The Book Thieves

Kamala, Claudine, and the wages of plagiarism.

I wish I had known, before I went to all the trouble of writing a book from scratch, that you can just copy and paste whole chunks of the darn things from Wikipedia. Not that I’m surprised to learn this is what Kamala Harris, or her ghost-writer, probably did in  2009 for her book Smart on Crime. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, no one thinks politicians write their own books, not even their supporters.

But it only serves to reinforce the galling impression that the highest positions in the land are occupied by empty, undeserving people. Many of us already suspected as much even before this year’s first major plagiarism scandal, also uncovered by reporter Chris Rufo, came to a head. That time the culprit was Claudine Gay, President of Harvard—a job description which, one might have thought, guaranteed a certain minimum of intellectual aptitude.

But we all know it doesn’t anymore. Titles of respect and prestige carry weight because at some point they were intended to signify real merit. But now they are just as often bestowed upon good little foot soldiers who can be counted on to use them as tools of intimidation in defense of ideas which have no merit of their own to recommend them. Most people suspected this before concrete evidence substantiated Gay’s inadequacy and dishonesty. She was a sham and a fraud standing in for a shameful, fraudulent overclass.

Now, this is a great injustice. And there are, I suppose, two possible ways you could react to it. One is to waste away in resentment and indignation. That would be a natural reaction to the unfairness of it all, to the outsized power that these high-handed impostors wield over decent people.

A natural reaction, and useful up to a point. Nothing wrong with getting mad if you do something about it, such as vote. But to live in anger—even natural, justified anger—is to let your enemies win. As a passing emotion it has its uses; as a state of the soul it’s the ultimate self-own.

And the only other option is the unnatural, maybe even the supernatural one. It starts with asking yourself what it must be like to live a life built on plagiarized books.

Let me tell you what it must be like, as someone who has built a life on books that are not plagiarized. The only reason to write a book is to convey something within you, to put some part of the truth you see on the page. That’s what a book is. If you’re doing anything else you’re not actually writing a book—you’re making a book-shaped instrument that you plan to use as a weapon or a drug.

And since the whole secret of joy is wanting from things only what they have by nature to give, whether it’s books or baseball or crown moldings or lunar eclipses; and since doing things for their own sake is life in abundance, whereas everything else will dissolve in the end on the cold wind into ruin and vanity; since all that is true, it turns out Claudine Gay and Kamala Harris and all hollow opportunists everywhere have already done something far worse to themselves than they could ever do to you.

You don’t have to call down brimstone and thunder upon them. You don’t have to excuse their offenses either. You just have to pray for them, sincerely, in compassion and sorrow over their empty, empty lives. And then get on with your own life, in abundance. That’s winning.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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