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Monday, June 13, 2005
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THE ECHOING AIR “In the end,” Walter Shapiro wrote, reflecting on Joe Biden’s failed 1988 presidential campaign during which he was exposed as a plagiarist, “Biden may be remembered as the candidate who truly offered the voters an echo and not a choice.” When UD reflects on the latest case of an educational leader plagiarizing a speech , as Biden plagiarized many of his speeches during his campaign, this aspect of the phenomenon (here’s an earlier case UD wrote about) strikes her most: the plagiarist exposes him or herself as an echo -- a meager person at best, and at worst a cipher. ' But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. ' This is Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway considering her reflection in a shop window and experiencing a sense of her own nothingness, her nonexistence. For serial plagiarists like Biden and the Florida high school principal I’m about to describe, the experience of existential dwindling is neither a sometime thing nor a source of anguish. Plagiarists seem to have made their peace with inexistence -- to have, as it were, put on for good their empty suit. They move easily in what Don DeLillo calls the “self-referring world,” a world which already speaks itself and whose script we mouth. UD of course agrees with those who say that on the scale of human misbehavior, plagiarism must always rank very low. But the peculiar and unsettling personal degradation of plagiarism is worth noting. Its degraded nature lies in its revelation of the diminished thing that some people have concluded they are. UD regards Principal Susan Duval’s recourse to plagiarism for her speech to the graduating seniors in her Florida high school as less cynical than desperate, as in I must say something, but there’s no there there. I have no self-expressivity because I am not a self. I must therefore find another self and assume its words. Things become yet more degraded when serial plagiarists (Ms Duval does this routinely) are cornered. ‘Asked whether a student who did the same thing would be accused of plagiarism, she told a reporter: "Was I turning this in for a grade? No.”’ Of course she was doing something more important with it than turning in a paper for a grade. She was turning to her community of students and sharing with them at a crucial moment in their lives the particular forms of wisdom she had gathered in her life. In her words, she was demonstrating the importance of the values she and her school had tried to convey to its students - autonomy, integrity, and all the rest. Although I believe Ms. Duval’s basic motivation was desperation rather than cynicism, I also believe that she has gone a long way toward making her students cynical, not merely because of the joke she played on them, but because of the way she - like most plagiarists - has sought to deny and deflect from the moment her plagiarism was discovered. On a lighter note, there’s this, from last March: ' GIBBONS: CONTROVERSIAL SPEECH WASN'T HIS OWN Anti-liberal comments came from e-mail Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., already was taking heat this week for recent comments he made to a Republican group in Elko. But it turned out Thursday that the words weren't even his own. Gibbons issued a statement admitting that he pulled much of his text from a copyrighted speech given by the Alabama state auditor in 2003. The Elko Daily Free Press reported that Gibbons brought a crowd to "near feverish pitch" on Friday night when he said that people who oppose the war in Iraq are "liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals." They support abortion but fight for animal rights, he said, according to the paper's account of the evening. They're the same people who want to go to Iraq to become human shields, he said. "I say it's just too damn bad we didn't buy them a ticket," Gibbons said. The speech originally angered state Democrats, who stated that the comments were a personal attack against people who disagreed with the Iraq war. "Last time Jim Gibbons said his 'communist' comment was 'taken out of context' and essentially blamed the reporter," said Jon Summers, communications director for the Nevada State Democratic Party, in a statement. "What excuse will he use this time?" This time, however, the text came almost word-for-word from a well-publicized speech Alabama state auditor Beth Chapman gave to a "Stand up for America" rally in 2003. The speech, entered into the Congressional Record, generated enough buzz over the Internet that Chapman eventually wrote a book titled "The Power of Patriotism: The Speech Heard Around the World." Gibbons used 15 paragraphs out of the 21-paragraph speech virtually word-for-word, according to the Elko Daily Free Press. On Thursday, Gibbons' office issued a statement saying he did not intentionally plagiarize the speech. Rather, he said, he received it in an e-mail and saved the text. "I don't remember who sent me the e-mail or when I received it exactly ... only that I found the words to be reflective of my deep concern about the morale of our troops," he said in the statement. …The controversy comes one week after Gibbons apologized for saying on national news that people who think the government should limit how much corporations can give to a presidential inauguration are "communists." ' |