Medical Imposture--A Life Fraudulently in Your Hands

My three-year-old nephew has been saying for several months that when he grows up, he wants to be "a pilot AND a doctor." Perhaps this was always William Hamman's dream as well, because until recently, everyone thought he was both. Hamman evidently did not lie about being a pilot, but fabricated a "medical residency, fellowship, doctoral degree, [and] 15 years of clinical experience" as a cardiologist in order to falsely acquire grants, university positions, and lecture tours. As a result of this deception, Hamman has lost his jobs as both fake cardiologist and real pilot. Although no evidence is available to show that he actually performed operations, he has (as seen above) supervised them.

It seems as though more impostors pretend to be doctors than they do almost any other profession, and I don't think it has much to do with a doctor's salary. Pretending to be a lawyer or a businessman or even a psychologist would risk fewer (or no) lives and probably take less training, so there must be another reason for medical imposters to choose this particular fraud. Additionally, Hamman chose to be an expert on the heart, not a general practitioner or a podiatrist or some other, less dangerous, type of doctor. Hamman wants to be in control of people's lives. He wants to decide whether they live or die, just like he does when he flies those enormous aircraft. Hamman has taken daredevilry large-scale, to include hundreds of unwitting people.

How would You Start Over?

Remember that mediocre Drew Barrymore movie, Never Been Kissed, where Drew's character enrolls in high school to write an exposé, chosen because she is the only employee of a newspaper who can pass for a high school student? Remember that her brother, played by David Arquette, enrolls in high school too so that he can have one last chance for success with baseball? If you haven't seen the movie, no matter--I've just summarized it for you (minus the saccharine love story). My real point is that someone in real life, Guerdwich Montimer, to be precise, apparently took some advice from that film and decided to fraudulently start high school again at age 22.

This kind of crime intrigues me because its detriment to others is unclear. The article mentions that Montimer's trial is set "for the week of Aug. 1, following the conclusion of the capital murder trial of accused cop killer Larry Neil White;" one could hardly say that this crime is equal to cop-killing, but who has it affected most? The kid who got cut from the basketball team in Montimer's favor? The 15-year-old girlfriend who thought he was her age? The church faithfully standing by him even after they found out that he has fabricated both his name and age? Also, Montimer faked his whole identity--would he be less culpable if he only faked his age (like the little leaguer who was too old to play)?

My gut reaction to these events is to say "no fair" that some people can start their lives over while my honesty prevents me from it. But this type of story mainly makes me wonder both why I would start high school again and what I would do on a second try. All annoyances of high school aside (and can they really be set aside?), perhaps I would be more focused or try harder to make friends or manage to get accepted to Harvard, but these things don't seem worth the trouble of creating a false identity and pretending to be 16 again. I do wish I had done some things differently, but all of us must wish that. What makes a person decide that he can just be someone else, just slough off an identity for a more favorable one? Besides the law, what keeps most of us from doing that?

On The Forged Gift

Recently a member posted this link on the Gaddis listserv, asking the group whether the story might be the "most Gaddis-like" yet. The story involves an impostor Jesuit priest who has been donating forged artworks to American museums and institutions for the past 20 years. Like The Recognitions, we have here an impostor, forged art, and apparent disinterest of the forger in monetary gain; furthermore, like those in the novel, the people who have discovered the forgeries cannot imagine an act of this type of deception without monetary gain as its end. The article makes a point to say that the impostor "pays for his own hotels and airfare while traveling, but gets wined and dined by the institutions because he has told everyone that he has many more works in his collection." The curators are the Recktall Brown of real life, judging all value in terms of money. I'm sure Derrida would have much to say about this false gift-giving (but I'm still reading Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, so you'll have to conjecture on your own).

But the problem here is that we know nothing about this impostor. Readers of The Recognitions can (at least sometimes) understand Wyatt Gwyon's motives because he tells us what they are. We can conjecture that this false Jesuit will reveal himself eventually, but he has spent twenty years not revealing himself. It is difficult to even guess at his motives. If he is caught, what will his charge be? The article mentions that museums have been "a little bit embarrassed" that they were taken in by the forgeries, but have they lost anything other than pride? A few dinner dates? I hope the federal authorities do catch this forger, if only so I may better understand him.

