this letterish thing appears somewhere in this week’s print edition of the Voice, accompanied by a likely much more articulate offering from Kiefer Roberts. You should go read his if you haven’t.
Who’s in fact surprised by the Revelation of St. John, ‘09? Not I.
This is not to say I’d ever taken him for a plagiarist, nor should it suggest I was anything but crestfallen the day I heard the news. Surprise, though, is unfair here. On what basis exactly did you expect otherwise?
Peter was an icon of sublime artifice. I looked up to him for his skill at crafting an image so self-consistent it seemed unreal. A run-in with Peter wasn’t just a conversation, it was an event that left you feeling graced by celebrity. He was an asset to our promotions precisely because his was the symmetrical face onto which you could project whichever lofty values you cherished. This is why his betrayal is so hard to swallow; though ultimately he asserted nothing, his deft presentation made us want to believe in everything. Beneath that presentation hid a man deeply isolated by his own remote fame and terrified by the weight of his vaunted lineage. He knew everyone and yet in the end no one knew him.
So surely let him be judged by Barbara Kingsolver and Corey Testa and Brian Wilson. But what you might haughtily call his Substance, what you might glibly term his Integrity–these things didn’t matter one bit to the Community that wanted desperately to get close to him. What of Substance and Integrity did we realize about Peter St. John? He was smart, articulate, and hospitable, and that’s all 99% of his peers were let to believe. Nobody wanted to hear about his anxieties and we sure didn’t give a damn about his ethics. Unless you were a lover scorned, it’s likely the Deepest interaction you ever had with Peter was that one time he told you your hair looked fabulous. Did you care then that he might have been lying? Doubtful; you were too busy blushing like the rest of us.
So what stuns you? We got sold. Image triumphed over Substance. Wool got pulled over the ungoogling eyes of the grand commencement committee and now there’re ever-more eggs hurling facebound toward our Administration. It’s sad and unfortunate, sure. But CollRel et al. aren’t the only one implicit in Peter’s plagiarism. We all are, for clutching tight to something so heartrendingly empty.
We loved Peter because he let us participate in the glamorous fantasy we took to be his life. Last week the veneer cracked and he was unmasked a phony. How dare he? He’d been daring to since the day he arrived on campus, and hadn’t stopped until his last steps off the podium. Alas but this is what it took to realize we were in love with a lie. I promise you, it won’t be the last lie we’re in love with.