an illustration of plagiarism
In "California Politics Today #170: Mel Gibson appropriates Tom McClintock's words, without mentioning that he has, but McClintock, through his spokesperson, says he doesn't mind, that it's way OK with him" we saw how Mel Gibson, in an interview on National Review Online (NRO) used the same exact words that Tom McClintock, California State Senator, had used in an earlier published article of his attacking Proposition 71, California's Stem Cell Initiative, as an out-of-control boondoggle that would push the cash-strapped Golden State ever-deeper into debt while not necessarily doing anything at all for the disease victims upon whose backs the measure's sponsors were at that moment riding to a resounding victory.
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."
For more about "the Spectacle" and to reach the thrilling conclusion of this article (which includes biographical material about all three principals), got to
"California Politics Today #172: The "life-like" opposes and gives rise to the 'ultra-life-like' ".
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