Having conclusively demonstrated that what Mel Gibson was supposed to have "said" in his interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online was mostly a word-for-word copy of what Tom McClintock wrote in his article (assuming, of course that it was written by the actual Tom McClintock, and not by his staff, writing as "Tom McClintock," since he did, after all, use some of the language at issue in his live, now encoded-recorded-posted-accessible, interview), it remains to seen if this is a clear case of "plagiarism," defined at dictionary.com as "n 1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work 2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own."

This reporter contacted California State Senator Tom McClintock's Senate office to inquire, and was referred to his campaign office. There, Jon Huey, a McClintock's campaign staffer and the Senator's designated spokesperson about the use of identical language in the Senator's article and the Gibson interview, said:

"Well, basically, the Senator had a great conversation with Mel Gibson and we offered to help him with his opposition with 71 and through that the Senator gave him his talking points and, you know, we're working with him and he's using our talking points. That's it and that's a great partnership with ours and his."

After acknowledging that he had read the National Review Online "interview" with Mr. Gibson, Mr. Huey, when asked if he had any problem or objection to Mr. Gibson's use of language identical to that in Senator McClintock's "talking points," said that he had "no problem, nor objections to that at all."

This reporter then sent an e-mail to Ms. Lopez documenting the apparent plagiarism, and, following that, spoke briefly with her by phone in her New York City office, asking if she'd received the e-mail. She said she'd received it but hadn't looked at it yet. She had no further comment.

No editors or other responsible individuals at National Review Online were willing to comment on the issue of plagiarism being raised in this case.

What is to be made of all this?

Given this reporter's pronounced tendencies towards both naiveté and cynicism, it's possible that an article claiming to contain an "interview" with a world-famous movie star in which he uses the exact words earlier used by a leading California politician to denounce, as had the politician, Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Initiative, without mentioning the previous text or attributing it in any way to its original author, is merely business-as-usual and nothing to get upset about, or even notice, or upon which to comment.

Actors use screenwriters; politicians use speech writers. Apparently it's possible to get a more powerful effect if conceptualizing/linguistically expressing and public articulating are separated into specialties to be done by those most talented at each, to be brought together by producers and campaign consultants into the package best-designed to move an audience or influence an election.

Movie star actors using the words of politicians as their own to attack special interest legislation being foisted upon the public through the initiative process may be merely trivial in a world where cadres of pollsters, campaign consultants, speechwriters, speech coaches, make-up people, hairdressers, wardrobe consultants, camerapersons, editors, and publicists, not to mention web designers and focus group specialists, all paid for by lots of campaign contributions, some large, some small, and coordinated by strategists, accountants, and lawyers, coalesce to present a "candidate" with the looks, speaking ability, people skills, and ambition to serve as a "front" for the entire apparatus.

The emergence of the "Grand Convergence"

This is how movies work; this is how politics works; and this is how business works. As show business, politics, and business, especially advertising, converge beyond today's "entertainment-political-industrial complex" to create a seamless and seemingly-inescapable system for the analysis of human desire and its individual and collective manipulation and channeling into those projects seen by the manipulators and their masters as best able to consolidate and expand their system of global control, it might not be amiss for those of us constantly subjected to this system of ceaseless emotional/political management to try to step outside of the frame in order to grasp just how the Wizards of Everything are doing this to us, from behind the curtain of glitz and misdirection, from where they, like their fictional archetype in Oz, are constantly, if only subliminally, admonishing us not to look.

McClintock-to-Gibson-to-Lopez substantively opposes Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Initiative, yet another particularly blatant and egregious (in this case to the tune of $6 billion) money-and-power grab by Stanford University and its network of collaborators. This creative triple-play is, nevertheless, a textbook example procedurally of the techniques used to build and maintain what the French intellectual and Situationist (and likely cheese-eating surrender monkey) Guy-Ernest Debord named "the Spectacle."

Here, not plagiarized, but quoted and attributed, is how Debord begins the text of his The Society of the Spectacle, quoting, but not plagiarizing, because clearly crediting, what the German philosopher Ludwig Feurbach wrote in 1843 in the Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity:

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

This latest, and relatively trivial, example of generating very minor spectacle relates closely to the creation what the very talented film critic and essayist David Thomson, in his brilliant volume Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts dubbed the " 'life-like,' a level of reality different from but partaking of both 'real' life and the fictions that are projected on the screen in films." (a self-plagiarizing quote).

(You can listen to this reporter interview Mr. Thomson in 1999 about "Beneath Mulholland" [which real Drive is only, according to MapQuest, only three miles from where this text is being composed] by clicking here. Please bear with the "audio collage" that begins around 13:20, mixes in another interview about Kabbalah, obscures a discussion of Jessica Rabbit, and ends around 14:15.)

By combining what Senator McClintock thinks with the on-line, print-generated idea of Mel Gibson saying it, there emerges the "life-like" image of Braveheart-Mad Max-Martin Riggs-Fletcher Christian-Rocky the Rooster Mel bravely, engagingly, inspirationally leading the "No on 71" troops into battle against yet another terrible enemy, in this case the possibly-overmatched California Proposition 71.

In a generally negative review of Mr. Thomson's book, an anonymous reviewer from Kirkus Reviews grudgingly gives him some credit when s/he writes:

"When he steps back and analyzes the roots of his fandom, he begins to verge on astuteness: 'Just the fact that photography is modern and technical does not prevent its fostering superstition. To believe in faces we never meet, and to let their moods affect our lives, depends on irrational faith.' "

What the book reviewer is saying about what sometime-movie reviewer David Thomson is saying about film stars is no less true when applied in such instances as the recently-omnipresent countenances of George W. Bush and John Kerry.

With so much "life-likeness" being concentrated on the question of whether Californians, through Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Initiative, ought to be investing $6 billion dollars in bio-medical technologies that may soon be capable of producing ultra-"life-like" transhuman beings, genetically-enhanced and genomically-superior, we should probably all just savor the privilege of actually being alive at such a time, and get about fearing or enjoying our real/imagined futures in the manner we deem most fitting.

Biographical notes