Jonah Lehrer’s Journey to Redemption

Writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned in disgrace last year from The New Yorker after he was caught plagiarizing from himself and others as well as fabricating quotes, is back.

By the age of 31, the pop-science author was a rising star when the tangled web he wove began to unravel. He initially denied responsibility, but eventually released a statement of apology: “I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers.”

Now The New York Times reports that Lehrer has sold a work to Simon & Schuster called A Book About Love. “Jonah Lehrer is an unusually talented writer,” said his publisher’s Jonathan Karp. “We believe in second chances.”

Several years ago James Frey’s memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces, got a bestselling boost as an Oprah’s Book Club selection before his fabrications came to light; the scandal culminated in an appearance on Oprah’s TV show, where she hammered him and his publisher for abusing her trust and that of the readers she sent his way.

Stephen Glass was a wunderkind at The New Republic in the late 90s before his articles were exposed as largely invented (his tale was brought to the big screen in the excellent film Shattered Glass). Another rising star, Jayson Blair at The New York Times, caused a stir when it was discovered he liberally plagiarized and fabricated stories and quotes for the paper. Journalist Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story for The Washington Post in 1980 was revealed to be fictionalized.

To my knowledge, none of these writers – with the possible exception of Glass, who tried his hand at a failed “biographical novel” – has attempted to work out a public redemption through their writing. Frey, for example, seems to have gone on to run a sort of young adult fiction sweatshop and to partner with actor Mark Wahlberg on a stalled project about the porn world for HBO, and Cooke and her boyfriend even scored big – $1+ million – from the sale of her tale to Hollywood (though nothing came of the script).

No one until Lehrer, whose new book will use “his journalistic misconduct as a case study of the mysterious and redeeming power of love.” “The lies are over now,” he had promised in his formal apology. But are they? Was he merely using “contrition as a career move,” as Andrew Sullivan once said of Stephen Glass? Slate has a blistering critique of Lehrer’s book proposal that acknowledges the author’s verbal skill but slams its “parade of cheap epiphanies” and strongly suggests he plagiarized portions; is Lehrer no wiser or more honest after all?

Et Tu, Spartacus?

Last week legendary actor Kirk Douglas posted a short plea for – something, it’s unclear exactly what – at the Huffington Post, a vague call for the elimination of guns in America, because, as he put it solemnly, “America’s Cowboy Days Are Over.”

In case you’ve been in a coma for the last century, Douglas, now at the almost Biblical age of 96, is the steely-eyed, cleft-chinned international superstar of such films as Paths of Glory, Lust for Life, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Seven Days in May, and perhaps most memorably, Spartacus. The talented, ridiculously handsome actor has played everything from tortured artist Vincent Van Gogh to a Viking warrior, military officers, cowboys, and, well, Spartacus.

In his HuffPost piece, Douglas says that “under the flooring of my dressing room is a safe. In it are two guns that I used to shoot the bad guys in movies and a silver plated revolver with my name engraved on it which was given to me by some crazy fan.” He writes that “I often played the good cowboy on screen, riding in to save the day. Now, everybody thinks he is a cowboy too. That frightens me. We have become a cowboy country with too many guns.”

How many is too many, Mr. Douglas, and who gets to decide that figure? The Hollywood left generally marches in unthinking lockstep to the progressive call to get rid of guns altogether in America – a simplistic, utopian fantasy that does not and cannot possibly address the complicated reality that millions of guns are already in circulation in this country. The left pontificates about “getting them off the streets” and seems to believe that this is best accomplished through the bureaucratic hassling and demonization of law-abiding gun owners, if not by actually forcing them to turn in their guns to the government – you know, for the sake of the children. Of course, despite a brainless video plea from a gaggle of Hollywood actors to “demand a plan,” the left doesn’t seem to have a plan for disarming criminals, gangs, and the violent mentally ill, who came by their firearm possession illegally.

The Totalitarianism at the Heart of Obama's Scandals

The Obama administration’s legs are wobbling under the weight of so many scandals lately that whole chunks of the edifice – the IRS, the NSA, the DOJ – are threatening to implode, particularly without support from the normally adoring media. Even the New York Times – the New York Times! – is no longer willing to bolster an administration whose totalitarian urges have been exposed to the light.

