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The Whole Fucking World Is a Fraud

March 1, 2008 9:04 AM

t seems like lately everyone is lying about everything. First, there was the whole A Million Little Pieces thing. Then, there was Kaavya Viswanathan, the "prodigy" novelist and Harvard student whose novel was discovered to be riddled with blatantly plagiarized passages. Then Marilee Jones, Dean of Admissions at MIT, admitted that she had completely made up several degrees she listed on her resume. And, perhaps most damaging to Mr. Utah, it was revealed that Bear Grylls is a fraud.

And just today, these stories are on CNN's front page: Misha Defonseca, the author of a book called Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years has admitted that her book about how she survived the Holocaust after her Jewish parents were killed by living with wolves for years is a complete fabrication. I've never read the book, but given the plot outline, I would have thought it would be obvious that it was a lie. I mean, wolves? As it turns out, the author isn't even Jewish, but she claims that her crappy home life made her "feel Jewish." She also claims that the story in the book is a story she made up for herself so that she could deal with her situation. That's cool if you're a four-year-old. But now she's an adult, and writing a book that's completely made up and presenting it as the truth is bullshit. And the fact that she chose to present herself as a victim of the Holocaust is nothing short of absolutely and completely revolting.

Then, it turns out that celebrity chef Robert Irvine completely made up stories about having worked on Princess Diana's wedding cake and working as a White House chef.

And finally, Tim Goeglein, a fucking adviser to the fucking President of the United States of America, admitted that a column he wrote took several passages directly from another writer's previously published article.

This kind of shit makes me really angry. First of all, how fucking stupid must you be not to know that you're going to get caught? If, as in Ms. Defonseca's case, you want to make up some story about your past in order to make yourself seem more important or to gain unwarranted sympathy, I guess that's fine. But how can you write a ridiculous story, knowing that perhaps millions of people are going to read it, and not think "Gee, I wonder if anyone's ever going to look into whether this story about me being raised by wolves is true?" I mean, wolves for fucks sake! Or, if you're going to write a chick-lit book, don't you think you might want to lift material from something other than other fucking chick-lit books? That's like--I'm going to write a sci-fi book. Here's the plot outline: Lucas Sunstrider treks through the galaxy in his spaceship, Calmness, and, with his laser sword and rag-tag group of friends, including a giant ape, a woman in lots of leather, a wise and balding older gentleman, and a guy with a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude, must evade the evil Cyclons while trying to overthrow the Machine Empire and its leader--there would be a big reveal here--who is actually his father! It's totally sci-fi and, best of all, it's completely original! Or, well, no one would ever discover that it's totally not. Right? Right?

The degree to which people fail to understand that they're going to get caught has always baffled me. During my time on Law Review, I helped with cite-checking. For those of you not in the know, cite-checking is the ridiculous process by which law students go and look up every single source in an article to check for correct citation, accuracy, and lack of plagiarism. You go through that process as a 2L while simultaneously writing an article that you know will be subjected to that level of scrutiny. So how could someone write an article that consists entirely of unattributed word-for-word copies of paragraphs from the sources and not know they're going to get caught? I don't know. But someone did it. And I'm sure it happens with disturbing frequency at all levels of education. And that's sad.

And then there's lying on your resume. Again, I have no idea how you could think that you could lie about having a degree from a school you've never even visited or working on something as high profile as a royal wedding cake and not know that you're going to get caught. It's fucking infuriating.

I have no sympathy for these people. I want them stripped of their royalties, thrown off of TV, and blackballed in these professions forever. There are millions of aspiring authors, administrators, and chefs in the world who are working hard every day to achieve what these people have without needing to rely on theft and lies. The fact that the jackass I talked about here robbed the honest people of an opportunity is just infuriating.

But I guess that's just how we roll, huh?



7 Comments


honeybunches said:

I totally agree that lying is bad :-). But I kind of feel for these people. It's so hard to get published without a gimmick or an outlandish claim. And that's kind of crazy--who cares if he worked on Princess Diana's cake--I just want to know if his cakes are good and he can tell me how to do it. Though actually I think I've picked up that specific book in the book store and I think it is more of a memoir than a how-to, so nevermind . . . Still, I feel kinda bad for people that want to write books but don't have an uncommon life to write about. I can totally see how the temptation to just make shit up would overcome a person.

