Well, all the pundits and everybody on facebook are writing about Paul Ryan, but I don’t want to do that because my take on the matter (for whatever reason, either just to keep the baggers in the big tent or to groom Ryan for a 2016 run or something else, the Republicans have decided to just go ahead and hand Obama the win, because they can’t win the election without Florida, nobody wins Florida without the senior vote and you’re not going to get the senior vote with a pledge to gut social security and medicare) is not particularly original, and I don’t see any point in blogging if I’m just saying the same stuff other people are saying.
Fareed Zakaria, Dumbass
So I decided to write about the Fareed Zakaria plagiarism scandal. (Zakaria is a hotshot journalist for Time magazine and CNN. He has won prizes. Esquire Magazine once called him the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation. He recently wrote an article for Time called “The Case For Gun Control” which a lot of people noticed right away was very similar to an article that Jill LePore had written for The New Yorker back in April. He’s been “suspended” pending further investigation. I’m guessing he’ll be back in 2 months.)
I informed my wife of my choice of topic and she said “Well, isn’t that what we do?” She didn’t mean on the blog. I would never plagiarize on my blog. And certainly not my poetry, which you can read if you clickety click up at the top of this page, where it says “poetry.” She meant in Watson’s World News, which is a thing we put out for our language school. We take articles from Ananova, and Reuters, and sometimes the Huffington Post or TMZ, and quite frequently from the Sydney Morning Herald, for some reason they often have the kind of stuff we’re looking for. “Orangutans Use iPads,” “German Family Fights Over Sausage,” “Miley Cyrus Gets Another Tattoo,” stuff like that.
I simplify the English, cut a bit for space, we translate a few of the harder words or phrasal verbs into Czech below the article, add a question for discussion to help teachers and Bob’s Your Uncle, an original article. We don’t bother attributing and we’re not a large enough presence on the journalistic scene that anybody gives a shit. But is it plagiarism?
Is it plagiarism when you “share” something on facebook? I mean, you didn’t write it, did you?
It’s kind of a shady area is what I’m saying. Writers (and certainly musicians) borrow ideas from each other all the time, you very often see thinly disguised versions of the same joke on all sitcoms at once and even in conversations, when somebody says something that strikes us as clever, we just can’t wait for just the right moment to repeat it as if it was something we just thought up ourselves.
But Zakaria apparently went over the top. I don’t think what he did was horribly evil, but it was godawful stupid. The people who read the New Yorker probably read Time, too, at least some of them, and he didn’t even wait 6 months.
So, a suspension for a few months just for being a dumbass is fair. And maybe he can lose his spot in the World Intellectual Heavyweight rankings.
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