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.