"I am that Illiterate Undergrad!": The Forger Looks for Credit

An article/confession was published in Friday's edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education which discussed a man's job as a writer of academic papers for hire. The confessee humorously includes badly written emails from clients, half-brags about his salary, and admits to having written everything from personal statements to PhD dissertations. The article is interesting, entertaining, and perhaps even shocking at times, but mostly tells educators what we already suspected about academic dishonesty--that it is easy, pervasive, and getting worse.

But this post is not about the millions of high school and college students who cheat, and I suspect that the article isn't about that either. Pseudonymous or not (and quitting his job or not), "Ed Dante" is Michaelangelo yelling "I am Praxiteles!" when his forgery is mistaken for the real thing. He makes a point of saying that he has "attended three dozen online universities" and written papers toward hundreds of degrees, in an apparent attempt to both bolster his esteem and undermine the American education system. He offers no solutions to a problem, delivers no scathing exposé on a specific company, and hides behind a pseudonym. His confession is not one because he risks nothing and says little that most people do not already know. "Ed Dante" is proud of himself for helping to weaken our education system, and he wants you to know it.

The Real Thing (Also The Title of a Great Story by Henry James)

A recent article in American Scientist discusses our tendency to choose a real object over a textual or digital representation of one when shopping, even if we have to pay more for the object in front of us. I suspect that this tendency has decreased significantly in the last ten years or so, but its continued presence is interesting to ponder. The article suggests that being able to "grab" the item increases its desireability in our brains, and that items (such as food) behind glass, even if instantly available, become no longer more desireable than a picture of them on the computer. Certainly there are many neurological factors at work here, but the study points to our suspicion of the two-dimensional representation. It seems we are hard-wired to not believe everything we see, and touching and tasting what's in front of us verifies its authenticity.

I wonder to what extent this phenomenon extends to people. More and more people are finding dates online, but a large group of the population still considers online dating unnatural, suspect, or even dangerous. Meeting my date in person will (probably) tell me no better that he or she is dangerous (or intelligent or attractive) than would his or her picture and "profile" online, but I would not consider a date or relationship "real" until I met the person. I also wonder whether we are willing to choose less attractive people to date if they are in front of us (much like the students who spent 50% more for physical items than for their online counterparts). It seems to me that we would forgive many more foibles (like grammar errors and bad haircuts, say) in a live, 3-D person than in an online representation of one. We want as much information as possible before making decisions, and we still believe that the real thing simply gives us more than its two-dimensional representation.

Altruistic (or Nepotistic) Fraud?

The man pictured above, Raphael Golb, is on trial for forgery he allegedly committed in an attempt to validate his father's scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This article discusses some of the details of the case, including Golb's creation of email accounts in the names of prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholars who disagreed with his father's findings. Golb claims that his father's research was stolen years ago, and that his fraud was an attempt to shed light on someone else's plagiarism, but the story sounds increasingly outlandish as one reads about it. If you felt that someone stole from your father, would you go to any lengths to expose the theft, even to the point of committing crimes yourself? Would you create 70 email accounts in the names of your father's detractors in an attempt to (falsely) restore his scholarly reputation? I hate to be a cynic, but I feel that there's more going on here than simple familial love. It almost seems as though Golb feels he owes his father something, and will even break the law to restore a (perhaps) broken relationship with him. I wonder if this will do it.

Kodak Moment(s)

This video advertises a product that allows the average housewife to easily manipulate family photos. I realize that photographic manipulation has occurred almost as long as photographs have existed, but does anyone else find this creepy? Family photos already tend to be extremely artificial, reducing a group of interesting, individual people to one static image, but isn't there something fun about the captured instant, however imperfect, that is lost once several photos are spliced into one? How long will it be before we airbrush our childrens' pimples out or even hire better-looking children to play them?

Authenticity and the Collector

This morning I came across this item for auction on ebay and, though I have little interest in buying it, spent several minutes wondering about its authenticity. How can a book published in 1995 have "1994" written in it by the author? Then I realized that I didn't really care whether it was authentic or not. I am not a collector, and I see my books' values pragmatically: will the binding hold up? is the text accurate? can I mark in it with impunity? I enjoy a beautiful copy of a novel as much as the next person, and would also like to have a signed copy of my favorite book, but in our age of mechanical reproduction, every book is a "copy," and even the signed ones are hardly one-of-a-kind.

