Plagiarizing the past

It’s no small irony that the one person who has pushed the anti-Reproductive Health camp to the sea is not its worst enemy but its self-proclaimed champion. Who is Tito Sotto. He took to the floor last week to deliver the final nail on the coffin. And did—to his own. And to his cause along with it.

God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

He did so by being caught plagiarizing again. I did say last time that I can’t fathom why people keep doing this in this age of the Internet. The days when you could rip off from others with impunity are gone. You copy, you will be found out—more easily than if you kept looking at your seatmate’s exam paper in plain view of your teacher.

Sotto did it again, and got caught again. By eagle-eyed netizens who saw that the inspirational conclusion of his speech came straight from Robert Kennedy’s “Day of Affirmation” speech in South Africa in 1966. Sotto’s reaction was lamer than a quadriplegic. “Ano, marunong nang mag-Tagalog si Kennedy?” I know that many things are lost in translation, but I also know that authorship is not one of them.

The evidence is incontrovertible, as Michel Eldiy, the discoverer of the word- or thought-lifting, showed in a line-by-line comparison of the English and Tagalog versions. They match perfectly, sentence by sentence, thought by thought, kilo  por  kilo.

“I found the idea good,” says Sotto. “I translated it into Tagalog. So what’s the problem?” Well, this Escalera might have been absent on the day Miss Tapia taught the lesson, but it’s like this: There is no problem with finding an idea good. There is no problem with translating it into Tagalog. There is every problem claiming it as your own.

There are exceptions of course, such as when a line or phrase has passed on to everyday language or become part of common usage. The second paragraph above is so. It comes from Robert Browning’s poem “Pippa Passing” which goes: “The lark’s on the wing;/ The snail’s on the thorn;/ God’s in His heaven-/ All’s right with the world!” That’s an exception, Sotto’s is not.

Sotto says his detractors are seizing on the plagiarism issue to divert the public’s attention from the real one, which is the substance of what he is saying. Well, that assertion has only dug a deeper grave for him, getting him a challenge to a debate from Ateneo teacher Leloy Claudio and writer Miguel Syjuco.

But quite apart from that, plagiarism does lie at the very heart of things. The issue is honesty. The issue is decency. The issue is a fundamental respect for the rights of others. Which reflects not just on Sotto but on his cause. Which reflects not just on Sotto but on his camp. Which reflects not just on Sotto but on the Church.

It puts their credibility on the line. How can you care passionately for the phantasmagoric rights of the nonexisting but care nothing for the very real rights of flesh-and-blood entities, even if authors often live phantasmagoric lives?

One is tempted to ask, what’s so hard about saying, “Ayon nga kay Robert Kennedy (salin ko sa Tagalog),” to preface the passage? Which brings us to the ultimate irony of this.

Kennedy’s “Day of Affirmation” speech is fairly well-known. It is a powerful defense of the living and a ferocious indictment of those who oppress them. It is specifically a defense of those who might as well not be there given the way they are treated, the “invisible man” as Ralph Ellison called their kind in his famous novel. That is the “Negro,” that is the black person, rendered invisible by apartheid in South Africa and by bigotry in America.

That is the reason Sotto could not have mentioned the speech. It would have been sublimely paradoxical if he had done so. There is nothing hypothetical about its premise, there is nothing conjectural about its advocacy, there is nothing fantastical about the people it is defending. It speaks about a real iniquity. It speaks about a real oppression. Not unlike the one being mounted by the Catholic Church against the faithful, not unlike the one being mounted by the anti-RH groups against the living.

The passage Sotto quoted—without attribution—is a powerful one. But it is just the logical conclusion of what came before. Namely this: “The cruelties and the obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which come with even the most peaceful progress. This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease. It is a revolutionary world that we all live in….”

The “Day of Affirmation” does not support Sotto’s cause, it indicts it.

You remember again Milan archbishop Carlo Maria Martini thundering forth against the Vatican: “Our culture has aged…. our rituals and our cassocks are pompous…. The Church is 200 years out of date. Why don’t we rouse ourselves? Are we afraid?”

Paraphrasing Kennedy, “The cruelties and obstacles of this slowly changing country will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn doctrines. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the security of obscurantism to the excitement and danger of actually having to think. This world demands the qualities of youth: not the youthful of the body but the youthful of the mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for questioning over blind obedience. It’s time to start thinking of the future….”

It’s time to stop plagiarizing the past.