The Award for Outstanding Achievement in Navel Gazing Someone Else's Navel

Each day seems to bring with it another report of theft, a new dastardly deed where the culprit is unmasked, sometimes given a public spanking, and dispatched into the annals of thievery. I feel as though I'm living through a season of plagiarism unlike one we've ever seen before.

Are we getting better at catching these parrots, or are they engaged in a breeding frenzy? I suspect it's a little of both, though why anyone would risk such a moronic feat in the age of Google, plagiarism detection services, blogs, and the unfettered graduation of lawyers each spring is beyond me.

It's so rampant that we have turned the corner and entered the age of meta plagiarism. People are plagiarizing in stories about plagiarism. Some, like New York magazine's David Edelstein, do it on purpose. After watching Oprah bat around James Frey like a lioness with a lippy duck, and particularly after witnessing Kaavya Viswanathan play pouty teen to Katie Couric's disappointed high school guidance counselor, he decided to write an article about plagiarism that was "99 percent" plagiarized.

There was also a recent plagiarism contest to see how many words one could steal in a 750-word piece of writing. The winning writer snagged 79 passages in her winning essay. Who knew plagiarism could be such hard work? And isn't this completely contrary to idea of the act itself? Gosh, some people will try and elevate anything to an art form. Fabrication takes real talent, if you ask me. Or any novelist.

Then, fittingly, Eat The Press today discovered that an article in the Boston Herald about an article in Vanity Fair that suggests the Da Vinci Code was plagiarized from another book was in fact itself plagiarized from an article in Editor & Publisher about the Vanity Fair article. (Excuse me while I go pop a Gravol.) I think the Herald has proven worthy of receiving the first ever award for Outstanding Achievement in Navel Gazing Someone Else's Navel, offered in recognition for managing to steal reporting while reporting on reporting about writing.

It would all be so amusing if it weren't based on such a reprehensible act. Worse, it's an act that seems to be becoming more prevalent in newspapers, books and magazines, and in the halls of academe. (My mother works at a K-12 school in Halifax, Nova Scotia and they use a plagiarism detection service, thus ensuring that any 5 year-old submitting a yarn about monsters in their closet is sure to feel the wrath of Mercer Mayer's attorney.)

Perhaps I feel overwhelmed because I spend too much time following these things. But rather than tracking hurricanes this time of year I find myself boarding up the windows in expectation of the next onslaught of plagiarism. Or plagiarism about plagiarism.