So then, what value does the signature add to the book? Why does the seller referred to above want $200 for a signed copy, and why might it be so important to a buyer to have that copy? Perhaps the first edition, especially the signed first edition, is as close to an "original" as is possible in publishing. The first edition novel is like the band a hipster liked before everyone else heard about it, and its price is indicative, not of its worth, but of the passion the buyer has for the work. But this passion often seems to diminish once the passionate begins to collect. The collector wants that which is closest to unique, if he cannot find something unique, and his use for the item is restricted to re-selling it at a profit or showing it to friends at parties. I don't think Gaddis would want his books to sit unread on shelves, nor to be shown off because they were expensive or exclusive.

On Admiration

From The Recognitions:

"--But if Mister Feddle saw a copy of a play by Ibsen, if he loves The Wild Duck and wishes he had written it, he wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of . . . recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?"

Language of Falsehood

Recently read in Emerson's Nature:

"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, the desire of pleasure, the desire of power, the desire of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections."

There is something just right about this statement.

Who is Hurt by the Liar?

Recently a friend and I discussed whether fabrication that was not "malicious" could be acceptable. She argued that perhaps a false story could be told as fact if it were entertaining and hurt no one. Indeed, we all read fictional books and watch fictional television shows, often ones "based on a true story," so does it matter whether the events happened to the storyteller or not, or even whether they happened to anyone, provided they are entertaining? Is there a great difference, ultimately, between falsehood and truth, and is truth very important anyway?

One could argue that Bethany Storro, pictured, hurt no one but herself when she told authorities that a stranger had thrown acid on her face when she, in fact threw acid on her own face for unknown reasons (though an interview on Oprah could be one). We could laugh at her stupidity or her desperate need for attention and forget about her. However, a few days after Storro's much-publicized "attack," a woman in Arizona was actually attacked with acid, apparently the victim of a copycat attacker. Storro is not the first person to be attacked in this manner, but she is one of the few whose stories have been aired on Good Morning America. In addition to throwing various innocent Washington women under suspicion, the faker's story appears to have lead directly to a real crime. The stories we tell don't have to be true, but we should be very wary of assuming that a lie will hurt no one simply because it has no malicious intent. Storro's intent may not be clear, but the consequences of her actions certainly are.

Forensic Fraud

I'm a big fan of those procedural forensic shows, the ones where the coroner or CSI or detective finds a bruising pattern or a cut or a bite mark that proves that the next-door neighbor really did kill the rude anthropologist, after all. I know that most of the science and technology in them is exaggerated, if not outright impossible, but it is nice to imagine that we could have the tools to almost always correctly identify the lawbreaker. That's why I was particularly drawn to this story wherein a man was convicted of arson, rape, and murder mostly based on the testimony of dentist Michael West, who claimed that teeth marks on the body matched those of a (mass-manufactured denture wearing) suspect. As the article explains,

West, who once claimed he could trace the tooth marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich at a crime scene to a defendant while excluding everyone else on the planet, has had to resign from two professional forensics organizations due to his habit of giving testimony unsupported by science.

West appears to be more or less a fraud, a man who dubiously matches teeth marks to the mouths of people who are already suspects and takes credit for closing difficult cases. I assume that acclaim drives him to do what he does, but his fraud has both put potentially innocent people on death row and could significantly undermine future use of forensic evidence in criminal trials. Does the dentist operate based on some thwarted sense of justice? Does he just "know" that suspects are guilty, and therefore fudges the evidence to put them in prison? Or does he disregard the suspects' plights altogether, wishing simply for congratulations for having solved a crime? Perhaps he's just trying to add some glamor to dentistry. I am no expert on this subject, of course, but neither do I claim to be.

On Narcissism and Liars

This is the story of Brian Blackwell, a 19-year-old man (or should I even say boy?) who told his friends he was a professional tennis player and brutally killed his parents when they discovered he had fraudulently opened and used credit cards in their names. He admitted to "manslaughter with diminished responsibility," claiming that his Narcissistic Personality Disorder diminished his responsibility. As this 2005 article discusses, "Blackwell's personality disorder meant he fantasised about unlimited success, power and brilliance" and he resorted to murder when his fantasy began to crumble.