Let’s begin with the Internal Revenue Service’s thuggish targeting of conservative groups. From April 2010 to April 2012, the IRS placed on hold the processing of applications for tax-exempt status received from organizations with such presumably conservative indicators as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” or “9/12” in their names, approving only four while green-lighting applications from several dozen organizations whose names included the likely left-leaning terms “progressive,” “progress,” “liberal,” or “equality.” It demanded from some conservative organizations unwieldy amounts of documentation and private information, such as what books their members were reading or what they had posted on social networking sites. The Coalition for Life of Iowa was actually asked to detail the content of their prayers at meetings. The Cincinnati office of the IRS leaked confidential donor information from some conservative applications to an investigative reporting organization. Even some conservative individuals are now alleging that they were personally targeted by the IRS for political reasons. Mark Steyn correctly labeled this abuse “a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States.”

Then Obama’s sycophantic press itself discovered to their dismay that Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department secretly collected telephone records for April and May of 2012 from as many as twenty of the Associated Press wire service’s reporters and editors, in relation to an apparent leak to the AP about an al Qaeda plot in Yemen. For the first time, Obama’s fanboys among the media found themselves on the wrong end of his political bullying, and they didn’t like how it feels.

Randall Blythe’s Mission

In the heat of a 2010 heavy metal concert in Prague, 19-year-old fan Daniel Nosek rushed the band and was shoved backward off the stage. He fell on his head and died. A jury found that D. Randall Blythe, singer for the American band Lamb of God, had pushed him, although the concert promoters and security were held criminally liable. Blythe was acquitted this past March, and on his blog recently he unloaded his emotional reaction to the experience in a post titled “Be Carefully.”

The trial had a profound effect on Blythe, now 42, largely because of a gift of grace from the victim’s family. “The family of Daniel Nosek never… wished me ill, either publicly or privately,” Blythe wrote in gratitude, and “they didn’t want anything from me in that courtroom except for me to understand how this had affected them... It was one of the most amazing displays of strength and dignity I have ever witnessed.” For that, Blythe said, “I am eternally grateful to them… I know what it feels like to hold my dead child in my arms [Blythe’s only daughter died within hours of being born]. The emotions one goes through are absolutely indescribable.”

When the verdict was read and Blythe was exonerated, he was overwhelmed and paralyzed with relief, disbelief, sadness. “A fan of my band was dead, and a family had been shattered... I did not know what to do or where to go.” At their request, Blythe met privately with the mother and uncle:

I cannot tell you what it is like to look into the eyes of a mother whose son is dead as a result of attending a concert by your group, his favorite band. I cannot tell you what it is like to hold her tiny hands as she weeps for her dead boy; to hold those hands in your large hands, the same hands accused of killing her son. I cannot tell you in any words what it’s like to feel that grief for her lost only child pouring off of her small frame in a massive dark wave of sorrow, to see that pain again in another, so visceral that your body shakes with the awful power and totality of it.

In Praise of American Warriors

For Memorial Day weekend, I thought I'd re-run this piece I wrote for Big Hollywood on a different occasion four years ago...

My father Roger E. Tapson, a former United States Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II, died in 2004 and was buried near a small lake in the rolling, pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands of other veterans - their names, as poet Stephen Spender might say, "feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud, and whispers of wind in the listening sky, the names of those who…left the vivid air signed with their honor." It’s exactly the kind of place my dad would have described – without a hint of Oprah-fied, feminized, New Age devaluation of the word – as “spiritual.” It was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.

 

Spiritual indeed, but not in the same degree or kind as "civilian” burial grounds. Not to diminish the final resting place of anyone interred in the latter; but to stand in a military cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn reverence. The “vivid air” of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra, because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and sacrifice – and to warriors who once embodied them. Their grave markers stand as a challenge to those of us who remain.

Honor, courage, dignity, service, sacrifice – how many of us civilians can say that we commit to embodying those qualities in our daily lives? How many of us can say we are truly tested, body and soul, ever, much less on a daily basis, the way that the men and women of our military are? How many of us can say we are ready and willing to “do what is required,” asWarlord author Ilario Pantano puts it, for our country and our fellow Americans, even at the cost of our lives? Precious few if any, I would guess, and we civilians are all the lesser mortals for it.

And that makes us all the more fortunate that there are those who can and do rise to that challenge, on front lines around the world. It takes a special American to embrace that responsibility and earn a uniform of the United States armed forces, and it takes a special family – warriors too in their own way (“they also serve who only stand and wait,” as John Milton wrote) – to support their loved one from the home front. 

