STUDENT PLAGIARISM AND SOCIAL DECAY: 
THE WHOLE FREAKING ESTABLISHMENT IS TOTALLY CORRUPT

My new girlfriend, a brilliant, talented, totally gorgeous woman, teaches English at a community college in Houston.  Lately, she's made a few posts on facebook about what a drag it is to deal with students who literally copy and paste parts of articles they find on the internet into the papers they turn in to her.  Her most recent post on the topic decries a student doing it again right after she had just been caught doing so on an earlier assignment.  A good discussion ensued, with people expressing sympathy, frustration, and urging her to be resolved in doing her job, you know, fail the fucker.  A few commenters got a bit meta on the subject and mentioned "the self-esteem generation," a favorite whipping boy of the right wing.

I chimed in after some fifty comments had already been posted:

My world history teacher sophomore year in high school would often say "I don't fail you; you fail yourself." That's exactly what's going on with this student of yours, Jennifer. She's failed herself. All you're doing is making the notation. I mean, it's a drag that you have to be involved at all, but this isn't you doing something mean.

Also, regarding the notion of the "self-esteem generation": there may very well be something to that, but I think the much more tangible signs of social decay these days come from the very top. We had George W. Bush's brother LITERALLY stealing the election for him in Florida back in 2000. We had Kenny Boy Lay and Jeff Skilling selling off their Enron stock while a hold was placed on their employees doing the same thing while its value plummeted. Then World Com and others right up to the toxic mortgage scandal that brought down the entire financial sector and threatened another great depression and fucked over hundreds of millions worldwide and we're still not even past that one yet. We have Walmart lying about using subcontractors who burn their employees alive. We have the oil industry funding bogus research intended to debunk actual science about global warming. And on and on. The whole freaking establishment is totally corrupt.

Is it any wonder that kids cheat? That's exactly what their leaders do, exactly what the people we ostensibly respect do. Why not?

Indeed, why not?  I mean, seriously, this stuff is all over the headlines, and the message couldn't be clearer: people at the top get there by breaking all the rules and fucking people over.  "Self-esteem generation," my ass.  The right wing has been pushing this hardball shit for decades, and the philosophy, if you want to call it that, is now triumphant.  It was only a matter of time before this kind of asshole-narcissism filtered down into the rest of society.

I only expect things to get worse.

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