I’ll guess Donald and Melania Trump are a lot like I was when I was 13.
At the time I had to take various classes in school that were about subjects that didn’t matter to me, subjects like “people” or “places” or “who did what when?” It’s not that I wasn’t at all interested in people, places, and who did what, I just wasn’t usually interested in the particular ones they brought up.
I remember one homework assignment to write some number of words about Fiji. I was actually mildly interested in Fiji at the time, so I didn’t apply my usual technique of doing homework, which was not do it, take a zero for that assignment, and hope I pass the course by sheer improvisation on the final exam. Instead, I decided to do the assignment. I decided to do it constantly for a whole week, up until a half hour before it was due.
Then I stopped at the school library and opened up an encyclopedia to the entry on Fiji. Contrary to what the teacher later claimed, I did NOT simply write out the entire entry and hand it in. I wrote the entry out and stuck in extra commentary to make the presentation mine. Little personalizing phrases like, “it is interesting to note that” and “many people are unaware that” and things of that nature.
“Fiji has one of the most developed economies in the Pacific due to an abundance of forest, mineral, and fish resources.” “Or so it has been said with authority,” I added.
What I’m thinking is, then, that Melania would have ordinarily let a speech-writer write her speech and just read it, essentially not doing her homework. In the way rich people can (pay someone else to do it). But this time she was interested in the subject (getting a shot at being First Lady), sort of the way I was interested in Fiji, so she decided to actually do her homework herself, and, in doing so, plagiarized Michelle Obama.
This is not scandalous. This is nowhere approaching scandalous. It’s just plain good fun. We can entertain ourselves for hours trying to explain to America how Melania did not plagiarize Michelle.
My first thought was, Michelle is an evil sorceress, obviously, and by means of Kenyan Voodoo magic, and the assistance of Satan, she wrote her 2010 convention speech by reading the future and cribbing off of Melania’s speech.
Another thought was Melania wanted to surprise Donald by buying the speech herself instead of him buying it, so she went on Craigslist and looked up First-Lady-to-be convention speeches for sale.
Or maybe Donald’s can-do attitude has rubbed off on Melania. You hear him say enough times such things as “I know all the best words” — how would you reconcile that with the fact that he doesn’t? You could think, well if he knows words so well, I must be regular genius at them.
Then she may have used the same technique I used to write My First Sonnet, which longtime readers may recall was subtitled “Opus 10, We’re Into Two Digits,” and was written by looking up Shakespeare’s sonnet #1, “which, being his first, was not one of his best.” I dumped out all the words I didn’t want to say and replaced them with words I did.
In that particular example I decided the words I wanted would concern sitting on sidewalks. Shakespeare’s words were all about love and stuff, so I changed most of them. One of Shakespeare’s lines was “Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel.” I left that in because I couldn’t figure out what it meant.
Perhaps Melania took Michelle’s speech and changed various words but left intact the parts she couldn’t understand.
All this is just preparatory to my confession that I’m still harnessing the stupidity I had as a 13 year old. Everything I know about the 2016 Republican National Convention I learned from late amendments to the Wikipedia article so titled.
I had a column all ready to go about Trump’s speech but the cat ate it. Also, I accidentally wrote it on exploding paper. And anyway, I never listened to Trump’s speech — the TV had a fever.