinet during a ritual clean-out of old papers. It was an unsolicited testamonial from a student (or a married couple, I don’t recall) in that modern drama class in praise of my teaching. I immediately perceived a universal truth: Complaint Goes Straight to the Top, While Praise Lies Buried at the Back of a File Cabinet!

In my last blog entry I offered three of my laws but did not include the above observation as my fourth, because someone else got there first—Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: 

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.  

(Act III, Scene 2)

*

Still, a figurative knife in the back is better than a literal stab to stomach.