Maureen Dowd’s ‘plagiarism’: should the court consider the value of the pilfered goods?

My goodness. Awoke to all these headlines about Maureen Dowd and thought she must have pasted a page of Cliff’s Notes into her column. But then it turns out to be one sentence, and not a very good sentence at that. It’s not like she cribbed “I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high over vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.” No, she “plagiarized” this mouthful of mush:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
It’s not like she made off with a pot of gold, more like a bucket of mud. Shouldn’t the court consider the value of the pilfered goods? It’s the standard nowadays to credit authors when borrowing even a single sentence, but now that she’s admitted the words came from from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, people ought to let it go.
There was a time, not long ago, when American authors freely borrowed lines from one another, and no one seemed to mind. In fact, it was considered a kind of homage. For example: When Carl Sandburg was describing his hometown in his 1919 1916 poem “Chicago” he wrote, among other things, that the city is…
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle.
And when Nelson Algren was describing the same town in 1951, he extended Sandburg’s metaphor:
The big town is getting something of Uncle Johnson’s fixed look, like that of a fighter working beyond his strength and knowing it. “Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs, who has never lost a battle’ ” the white-haired Poet wrote before his hair turned white. But the quality of our laughter has altered since that appraisal, to be replaced by something sounding more like a juke-box running down in a deserted bar. Chicago’s laughter has grown metallic, the city no longer laughs easily and well, out of spiritual good health. We seem to have no way of judging either the laughter of the living or the fixed smirk of the dead.
Algren is careful to quote Sandburg, but then A.J. Liebling, a New Yorker, came along in 1952 and wrote in “The Second City”:
And instead of ‘laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,’ Chicago wore a grin that might have indicated punch-drunkenness.
How very Algrenesque. Did Algren complain he’d been plagiarized? Hardly. He gave Liebling’s book a rave review. And Algren hardly could complain, because when he wrote these lines in 1951…
Now it’s the place where we do as we’re told, praise poison, bless the F.B.I… and applaud the artist, hanging for sale beside his work, with an ancestral glee.
It seems as though he may have recently read these lines, written by the screenwriter Ben Maddow (“Asphalt Jungle”), under the pen name David Wolff, in 1940:
“where the painter hangs for sale beside his work.… He who can feign desire, praise poison, or hang by his teeth, lives well…”
Are these guys all plagiarists? No, they’re writers who admire, and borrow from, one another’s work. And at least the stuff they stole was worth something. Now that we can Google a word or a phrase, our standard of originality has gotten more extreme.