Plagiarism being a big, destructive, and mysterious problem, one welcomes plagiarist-testimonies, first-person efforts to explain Why They Did It.

But there are some obvious problems. Did the plagiarist plagiarize her mea culpa? Even if she didn’t, can we trust anything she says?

Q.R. Markham, plagiarist-du-jour, titles his tell-all Confessions of a Plagiarist. There’s a reckless no-holds-barred feel to the word confession (Confession box. Confessional poetry. True confessions.). But the guy’s been a liar for twenty years.

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Markham makes the mistake of pathologizing what he’s done. It’s not that success and fame are so important to him that he’s willing to cheat to get there — which has always seemed to UD a pretty plausible explanation for the James Freyesque plagiarism in which Markham indulged. Like Frey, he blames it all on his addictive personality – a disorder beyond his control.

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Markham starts out not too badly:

We’ve all heard in meetings the description of the alcoholic as the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. That was — is — me in a nutshell. I wanted recognition, I wanted praise, but I had no faith in my own abilities. I had grown so used to being thought of as a wunderkind that a kind of false self emerged, one that was confident and hard-working and thrived on adulation and encouragement. It was an image that was completely at odds with the fear, self-doubt, and dishonesty that occupied my skull… My whole identity had become that of an aspiring writer. I wanted to be famous. [The writers I plagiarized were] satellites in my monomaniacal orbit… There was some kind of built in death wish to the whole process.

Yet this doesn’t describe mental disorder — just garden-variety narcissism.

Markham really begins to slip when he writes, of the people who have stood by him:

The realization that I was loved already and didn’t have to fight to earn that love was mind-boggling. It was quite the opposite of my notion that I had to struggle to show the world I was worthy.

Cutting and pasting from your favorite writers is not struggling to show your worthiness. It’s easy to plagiarize. People do it in part because it’s quick and simple. Their narcissism convinces them that they’re not subject to the same rules as everyone else. Their narcissism also makes them feel happy when they get one over on large numbers of people. Confirmation of their superiority.

Now for the pathology.

It’s easier to make moral pronouncements rather than see human flaw or human weakness. I was that way before I knew I was an alcoholic. Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

We’re not allowed to give Markham a hard time for what he did because he didn’t do it. He was in the grip of a disease.

The problem is that plagiarism isn’t really the sign of a weak, troubled person. If you read over the many plagiarism posts on this blog, you find that it’s typically the behavior of a very ambitious person who doesn’t mind scheming and cutting corners to get what he wants. That doesn’t sound weak to me; it sounds rather strong. Lots of very high-profile powerful people (Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) plagiarize. They’re busy and important and they figure they can get away with it. They certainly don’t have the trembling self-loathing personality Markham claims to have.

UD isn’t denying that there might be some degree of pathology in a high-risk act like plagiarism. She’s simply noting that most of the recent authors of plagiarized books and theses and speeches – at least the authors that have hit the news and been featured on this blog – seem to be successful, well-adjusted people.