If there’s one breed I can’t stomach, it’s those who appropriate credit for the accomplishments of others. Not because it’s immoral — though it is. But because I can appreciate how hard-fought accomplishment comes, as one who conceived the Human Genome Project, endured five-and-a-half years in the Hanoi Hilton, and shot a man in Reno — just to watch him die.
Or maybe that was Johnny Cash. In any case, I recently found my own credit had been appropriated. Two weeks ago, an alert reader notified me that she’d enjoyed a recent piece of mine when she’d read it in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and again later when she’d read it under the byline of Brian Goldenfeld in a small-circulation L.A. weekly called the Heritage Southwest Fewish Press.
Though for security reasons I often favor noms de plume (“Frank McCourt” when I shovel blarney about my impoverished Irish childhood), “Brian Goldenfeld” is not one of them. It seems I had been plagiarized. Not just pick-pocketed for a few ideas — my pieces tend not to have many. Instead, Brian stole all 2,100 words, right down to the headline and first-person anecdotes. Perched atop my piece was Brian’s swollen, goateed mug, smiling the wan smile of a man trying to sneak out of a 7-Eleven with a Little Debbie snack-cake tucked into his waistband.
While I’ve never looked kindly on plagiarists, I certainly understand their motivation. Anyone who’s paid to put words together knows how agonizing it is when they won’t come. In those instances, some of us do pushups or ingest unhealthy quantities of caffeine. Others peruse periodicals, then swipe whatever’s useful. To each his own. But I’ve always been surprised that plagiarism doesn’t occur more often. As Byron said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” which he proved by pilfering the line from King Solomon.
Still, when plagiarism happens to you — when you see your precious babies kidnapped after spending, oh, 30 minutes, slugging them out — you’re easily moved to outrage. I called the editor of the Heritage South-west Fewish Press, Dan Brin, on a Friday, four days after my reader had alerted him of the theft. In that span, Brin not only had failed to notify me, but had put an issue of his paper to bed without running a correction. When I reached him, I could hear him flop-sweating into the phone. “You’re mad,” he noted in between sniveling apologies, perhaps not realizing that if I’d been interested in the kind of collaborative effort where I do all the work and someone else takes all the credit, I’d have gotten into television.
Though Dan wasn’t complicit in the lift, he did seem to have a fibbing problem. He told me he’d just found out about the plagiarism Thursday, later admitting it was Monday. He said Brian was a sporadic freelancer, later admitting he was a contributing writer. He said he couldn’t afford to reimburse me for my work (unfortunately, he stuck to that one). He also attempted to drum up sympathy for Brian, saying he was a 300-lb. man with a disability who lived at home with his mother.
After some spadework, I finally tracked Brian down at his brother’s place, which turned out not to be his brother’s place. It was Brian’s place, though Brian initially pretended to be his brother, which his father told me he doesn’t have.
The 33-year-old legal aide apologized and said he’d suffered writer’s block, understandable when one is trying to describe an event one never actually attended. I was intent on checking Brian’s answers against Dan’s. “Brian,” I said, “I have to ask you some weird questions. Do you live with your mother?” “No,” he said. “Do you have a disability?” “No,” he replied. “Brian,” I asked, “are you a 300-lb. man?” “Yes,” he answered, “But I’m on a diet. How’d you know? Did you see my picture?” “Yes,” I retorted, “if you’ll remember, it was attached to my story.”
A political-journalism junkie, Brian had a question of his own. “Do you know David Broder?” he asked. After some shop talk (Brian’s ultimate ambition is to “be Marlin Fitzwater”), Brian thanked me for not suing him, but said if I did, his medical excuse was all worked out. It seems he suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which makes him chronically lie to people. From experience, I’d say he’s telling the truth.
Still uncompensated, I fed the item to the Washington Post, and it ran the next day, though not to my satisfaction. Perhaps I’m the butt of some cosmic copy-editing joke. But now, Post readers believe that one of the most blatant instances of plagiarism in recent memory occurred when Brian Goldenfeld stole the work of “Mark” Labash. As I recently pronounced at a cocktail party in a blisteringly original formulation, “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Actually, Napoleon said it first — but so what? Let him sue me.
MATT LABASH
