National Post ·
Five years ago, some overworked galley slave in Stephen Harper's entourage had slept in or felt indisposed or something. Having to scramble when he came to, he lifted big chunks from a speech by Australian leader John Howard and put them into a speech he was preparing for his own master. As a result, when Harper was mouthing what he thought were the platitudes of his own ink-stained wretch, he was in fact mouthing the platitudes of the ink-stained wretch who wrote John Howard's speeches. This came to light a few days ago, and made plagiarism the scandal of the week.
Fair enough. Pinching someone else's creation and passing it off as your own isn't comme il faut. Frankly, it's stealing. It's certainly not something to be encouraged in prime ministers, aspiring prime ministers, or their speechwriters.
For reasons difficult to explain, plagiarism doesn't always feel like stealing, though. People who would never dream of driving away your car or reaching into your wallet without permission, may breezily lift your phrases without attribution. They'll trouser your applause, pocket your fee, even reap your aphrodisiac benefits, such as they may be, without giving it a thought.
Old buddies aren't above rubbing your nose in it. "Hey, sucker, did you sleep well? You'll see a few reconditioned phrases of yours in the paper under my byline this morning. Had a hot date before deadline, the clock was ticking, so ? This paragraph of yours from 10 years ago isn't up to my usual standards, but anything will do in a pinch, eh?"
Gee, thanks, pal. Pinch is right.
I shouldn't make light of it. The misappropriation of intellectual property is just as objectionable as the misappropriation of any other property. Imitation is flattery, but plagiarism is theft. In bohemian cities like my native Budapest, old-time writers would often treat their manuscripts as currency. Headwaiters in literary cafes would accept a manuscript page, or even part of one, in lieu of cash for a lunch or a drink, knowing that as deadlines approached the book publishers or newspaper editors across the street would redeem every scrap without fail.
In old Europe, treating a paragraph as a banknote seemed natural. It made plagiarism appear more tangible than in societies where intellectual property is distanced from monetary value by intermediate financial instruments. Copyright law is actually more difficult to explain to law students than to circus seals that get a fish for every musical note they produce. Seals understand © right away.
Moral considerations aside, I've always found the plagiarist's mindset puzzling. Taking a career-ending risk for so little gain appeared daft. Deadlines may be relentless, but coming up with a phrase always seemed less time-consuming to me than looking one up. If one needed lots of copy to fill acres of empty space, saying "'to be or not to be,' as Shakespeare put it," got rid of more empty space than just saying: To be or not to be. Why plagiarize when one can quote? It never made any sense to me.
As a writer, I would have been far more tempted to succumb to what I call "attributism." The word hasn't made it into the dictionary, but it may one day as an antonym of plagiarism. If plagiarism means attributing someone else's verbal, musical and (rarely) pictorial compositions to yourself, the opposite would be attributing your own phrases, verbal, aural or visual, to somebody else.
Lawyers, politicians, or polemicists are tempted to do it because of the authority it lends to their arguments. To sway a tribunal or a crowd, it makes sense for you to cite weighty sources. "Remember Julius Caesar? 'Surrender not!'" Of course, if you just want to show your audience how smart you are, it makes sense to plagiarize. "As I've said, the die is cast." (Few authors would be dumb enough to try pinching alea iacta est, but you get my drift.)
I rarely worry about not being smart (which shows that I'm not smart enough), but worry often about not being able to persuade others. I'm tempted to borrow other people's authority rather than their authorship. I don't want their ideas for my brand, but sometimes want their brand for my ideas.
Did I ever yield to the temptation? I plead the Fifth.
What about scribblers who routinely assume the identity of others? Do ghost or speechwriters become all mixed up? Is authorship just a moral blur for lowly, un-bylined hacks?
But speechwriters aren't necessarily lowly hacks. Real bravura buzz-saws have done stints as speechwriters -- John O'Sullivan for Margaret Thatcher, David Frum for George W. Bush, to mention two I know. They've never looked confused to me.
Oh, well. By next week it will be last week's news. A candidate will make another kind of slip launching another set of sharks, and moralizing pundits won't be able to give away stories on plagiarism. So pass the sins of the world, along with its glories -- or, as Julius Caesar put it, Sic Transit Peccata Mundi. (All right, all right, I made it up.)