I Shot a Man in Reno…
Posted by William Rabkin on January 7, 2009
…just to see him die.
Oh, wait, no I didn’t. I guess I just hummed that song so often that somewhere along the way I internalized it as my own experience.
That sounds believable, doesn’t it?
Almost as believable as it does when best-selling religious book author Donald Walsch uses it an an excuse for publishing someone else’s mawkish essay as his own.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.
During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.
Mr. Walsch’s story was nearly identical to an essay by a writer named Candy Chand, which was originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since. Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience.
I just hope before he writes that essay about what it’s like to have a dead guy in your bed, he stops to think that he might not actually have experienced it himself…
Richard said
Hilarious… I think I internalized A Christmas Carol… it’s a dickens of a story that I just made up one year for worldwide distribution…
Eric Garcia said
The LAST thing I want to do is defend Neale Walsch — and I believe, in my heart of hearts, that he’s a plagarizing, moralizing, self-righteous asshole.
That said:
For a long-gestating project, I’ve read a fair amount of research about both created memories and assumed memories, and their prevalence in the general population is pretty astonishing. Bunches of studies have shown that we, as a species, often get our memories clouded and augmented with the shared memories of others; if we hear a story enough, as time passes it becomes *our* story, and the mind tricks itself into believing wholeheartedly that it happened just as “we” remember it.
There was a great segment in the Showtime version of This American Life that explored this notion via a cute little cartoon segment with animation by the great Chris Ware. Definitely worth watching, and extremely amusing:
Oh, and hooray for Blogging Bill. Congrats on the PSYCH publication, too!
caericarclight said
I don’t know anything about Walsch or the situation beyond what’s here, but Eric Garcia is totally correct. Human memory is frighteningly unreliable and easy to manipulate, even accidentally.
Oh…and while I’m here – still totally love “She Wolf of London.”
Burl Barer said
George Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun” in Eric Clapton’s garden. When he happily played the new tune on his guitar for Eric, Clapton looked at him incredulously and said, “George, you didn’t write that. You’re playing the tune of The Byrd’s hit,The Bells of Rhymney.”
“Oh,” said Harrison, “no wonder I liked it.”