March 1, 2008 10:46 AM



kristin said:

I absolutely agree with your suggestion that the people you mentioned in your post (apart from possibly Robert Irvine, who I find to be a *giant* tool that engaged in run-of-the-mill, not cool but also not that ridiculous, resume-padding) be permanently blackballed from their professions.

As someone who writes and would someday love to be published, I understand how hard it is to find a publisher (or even an agent) and how much success can depend on luck or finding an advertising audience through ludicrous claims and television appearances. However, there is a genre for people who want to make things up - it's called fiction. If nothing happened to you and you want to write something exciting and made up, write it and be honest about the fact that you made it up. Thousands of people do it all the time and some of the most powerful books about the Holocaust that I have ever read have been openly fictional. Being a person with a slightly-less-sensational life than other people does not give you the right to lie and cheat or otherwise trivialize the experiences of people who have actually lived through horrible things.

On a separate note, there is no excuse for intentional plagiarism, ever, under any circumstances. I would support a penalty for plagiarism equivalent to the academic death penalty. Not only do people who publish plagiarized material take an opportunity away from a more deserving author/scholar/researcher who has producted original work, they do it at the expense of the person whose work they are plagiarizing. While I understand that, in some cases, there can be grey area around paraphrasing and other forms of indirect plagiarism, direct plagiarism like that in Viswanathan's book and the law review article you mentioned is inexcusable and should have serious repercussions beyond bad publicity (or a complete coverup).

March 1, 2008 11:35 AM



Ismael Tapia II said:

honeybunches,
Getting published is hard. So is becoming Dean of Admissions at MIT or getting your own show on Food Network. But that's why you have to have top-notch qualifications to get those jobs. What you're saying boils down to essentially this: These jobs are hard to get. In order to be qualified, you need to be special in some way. But not everyone is special, and everyone wants to be special. And that's not fair. So it's ok to lie because everyone deserves to be special.

Lying is lying and lying to get a job you don't deserve and thereby screwing someone who does deserve the job and who actually is special in some way is inexcusable.

March 1, 2008 4:08 PM



TheExpat said:

Where I live, lying is a way of life for some people. Whether it's to give one's business competitors a false sense of goings-on in one's company, saving face, padding your resume, or to cover up bribes, or even allegedly pretending to get shot in order to win the presidency, it's all fair game.

I think it's awful that things in the US are often so similar, and yet we look down on small countries like Taiwan where the lying just seems more obvious? C'mon, it's the same wherever you go, and the only difference is who or what makes the news and what doesn't.

While we certainly like to point the finger at 'bad influences' in our country (the media, Hollywood, etc.), the ultimate bad guys are the adults in every sector of society, people who should know better, who lie routinely to get by, and then teach young people that it's permissible to do the same to get ahead. These people are, as Ismael stated in the case of Ms. Defonseca, are the equivalent of four-year-olds who, knowing what they want but not how to get it, do the opposite of what they should do and, ultimately, get spanked.

March 1, 2008 8:54 PM



morenonesense said:

I disagree about the dean at MIT case; you said that "Getting published is hard. So is becoming Dean of Admissions at MIT or getting your own show on Food Network. But that's why you have to have top-notch qualifications to get those jobs" and in that case, she made up false qualifications to get an entry level job in the admissions office. afterwards, she worked her way up, and was apparently a good enough employee that she received awards for the high level of her work. So, in that situation, i don't think its as bad.

March 2, 2008 1:28 AM



dicta said:

i agree with you completely ismael. these people are ridiculous and worthless. and padded resume aside, robert irvine is an annoying prick and i don't even think his food ever looks or sounds good, nor do i appreciate his show on any level.

i deal with "regular" people for 8-9hrs a day everyday for my job. the only thing i can say is that these celebrity cases are fairly consistent with the general population--people are just a bunch of liars.

March 2, 2008 6:44 PM






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