Barack Obama: Guilty of Literary Crimes?

This election season has been a confusing one on many levels. I started out warily in support of Hillary Clinton because I was impressed by her strong performance in the early debates and the thoroughness of her knowledge of government. After Barack Obama's moving victory speech in Iowa, however, I started wondering if I was backing the wrong candidate. And then after watching the Clintons go after Obama with their Nixonian campaign tactics in South Carolina, I decided to make a change and now I'm firmly in Obama's camp.

In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?

The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.

Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?

Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?

Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?

I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."

And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."

I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.

We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.