It seems that nothing about Brian Blackwell's life was quite the truth, until he really, truly murdered his parents and then went on vacation with his girlfriend using their stolen credit cards. Is the liar's truth the lie he makes others believe, or the reality only he knows? It almost seems as though his lies about himself became so profound that he was no longer held accountable for his real actions, as though those were made untrue as well. Blackwell was the first person to use Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a criminal defense, and I wonder to what extent he opened the floodgates for others like him. Should Blackwell's actions get more leniency than those of criminals who aren't compelled to lie, who kill for money, or food, or love? Are his fantasies less controllable than others' avarice, gluttony, or lust?

Forget "Born with It"

I've begun watching television for the first time in seven years, and while there is a motherlode of fakeness on TV about which to write, few shows or advertisements have announced to their own deception as loudly as Maybelline's "Falsies" mascara, which purports to make your real lashes look like false ones. Woman has moved, then, from wanting to look like "maybe she's born with it" to wishing to look like she's got fake facial alterations. Are we to celebrate the fake now, embracing artifice and shunning the genuine? Is anyone attracted to the woman on the left solely because her eyelashes are enormous-looking?

Teach Your Children Well

The "Google alert" I have set up for the words "forgery" and "impostor" give me hundreds of news articles every week, and I don't even begin to read all of them. Most involve forged checks and forged legal documents on a minor scale, and the perpetrators are usually sentenced to two or so years of prison, depending on the charge. The stories I find more interesting are those that don't involve literally making money, but have more subtle ends. In "Qatar's top-selling English language daily newspaper" I found this story about a teacher/father's forgery of his children's documents to be accepted into a PRIMARY school in England. Perhaps my public school education makes me especially disdainful of this kind of action, but the fact that the story made it to a newspaper in Qatar points to the fact that others must be interested as well. One hears of all kinds of fraud happening at the high school and college level in terms of document falsification and illegal test-taking, but rarely does it happen at the primary school level (as far as I know). I pity this man's children, forced to leave their school because of their father's fraud, unsure whose actions to emulate. I am rarely a "think of the children" kind of person, but I wonder how these kids will learn the value of honesty and hard work, if they can't learn it from their father who is also a teacher.

Musical Plagiarism

I had almost forgotten the story of Joyce Hatto, supposed master pianist who was discovered to have stolen other people's recordings and appropriated them. Modern technology (iTunes) helped a musical connoisseur discover the fraud, but not before she died and was dubbed "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced." This wonderful New York Times Opinion piece by Denis Dutton explains what Hatto did but not why she did it, and perhaps that is what all of my blog posts ask. Are the reasons for stealing something and passing it off as your own the same as those for making something and passing it off as someone else's? As Dutton explains:

Joyce Hatto was not a pianistic forger. In order to forge a piano performance she would, for example, have had to record Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata herself and sell it to the world as a lost recording by Artur Rubinstein.

She was instead a plagiarist: she stole other pianists' work from published CDs and, with only a few electronic alterations, sold them as her own.

I dislike the deceit involved with forgery and imposture, but, as Dutton describes it, there is something so much worse about plagiarism. Hatto never faced any repercussions of her plagiarism during her life, and probably died just as she lived: "bubbly, confident, witty; a bit boastful perhaps." I wonder what justice comes to liars when they die.

On Plagiarists and Lawyers

A few years ago, this young adult novel was published and subsequently pulled from shelves when it came to light that the novel had at least "45 'strikingly similar' passages" to Megan McCafferty's novels, and those of several other popular novelists. The author, Kaavya Viswanathan, claimed to have "internalized" passages from these books and "accidentally" incorporated them into her own, and despite the fact that no one really believes this is true, it seems to have been accepted--Viswanathan lost respect and her second book deal, but suffered no other repercussions of this fraud. She graduated from Harvard, where she was a student at the time of the scandal, and is now happily attending Georgetown Law.

I'm glad that this kind of fraud still causes at least some media scandal, because it means that most of us find this scandalous. But Viswanathan lost so little--shouldn't there be punishment for this? To me, this plagiarism is at most grand theft, and at least copyright infringement, both of which have serious punishments. Perhaps a tinge of jealousy is behind my desire for justice as well; not simply dishonesty, but also money got this girl's book published and got her into Harvard. She may be smart, but she has gotten much of what she has (and what I or people I know and love want) with a combination of money and dishonesty, neither of which I have in any great quantity. Perhaps I am not morally outraged: maybe I am just jealous.

