Plagiarism

Without ever actually using the word "plagiarism," Michael Moynihan in last weekend's Wall Street Journal makes the case that Dominic Sandbrook engaged in a good deal of it in Sandbrook's new book, MAD AS HELL: THE CRISIS OF THE 1970s AND THE RISE OF THE POPULIST RIGHT.

Moynihan, the senior editor of libertarianism's flagship magazine, REASON, says that Sandbrook "shamelessly and repeatedly cannibalizes the work of others...." such as Mark Bowden's book about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, GUEST OF THE AYATOLLAH (2007).

Such a charge requires putting passages side by side. Sandbrook writes thus:

"At Washington's National Cathedral, bells tolled every day at noon, once for each day of their captivity, while in Lawrence, Massachusetts, churches rang their bells fifty times a day in sympathy."

Bowden had put it thus: "At the National Cathedral in Washington, bells tolled every day at noon, once for each day of the lengthening captivity. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, all of the churches around its city hall sounded their bells fifty times each day at noon to remember the American captives."

To be fair: Sandbrook did a little re-writing of Bowden. He shortened Bowden's sentences in that passage, as a copy-editor might, deleting the arguably unnecessary word "lengthening" in the first of those sentences for example. Still, the similarity is rather too great for comfort. It would have been better to use quotation marks and credit Bowden in the text even if it did mean using that adjective.

Another example? Any book about the politics of the 1970s will have to describe the bicentennial celebrations of 1976. In that context, Sandbrook writes specifically of the Boston fireworks:

"On television, pictures showed girls applauding on their boyfriends' shoulders, fathers lifting their children in the air, a South Boston priest waving an enormous American flag."

J. Anthony Lukacs had described those fireworks in his 1986 book, COMMON GROUND. Thus: "Long-haired girls perched on their boyfriends' shoulders, fathers held children aloft, a priest from South Boston waved a huge American flag."

One gets the feeling, from such examples (Moynihan provides others) that Sandbrook did just enough copy editing to avoid the p word. In that Bostonian scene, this chiefly involved changing the tense from past to present. Also, Sandbrook might say in his own defense that Bowden, Lukacs, and the other sources to which Moynihan refers were all explicitly cited in his footnotes.

The problem remains, though. The borrowing isn't of the usual scholarly sort, but goes to the choice of anecdotes, the physical details thereof, and the adjectives. In order to write a book about the 1970s, it is necessary but not sufficient to read a lot of the stuff that has been written about the seventies. One must think about the subject sufficiently to make it one's own.

Ah, the Good Old Days of Heavyweight Boxing

The "Thrilla in Manila"! Mohammad Ali defeated Joe Frazier in the Phillipines in a much-hyped heavyweight bout that lived fully up to its billing -- as of yesterday, this was thirty-five years ago.

Those were the days, for boxing. Frazier, Ali, and Foreman were all in their prime at the same time, and this harmonic convergence produced some terrific fights.

Frazier beat Ali by unanimous decision in 1971.

George Foreman fought Frazier in 1973 and dominated him. There is no cute rhyming phrase for this, though it is sometimes called the Sunshine Showdown, because the venue was Kingston, Jamaica.

In January 1974, Ali got his own rematch against Frazier, and beat him. Did this mean Frazier was washed up? Hold that thought.

Ali fought Foreman, the "rumble in the jungle," in October of the same year and came away victorious.

Meanwhile, Frazier had proven that he was not by any means washed up, with a convincing and exciting win against Jerry Quarry in only five rounds in NYC, and a defeat if Jimmy Ellis in nine rounds in Melbourne, Australia. The stage was set for Ali-Frazier III. The Thrilla in Manila, September 30, 1975, for both the WBA and WBC heavyweight titles.

YouTube has this.

I don't know whether heavyweight boxing will ever have the cache, the excitement, that it held through much of the 1970s.

Ah, but now we do have YouTube. Click the above link and watch for yourself, a 9 minute condensation. Note, especially, at the end of the fight as condensed there, Ali's confession of exhaustion, and of how his now-defeated opponent turned out to be "tougher than I thought he was -- I'm so tired I don't want to do nothing. I want to rest for a week." After all the pre-fight trash-talking, that sounded like warm praise from one great fighter to another.

John Searle

John Searle discusses language as a subject of philosophy, in this fascinating YouTube clip from 1978.

He is speaking with Bryan Magee, a fascinating writer in his own right.

2010: A Year of Living Dangerously

The Federal Open Market Committee, a body of the Federal Reserve, voted this week to keep the federal funds rate in the range betwen 0% and 0.25%.

Frankly, I believe this to be irresponsible. It is part of the bad old tradition of using the money supply to stimulate an economy by cheapening the currency. They also retained the "extended period" language. You can see the whole statement by clicking that link.

The first two sentences of the 3d graph are crucial: "The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period. To provide support to mortgage lending and housing markets and to improve overall conditions in private credit markets, the Federal Reserve is in the process of purchasing $1.25 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities and about $175 billion of agency debt."

This means full speed ahead for a policy of "quantitative easing," or the cheapening of the US dollar, and this in turn means increasing prices across the board are inevitable.

In the very short term, this is good news for some people. It is good news for businesses that have gone too far into debt, but whose debt is measured in nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) terms, because they'll be paying back that debt now in cheapened dollars, so in effect their debt is being reduced. It is good news, too, for some of hte unemployed. Some of those businesses, relieved of that debt, will be in a position to hire new employees. In simple terms, then, this policy will have and is having a stimulative effect, but it is like getting one's energy from a drug. The drug has effects on the body that go far deeper than the immediate rush, and even the rush won't be as great as some hope, because a body builds up tolerance over time, requiring ever-greater doses for the same effect.

Neal Lipschutz, managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires, expressed his disappointment immediately. "I continued to hope for the merest hint that zero rates can't go on forever. That would have been achieved by altering or eliminating the 'extended period' modifier for how long current policy would hold. But it stood unmolested."
Though Lipschutz didn't put it this bluntly, it does now appear that we are headed for 1970s-style stagflation.

The price of crude oil (which is globally set in terms of the US dollar) has been declining for the last month, from $80 to $70. Yet it began a climb immediately when markets learned that the FOMC was sticking with the near-zero rates and with the "extended period" description of their tenure.