How to Become a Plagiarist

Believe your parents and teachers when they say anybody can grow up to be president, and then tack on the conditional coda, “even you.” Your mom always tells the family at Christmas and Easter about your good grades and what potential you have. You don’t see it yet, but she’s priming you for great things. It’s a good thing. You glad-hand all her friends who know your history better than you do. Your dad likes that you play catch with him every now and then instead of staying cooped up in your room watching CNN all day. Accept his tutelage on how to overcome your difficulty at catching a fastball on your glove-side, it’ll prevent you from being made fun of by the jocks in gym class. Get plastic trophies, multi-colored ribbons, and faux-gold medallions from Little League.

Play sports and study. Become good friends with every clique and person in it, but never be great friends with them. Make sure they never forget you and that you can have a solid 5-minute superficial conversation with them. It’s all you need. Secretly hate your teachers. Get A’s without trying, but still complain about homework with your buddies at recess. Fall in with the wrong crowd for all the right reasons.

High school starts with a bang. No one has been Class President as a freshman in twelve years. You strive for it. Shoot the breeze with the upperclassmen in hopes they’ll vote for you. Show them all your Lord of the Rings impressions. They like your Gimli one the best. You’re short like him, so they call you Gimli. Gimli will never become Class President.

Quit the baseball team after your sophomore year.

“I lost the love of the game,” you tell everyone. “I had more fun cracking jokes on the bench than playing 3rd base.”

Translation: The sport became a job that you realize you had been forced to do since you were in seventh grade. This is your first rebellion.

As a stipulation for giving up baseball, your parents push you into the labor force. You get a job at a nationwide pizza chain doing the same thing over and over for minimum wage. You’re the only white person in a store full of black people. This is the kind of thing that colleges love to hear about on transcripts. The whole diversity angle is very “in.” You don’t show your co-workers your impressions. You’re quiet, but you always say the perfect things when the opportunity presents itself. They call you the “cute white guy.” You feel like you’ve solved racial relations.

You get accepted to a world-renown university. It costs a Camaro a year to go there. So, instead, you go to one of its satellite campuses in a culturally-rich city.

You’ve never had a girlfriend when college begins. Inadequacy builds and self-confidence begins to shed away. You isolate yourself in your car to do homework and everything else. You socialize at the lowest-level. Nerds look at you in disdain over the top of their TI-81 calculators. High school promised the world for you. It taught you how to find “x” and why The Battle of Little Big Horn was so pivotal. It showed you what fallopian tubes look like and where Yemen is located on a map. It let you do a graduation speech after letting you feel like a God for your senior year. Then it abandoned you. You feel used, violated. You consider going back to visit teachers, when the underlying psychology says that you want to return to a place where you felt comfortable and accepted, since your current land of learning is harsher than a Siberian winter.

The first year is the worst. You made one friend. Of course you end up developing a crush on your friend, because the pursuit of love is a drug for you. The revolving door of manic depression and euphoric jubilation is phenomenal, bewildering, effervescent, and self-destructive. Blinded, you see a bright future. The future, as you well know, but choose to hide, will actually be filled with heartbreak and Coldplay songs, but at least it’ll get you your confidence back. It’s paradoxical in ways, but it’s true.

You join an extracurricular that has nothing to do with a future in politics, but you do it anyway. This is your first mature, independent decision of your life. You feel happy here, but you don’t know it’s because the choice to join was your own. Following your heart is new to you in many respects. The group has people of every color and background, and all of them tell crude, hilarious jokes. It’s a tight-knit family that can all poke fun at each other’s race; you’re all less influenced by Barack Obama than by Dave Chappelle.

Diversity seems to follow you everywhere you go, and you just fit in like you belong. You say that to yourself in the mirror. Your life is beginning to follow the clichéd narrative of successful people you always hear about on cable news and Vh1. You imagine Wolf Blitzer setting up a news package about your Presidential run by saying the words you’re thinking right now. It’s impossible to get over your ego. You still believe you can be President. You’re nineteen going on delusional.

In a country of roughly 300 million people, one man is President at a time. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning with a winning Mega Millions ticket in your wallet. On February 29th of a leap year. But there’s at least there’s a strategy to getting to the White House. That’s the difference.

Out of requirement, you have to take an English class. Working without the benefit of your scholarship, since it’s a summer course, you choose Advanced Creative Writing. A bad experience with Intro to Creative Writing the previous year left you bitter and with a distrust so extreme toward such classes that it can only be compared to Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto against technology’s erosion of human freedoms, minus the whole bombing aspect, obviously. You read the Wikipedia article on Kaczynski to make sure you nailed down the reference correctly.

Always double-check.

You consider how cool it must be for the other people who worked with Kaczynski during his Ph.D-years at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.

“I knew the Unabomber, you know.”
“No! Get out! Was he as nuts back then?”
“You kidding? I was crazier than he was. Teddy was a doll.”
“You don’t say. Goes to show you never can tell.”
“Just like Chuck Berry said.”

You sit at your laptop considering your honeycomb theory of causality when you should really be working on your writing assignment. It’s procrastination of the most mentally-demanding sort. You would be working far less brain cells by doing the homework, but you decide that considering the ramifications of every action in a person’s life, whether it be minute or serious, and by knowing all the ramifications of the ramifications ad nauseum, you can predict the future, or at least know the far-off implications of every choice. You can see around the bend, in a sense. You’re no physics whiz, theoretical or otherwise, so you instantly toss around the thought that this idea’s been conceived already.

You wonder if you’ll ever produce anything original during your existence.

You begin to look ahead at your own future, using an incredibly basic formula/structure of your theory, laid out on many pieces of paper, to try to see what’s in store for yourself. Spoilers never ruin movies for you anyway; it just makes the journey as intriguing seeing how the characters and plot get to the end. You begin by considering the delightful possibility that your self-developed theorem is indeed your own, and your genius is recognized by important people.

You’re working at the N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on your desk, something nobody else can break. You take a shot at it and you break it. You’re real happy with yourself, because you did your job well. You find out that that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people you never met, never had a problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" because they don't care. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot; Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie taking shrapnel in the buttocks. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his bottom got his old job, because he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.

Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so our country could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it isn’t helping your buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it isn’t too long until he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now your friend's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which is unfortunate because the shrapnel in his rear is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving, because every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.

You push away the papers, scribbled with your frantic amateur physics work.

You’ll hold out for something better.

If that’s your future, you figure, “Fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard?”

You could be elected president.