Br'er Wardo Meets the Tar-Baby!

Br'er Rabbit and Tar-Baby

Wikipedia explains:

"Tar-Baby was a doll made of tar and turpentine, used to entrap Br'er Rabbit in the second of the Uncle Remus stories. The more that Br'er Rabbit fought the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he became. In contemporary usage a tar baby refers to any "sticky situation" that is only aggravated by efforts to solve it...The [Tar-Baby] story was originally published in Harper's Weekly by Robert Roosevelt; years later Joel Chandler Harris wrote of the tar baby in his Uncle Remus stories. A similar tale from African folklore in Ghana has the trickster Anansi in the role of Br'er Rabbit."

The brilliant Professor Thomas F. Brown has published a second article about Ward Churchill's academic misconduct in the upcoming issue of Plagiary (Volume 2--Number 7). Dr. Brown's new article is called "Ward Churchill's Twelve Excuses for Plagiarism."

The article is well-argued, logical, and hilarious; it makes the obvious point that Churchill's twelve excuses would not be accepted by teachers and professors if young students tried to use them:

"But Professor, when I plagiarized Janie's term paper, I did mention her in the footnotes!"

According to Dr. Brown's new article, the overweening Wardo actually informed investigative reporters that plagiarism was a firing offense and challenged anyone to find problems with his work. And they did.

Churchill's purile efforts to extricate himself from his difficulties just made matters worse for him. It's like watching Br'er Rabbit fighting with Tar-Baby. Br'er Ward was no match for the really smart journalists and professors who took him on.

Evidently Churchill never learned that once people start lying that sooner or later they will trip over their own lies and damn themselves out of their own mouths.

I have written about Dr. Brown's Ward-Busters on a number of posts.

Dr. Brown wrote about Ward Churchill's fabrications in a 2006 issue of Plagiary. That article is called "Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill's Genocide Rhetoric."