Stolen Valor

The man pictured here in military dress is not a marine, nor is he at a costume party. Jesse Bernard Johnston III bluffed his way into the U.S. armed services, pretending to be an officer and committing a crime by wearing military honors under false pretenses. More shocking to me than this falsehood, however, was the following information from this article:

"In a recent court proceeding, Johnston's former wife, also an Army reservist, accused him of using falsified documents to make it appear he'd served in the Marines. Melanie Rolfing, 24, made the claim in a sworn statement filed last month in Fort Worth family court when she had her two-year-old marriage annulled, alleging fraud. Johnston did not contest the annulment."

Even after seeing, reading, or experiencing dozens of similar situations in news, television programs, literature, and my own life, I still cannot fathom a person having no idea who her spouse is, to the point that an annulment is both necessary and possible after two years of marriage. I'd like to think that I could neither befriend nor partner with a fraud, that my own honesty would repel this type of person, or at least illuminate his or her dishonesty, but I know this is not true. These types of frauds are successful simply because most others are honest, because the honest ones would never lie and therefore do not expect to be lied to. We are the types of people who would state "fraud" as a reason for annulment of marriage after two years, because it would take that long to detect our loved ones' lies.

"Oh, you must have confidence."

I've been looking for a moral lesson in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, or at least some way to properly understand the book, but so far I am simply confused. The confidence-man, who may or may not be the devil (according to copious notes in the Norton Critical Edition of this text), spends most of his time convincing misers, misanthropes, and other con men to gain "confidence" in others, and when they are ultimately convinced, he uses their new-found confidence to steal their money. Is this loss of economic wealth a punishment for faithlessness, or is it proof, for the miser and the suspicious barber, that they should never trust men (especially with their money)? The confidence-man, moreover, does not manage to get any money from his fellow con man, Charlie, but simply thwarts his companion's own attempts to swindle. The book seems to simultaneously attempt to increase its readers' "confidence" and advance a sort of misanthropy itself. Whom shall we trust, and why? What does Melville want us to believe?

If You're Going To Fake it, You Might as Well Say You're the Best...

From the New York Times and The New Republic come this story and this résumé about a young man named Adam Wheeler who faked his way into Harvard and has apparently falsified nearly everything about his academic life. The image above, from The New York Times, gives details on just a few of his lies. Note the "veritas" on two out of three of the school insignias shown. Wheeler is now being prosecuted for theft of scholarship money from Harvard and has pleaded "not guilty" despite what seems to be overwhelming evidence against him. What is to be done with people like him? What will he do? Will his lying escalate (though I can't imagine what could be bigger than this), or will he be somehow reformed and go on high school lecture tours about honesty? What does a person do once everyone finds out he is a phony?

A Forgery's Worth

One imagines that there is much more to this story than is explained in the news article, but even this small amount of information is fascinating. The story seems worthy of fiction or film: an elderly art dealer who (supposedly) convinces an artist to fake a Picasso "to help catch a thief" and later sells a forgery for two million dollars and pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. The film would likely include more guns, but gunplay wouldn't be too great a stretch, since the FBI is already involved. This is a story about the crook dealer, but what is the forger's story, I wonder?

This story also leads one to further question art's monetary value. The painting, pictured above, is not itself extraordinary, and would not be worth very much as a work by Maria Apelo Cruz. As a forgery, the work of art loses its value as itself: if people believe that the work is a genuine Picasso, it becomes that work, by Picasso, and once the fraud is discovered, all of its value, monetary or cultural, evaporates. Why is this not art? What is it now?

Clerical Imposture

This story is the type of imposture that shocks me for its brazenness, in a similar way that the Presidential State Dinner crashers, pictured here with Joe Biden, shocked much of the United States last November. Is impersonating a religious officiant more grievous than pretending you've been invited to a White House function, or are they more or less equivalent? Do we revere religious events in a similar way to government ceremonies? Perhaps these crashers are living the American Dream, which imagines that a person can become anything he or she wants to be; perhaps we must amend the American Dream to include pretending to become anything he or she wants to be but can't legitimately become.