I was too young for the Vietnam War draft, and when I did come of age I was much more interested in playing guitar in a rock band than having my hair shaved off and being yelled at by a drill sergeant. Today, when America is engaged in an epic clash with worldwide jihad, in addition to facing threats from thuggish dictators to Central American drug armies to a re-emergent Russia, I’m frustrated and deeply regretful that I never served, and that the only way I can now contribute to the fight is through my writing.

Is the pen mightier than the sword? It sure doesn't feel like it – it’s pretty obvious which one I’d rather have in a fight – but the pen is what I'm stuck with. Meanwhile I'm grateful and humbled that the men and women of the United States military have the rare and noble qualities it takes to be the sword between me and America’s enemies.

Brave New ‘Cosmos’

Last week the Fox network announced plans to reboot Cosmos, the massively popular documentary TV series hosted by the late scientist and science popularizer Carl Sagan. When it aired 33 years ago, the original program became the highest-rated series on PBS (and held that distinction for 10 years until Ken Burns’ The Civil War). “Before there was Downton Abbey,” said Fox President Kevin Reilly, “the biggest thing to happen to PBS was Cosmos.”

With Sagan as guide, Cosmos swept viewers along on a grand tour of the origins of the universe, the evolution of our planet, the miracle of life, and the nature of consciousness. It celebrated our innate curiosity and our longing to return to the stars from whence we came. “We’re going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination,” he promised. Each of the 13 episodes – with titles like “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” “The Harmony of Worlds,” “The Lives of the Stars,” and “Who Speaks for Earth?” – focused on a specific aspect of the journey. The series opened countless minds to the power of science, the majesty of the universe, and the possibility of life beyond our own planet. It was accompanied by a big-selling, gloriously illustrated coffee table book (which I am pleased to say I still have).

When it aired, Cosmos immediately established creator Carl Sagan as a pop culture icon. The catchphrase “billions and billions,” falsely attributed to him (it actually originated from a skit on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson), became a common cultural meme; Sagan even playfully made it the title of a collection of his essays. Like painting instructor Bob Ross and beloved children’s show host Mister Rogers, two other quirky but endearingly sincere pop culture icons on PBS, Sagan was an easy target for parody and ridicule, but he and his show nonetheless had an incalculable impact on American viewers, their interest in science, and the perception of their place in the universe.

Rumsfeld’s Rules

When President Gerald Ford learned that his Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld had compiled a file of instructive observations and quotations about effective leadership and management, he asked to read them. An impressed Ford promptly designated them “Rumsfeld’s Rules” and distributed them to the senior members of the White House staff. Since then they have been read by presidents, government officials, business leaders, diplomats, members of Congress, and others. Rumsfeld was finally asked to collect them between covers and elaborate on them, and the result is the just-published Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life.

Donald Rumsfeld boasts a ridiculously distinguished résumé from the arenas of business, government, and the military: naval aviator, Congressman, top aide to four American presidents, ambassador, the CEO of both a worldwide pharmaceutical company and a leading company in broadcasting technologies, and of course, as he is most well-known, the 13^th and 21^st U.S. Secretary of Defense (the only man in American history to serve twice in that post). He is also the author of Known and Unknown: A Memoir, a weighty tome but one of the most important political memoirs since the 9/11 attacks forever altered our geopolitical landscape. He now chairs the Rumsfeld Foundation, which supports leadership and public service at home, and funds global finance projects, fellowships, and charitable causes that benefit our armed forces and their families (all proceeds of Known and Unknown, for example, go to the Foundation’s military charities).

Speaking Engagements This Week

Tuesday I'll be introducing former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a Freedom Center luncheon at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, and later this week I'll be speaking before the Bloomfield (MI) Republican Women's Club on "Hollywood and Islam."

Stalin’s Secret Agents

Try a word association quiz with the phrase “Cold War,” and the first two responses that are almost certain to come to the mind of the general public are “paranoia” and “McCarthyism,” which is practically a synonym for paranoia. The common assumption, thanks to decades of public school indoctrination and the influence of leftist intellectuals, is that the Cold War, at least in its early decades, was all about suspicious Republicans fearing a Red under every bed and blacklisting innocents in Hollywood. But a recent book (the paperback edition hits bookshelves next month), lays out the historical evidence for massive Communist penetration of our government beginning in the New Deal era, increasingly rapidly during World War II, and afterward leading to gaping breaches of national security and the betrayal of free-world interests.