On Fiction Writing and Liars

Last night my professor said of an author's magazine interview, "of course it's hard to know how much of what she says is genuine, since all writers are liars anyway." Edgar Poe once ran a fake news article about the arrival of a hot-air balloon from across the Atlantic, and gathered huge crowds to buy the paper in which the story appeared. We all know, of course, that writers of fiction must fabricate characters, plots, and settings, as part of the creative process, but it's often difficult to tell to what extent the fabrication extends to the writers' real lives. Do we, as readers of fiction, allow some lying from our authors outside their fiction? Is it possible to know whether truly great fiction writers are lying or not? Perhaps we don't care, as long as the writing is good. Maybe the genuine and the fake are indistinguishable for some people. One wonders which came first, though--the lying, or the fiction writing? It's quite likely that I've been unable to write fiction because I've been unable to lie. Perhaps I could take some tips from Poe.

Pictured is (possibly) Poe in his coffin, from www.celebritymorgue.com. It's quite likely to be as fake as Poe was.

Academic Fraud

Apparently there are repercussions for lying about your academic record!

From the Southeast Missourian:

JACKSON, Mo. (AP) -- A 22-year-old woman has admitting submitting a phony transcript to Southeast Missouri State University.

The Southeast Missourian reported that Danielle Feagin of Malden pleaded guilty to forgery charges on Monday. Sentencing will be May 24.

Feagin told a judge she committed the forgery in hopes of gaining quicker acceptance to Southeast Missouri State. The transcript showed Feagin had a 4.0 grade point average and 89 credit hours at Three Rivers Community College. Actually, she had a 2.4 GPA and 37 credits.

Prosecutors are recommending a suspended sentence and probation.


It's perhaps lamentable that her goal was only Southeast Missouri State--who knows what kind of attention she'd get if she had tried to get into an Ivy League or a UC with a forged transcript. One wonders how many people try to fake transcripts, and also how many people get away with it.

The Cancer-Faker

This woman, Kelly Von Lehmden, raised thousands of dollars to fight her breast cancer, and was later discovered to have falsified documents to fake the disease. Now there is concern for her handicapped son, who may be a victim of her Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. In our age of pathologizing all aberrent behavior, we seem to treat criminals as greater victims than their victims often are. Is this woman mentally ill? Was she simply unable to prevent herself from forging medical records? Is this scandal enough to satisfy her incessant need for attention, or will she continue to pull stunts like this until someone really gets hurt?

The Forger Family

One of the most recent major art forgery operations was carried out by the Greenhalgh family: artist son Shaun and his elderly parents, George and Olive. It seems that there is a psychological difference between a single person who copies artworks (whether for monetary gain or not) and a group of people all committing a fraud together. This article claims that the group did not carry out these frauds for money, but rather due to "resentment of the art market." Shaun's obvious skill suggests that this statement could be true--certainly he could make some sort of living selling copies of great works of art--but these three wanted to undermine the whole art market. Still, a single piece successfully sold and then revealed to be a fake would signal their resentment at least as effectively as several pieces successfully sold and never discovered to be forgeries. I'm not convinced that they were trying to make a point. The art market has always been ridiculous and has never been fair, just like every other market. I'm mostly just certain that they were trying to make money.

Lawsuits and Plagiarism

People like Blair Hornstine, pictured left, are a waste of everyone's time. This disgustingly sappy pro-Blair website discusses the plight of poor Blair Hornstine, who sued a school district for 2.7 million dollars because she was forced to share valedictorian honors with a student who didn't get to take his classes from home or skip P.E. I'm sure there's not much talk in that site about the fact that she plagiarized school newspaper articles and Harvard rescinded her admission. I have nothing but contempt for fakers like these, people who will live their entire lives as lies (what kind of congenital medical condition do you have, Blair?) and cut any corner possible instead of legitimately working and studying like almost everyone else has to. I don't know her, and perhaps I'm doing her some injustice, but I do know that she plagiarized, and a person who plagiarizes is certainly capable of other forms of fraud as well. She will probably continue to succeed, unless some sort of cosmic karma really does exist.

Cheaper than the Real One...

Today my spam email directed me to this website, unapologetically advertising the best false diplomas money can buy. The email encouraged me to "change [my] life a bit with our novelty documents" and to "just take a chance." For me, the potential repercussions of this type of lie would be crippling, both emotionally and professionally. Is it impossible to succeed without lying about yourself? Do we all have to make ourselves look better than we are, even to the extent of falsifying documents? Also, what kind of laws are in place against this type of fraud? I wonder whether an employer can sue an employee if he finds out that he was lying on his résumé. I hope he can.