Contrary to the notion that domestic Communists were simply harmless, misguided idealists, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein shows that widespread government infiltration by Soviet spies sabotaged our foreign policy and molded the post-WWII world in favor of the Soviet Union. Evans, the author of eight previous books including the controversial revised look at Joseph McCarthy called Blacklisted by History, is a former editor of the Indianapolis News, a Los Angeles Times columnist, and a commentator for the Voice of America. Romerstein is a leading Cold War expert, formerly head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency from 1983 until 1989, who has served on the staff of several congressional committees including the House Intelligence Committee.

The early Cold War spying which resulted in the theft of our atomic secrets, radar, jet propulsion, and other military systems was serious enough, but that wasn’t the major issue. “The spying,” as the authors put it, “was handmaiden to the policy interest,” which was by far the leading problem. As President Franklin Roosevelt’s health and mental ability waned, covert Communist aides exerted pro-Soviet influence on U.S. policy, which was reflected in postwar discussions by the Big Three powers about the new shape of the world. The policy impact of such deceptive influence on the part of Soviet agents

was to turn Western influence and support against the anti-Communist forces and in favor of their Red opponents, as U.S. and other Allied leaders based decisions on false intelligence from pro-Soviet agents. The effects were calamitous for the cause of freedom, as numerous countries were thus delivered into the hands of Stalin and his minions.

The three leaders – FDR, Churchill, and Stalin – “would ultimately decide what political forces would prevail where and the forms of government to be installed in formerly captive nations, including those in alignment with the victors.” Unfortunately, at that time “seeking Soviet ‘friendship’ and giving Moscow ‘every assistance’ summed up American policy [in meetings] at Teheran and Yalta, and for some while before those meetings.”

"Jihad in America: The Grand Deception" Wins Best Documentary

The documentary I co-wrote for the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jihad in America: The Grand Deception, won Best Documentary at this weekend's Beverly Hills Film Festival. You can find it here on Amazon.

Topless Jihad

Recently members of the Ukrainian-based, global feminist group Femen staged protests across Europe calling for “topless jihad.” While American feminists today are satisfied whipping up outrage about Mitt Romney’s binders and Sandra Fluke’s right to bill taxpayers for her birth control, Femen’s Amazonian warriors dive right in to do battle in a real War on Women being openly waged by Muslim misogynists. Topless jihad – it puts a whole new spin on #MyJihad.

The protests in Sweden, Italy, Ukraine, Belgium, and France [here are images from the demonstrations; warning – most contain nudity and/or offensive language] were in solidarity with a gutsy young Tunisian activist named Amina Tyler, who recently shocked Islamic sensibilities by posting naked images of herself online, with the words “I own my body; it’s not the source of anyone’s honor” penned on her bare chest.

The head of Tunisia’s Orwellian-titled Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice responded to this provocation as you might expect from a violent totalitarian, calling for Tyler to be stoned to death lest her obscene actions lead to an epidemic of Muslim women casting off not just their burqas and blouses but their oppression as well.

Nice Sharks Finish First

The Los Angeles Times did a profile recently of gleefully greedy investor Kevin O’Leary of ABC’s popular business pitch show Shark Tank. Sarcastically dubbed “Mr. Wonderful,” he is the sharp-tongued dealmaker that audiences love to hate, the show’s “Wicked Witch of the West,” as one TV producer put it. His brutal honesty and cold put-downs (“You are a nothing-burger”) make O’Leary stand out as the Simon Cowell among the panel of other self-made multimillionaires. Too bad the LA Times didn’t look past the ratings-grabbing arrogance and profile a more exemplary co-star – O’Leary’s polar opposite, Canadian software king and nice-guy-who-finished-first, Robert Herjavec.

Robert is the elegant gentleman Shark, whose “brilliant blue eyes and expressive features seem particularly adept at telegraphing sympathy,” as one interviewer perfectly phrased it. Where Mr. Wonderful might dismiss a wannabe entrepreneur on the show with a curt “You’re dead to me,” Robert often delivers his honest assessment of a pitch – and even his rejection of it – with a compliment and encouragement rather than an insult. “Because of my mom, I learned never to be rude,” he says, exhibiting a politeness and respectfulness that sadly seem quaint in the attitude-filled world of reality TV.

The son of Croatian immigrants who arrived in Canada with just $20 when he was 8 years old, Robert once got emotional on the show – even choking up other sharks as well – when he referred to his now-deceased father’s quiet struggle to make ends meet for his family in the New World. His father hated living under Communist oppression in dictator Tito’s Yugoslavia, was repeatedly jailed for speaking out against it, and just wanted his only son to grow up free.

Iran Declares War on Hollywood

In response to last year’s Oscar-winning film Argo, based on the real-life rescue of a handful of American citizens during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Tehran plans to sue Hollywood filmmakers who participate in the production of such “anti-Iran” propaganda films.

In the movie, in which director Ben Affleck also plays the lead role, Iranian officials are shown being outwitted by an elaborate CIA plan to camouflage the U.S. diplomats fleeing the country as part of a team scouting locations for an outlandish science-fiction film.

Iranian authorities have labeled Argo a propaganda attack against their nation and humanity. The country’s state-run broadcaster Press TV complains that the film is “a far cry from a balanced narration” and is “replete with historical inaccuracies and distortions.” The film was banned from the general public – not that this accomplished anything, since an estimated “several hundred thousand copies” have been sold by DVD bootleggers who say it’s their biggest seller in years. As an additional measure, Iranian officials held a private screening of Argo as part of a conference called “The Hoax of Hollywood” and called it a “violation of international cultural norms,” whatever those are.

Press TV detailed its objections to the film in an online article: “The Iranophobic American movie attempts to describe Iranians as overemotional, irrational, insane, and diabolical while at the same time, the CIA agents are represented as heroically patriotic.” At the risk of speaking for Ben Affleck, I would respond that the movie does not depict all Iranians this way, only the murderous Islamic fundamentalists who took over the country, and who already do a great job living up to the description “irrational and diabolical.”

Nonetheless, Press TV reports that offended Iranian officials have talked to an “internationally-renowned” French lawyer about filing a lawsuit. “I will defend Iran against the films like Argo, which are produced in Hollywood to distort the country’s image,” said attorney Isabelle Coutant-Peyre. In a curious, Hollywood-worthy twist, Coutant-Peyre just happens to be the wife of mega-terrorist Carlos the Jackal, currently imprisoned in France where he converted to Islam.

The Misunderstanding of Lauryn Hill

Grammy-winning singer Lauryn Hill had drifted to the margins of the pop culture radar in recent years until Monday, when she made surprising headlines by being sentenced to three months in prison for failing to pay nearly $1 million in taxes. She then raised some eyebrows even further by audaciously comparing her situation to the slavery of her ancestors.

“I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them,” Hill exclaimed in a forceful statement to the court. “I had an economic system imposed on me.” A little bit of advice to millionaire rock stars: unless you want your credibility rating and degree of public sympathy for you to plunge to zero, don’t compare the outcome of your own choices to the crushing misery of a slave.

Despite her mixed creative output and audience reception in recent years, Hill is one of the most successful women in the history of the music business. Now 37, she hit it big as a teenager in the 1990s with the Fugees before hitting it even bigger with her multiplatinum 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She has a shelf full of Grammys, including one for co-producing Santana’s blockbuster Supernatural album.

In 2000, Hill began to feel the oppressive demands of fame and the music industry, and dropped out of the public eye supposedly to protect herself and her children, now numbering six, from its pressures. “I was told, ‘That’s how it goes, it comes with the territory.’ I came to be perceived as a cash cow and not a person. When people capitalize on a persona, they forget there is a person in there.”

Man’s Search for Offline Meaning

Last week technology writer Paul Miller returned to the internet after an entire year offline, an experiment to see how unplugging would affect his productivity and quality of life. At the outset, he believed not only that the internet was making him unproductive, but that “it lacked meaning. I thought it was ‘corrupting my soul.’” A year later, what did he conclude? “I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more ‘real,’ now. More perfect.” Supposed to, but there was a problem: “I was wrong.”

At 26, Miller had used the internet “constantly,” he says, from the age of 12, and made a living from it since he was 14. As a result, “I didn’t know myself apart from a sense of ubiquitous connection and endless information. I wondered what else there was to life.” With the backing of his employer, he decided, with no small degree of eager anticipation, to unplug, “find the real Paul, far away from all the noise, and become a better me.”

Everything began promisingly on May 1, 2012. He got outside to play Frisbee, take bike rides, meet with people in person. He pumped out essays and wrote half a novel. He lost 15 pounds effortlessly and bought new clothes. His attention span swelled. He interacted better with people. He lived in the moment. He got so in touch with his humanity that he cried during Les Miserables. He had indeed discovered the real Paul.

And then it all came undone. By the end of 2012,

I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.