Art Forgery

Forgery, perhaps only because I am more and more interested in it, seems to be of increasing interest to the public. An exhibition of the works by the subject of the film F for Fake, Elmyr de Hory, is currently on display in Minnesota. De Hory's protege and inheritor (oddly named Forgy), has launched the show of his "friend's" works, including one authentic artist's work and dozens of de Hory's fakes. This article discusses the relationship between the two. I think I admire art forgers, for their artistic skill mostly, but I also wonder how satisfying it can be to copy someone else's work all your life. Is money a motivation, or pride, or something else? Perhaps I should start trying to write "lost" Gaddis novels and see how it goes. Somehow there's a difference between that and an art forgery.

Smeared Benjamins

Today this article appeared on major internet news sources. The article mentions that "$200,000" were found, but the discovery of a dozen reams of paper or a thousand prints of a work of art in an old car would make no headlines. Where the rarity as well as the quality of a work of art makes it valuable in monetary terms, it seems that money is made valuable simply by governmental regulation. Mammon, in The Faerie Queene, fingers coins no longer in circulation and thus having no exchange value. Mammon's real gold, because it is hoarded and not exchanged, is no more valuable than a wad of counterfeit bills stuffed into a car.

Minor Goddesses

While reading a Poe story, I came across the name of a Roman goddess that I had never heard before. Laverna, the goddess of ill-gotten gain, is celebrated by pouring libations using the left hand. I wonder what a goddess of cheats would look like. I was unable to find a satisfactory image of her, though her name seems to have been appropriated into various tarot decks and children's fairy stories. I'm also surprised I haven't heard of her before now. Surely the impostors and counterfeits with which I am so intrigued pray to her while doing their deeds!

What's the Opposite of an Impostor?

I notice that men tend to be impostors much more frequently (at least in literature) than women. This article from Psychology Today discusses a problem many people (mostly women) have
in which they feel themselves to be frauds, even when they are genuine successes. This is known as "Impostor Syndrome," and it strikes me as the exact opposite condition to the impostor himself.

On Puppets

After close consideration of fauxlebrity Heidi Montag's new look, I have determined that she is slipping into the uncanny valley. I cannot yet determine whether she is on the "moving" or "still" curve, since it's not certain whether she can move any longer. This is certainly an interesting sociological study!

I would like to see this film, about a man who pretended to be a doctor at the WHO for eighteen years before killing his family when they began to discover his lies. One may ask: "was he living a double life?" but he had no real job and no other wives or mistresses. In his copious free time, he mostly wandered the woods. The book of the same title, by Emmanuel Carrere, is bone-chilling and excellent.

Intellectual Fakers

While visiting the Stanford campus this weekend, I was reminded of Azia Kim, the girl who was able to fool dozens of people pretending to be a Stanford student for almost a full school year. For this feat, she apparently merits this Facebook fan page as well as, it is rumored, a book and TV deal. Do we prize fakers more than those with authentic merits? Or are we simply enthralled by people this brazen? I am one of a million Stanford rejects, but somehow I was able to rebuild my life and move on...

Appearance

Alan Watts would certainly have something to say about there being a larger "Appearance" section than Philosophy section in the local bookstore.

"My envy's not dangerous; it wouldn't hurt a mouse. I don't want to destroy the people -- I only want to be them. You see it would destroy only myself."
--Gilbert Osmond, Portrait of a Lady











Pictured: Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller, imposter.

Doppelgangers

Today my coworker called a bookstore and was greeted by a woman with a voice supposedly "identical" to mine. She said: "Thank you for calling Barnes and Noble, this is Lara, how may I help you?" I was put in mind of Spenser's "false Florimell," who, despite having hair made of golden wire and being animated by a demon-sprite, convinces everyone that she is Florimell herself. If the bookshop girl and I meet, one of us may disappear into thin air...

Monetary Value of a Forgery

Thorstein Veblen, pictured left, discusses the value of hand-wrought versus mass produced products:

the material of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or colour, and without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability; if a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever imitation of hand-wrought goods, . . . the utility of the article, including the gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety percent, or even more.

In the United States of America Mr. Sinisterra had been a counterfeiter. During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question.
--William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Pictured: Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., great impostor