Lefties sucked in again
Mar 5th, 2008 by Mark
Margaret Seltzer aka Margaret B. Jones
This is funny. The lefties in their desperate attempt to push their liberal attitudes as fact have become caught in their own web of lies. Not only have they been sucked in by a book that is a complete fraud, it’s a fraud by a white woman who grew up in “white” Sherman Oaks and who is now a best selling “black gang member” author. *lmao* I love it when the arrogant get hoisted on their own petards.
Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central, where “I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not.”
Classic.
What fools are we
Oprah gets fooled AGAIN by an author. The NYT outed the author yesterday. Even the vaunted NYT was sucked in by Seltzer.
“Love and Consequences” was the second memoir revealed as a hoax in the past week - the first came when author Misha Defonseca acknowledged that her 1997 book “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” was a fake.
How sad that editors and publishers would be so desperate to put a book out that aligns with their beliefs that they don’t even do basic fact checking. Worse they can’t even see through the nonsense that was written.
It’s pretty gripping stuff. Earlier this week, however, the New York Times revealed that Jones is, in fact, Margaret Seltzer, a 33-year-old white woman and creative writing student who grew up in Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, an exclusive private Episcopal school in the Valley.
Who did she tick off?
Seltzer, 33, was exposed by her sister, who read a profile of the author last week in The New York Times and then contacted the paper. The Times confronted Seltzer, who was tearful and contrite in admitting the deception.
Ouch, your sister turns you in? Oh that stings. Surely she knew this would happen?
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.
In her defense it is easy to get in over your head in a situation like this. That’s why you don’t put yourself in a position like this.
I wuz bohn a poh bahlack chahild
Seltzer aka Jone holds “bandanna of fallen friend”
This one passage should have tipped them off. It is so incredible that this one passage, which is blatantly made to order “drama”; was not caught by the publishers readers.
Jones recounted her own activities as a drug courier for the Bloods, how she received her first gun as a 14th birthday present and, most chillingly, how she used her first substantial drug profits to buy a burial plot.
Bullcrap. Anyone with a clue about gang life knows that is a load of nonsense. Oh, it gets even more stupid.
Its author, Margaret B. Jones, was purported to be a young woman of mixed Caucasian and Native American ancestry who grew up in the care of an African American foster mother in South L.A.
Who believed this? That two blatant red flags that anyone with a clue would have checked out before even offering a deal for a book. If they did check it out, why did not they not see through it?
UPDATE: it seems that even the reviewer in the NYT thought something was amiss…
“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”
… and then ignores it because clearly it had the message they wanted to hear.
what’s the dillio
Let’s start with the phrase “south LA”. Why such a general reference. Why not tell us the city or neighborhood? [note: South L.A. is the name used today, it means South Central L.A. The city changed the name attempting to remove the stain of the city's failure. In essence re-branding the area. South Central included many areas that are actually cities outside of the LA city bounderies.]
Second since when did “white” kids start getting placed in “black” homes in gang neighborhoods by foster care? Third, the “bloods” and “crips” are black gangs.
One reason has to do with public taste. In the United States and, increasingly, in parts of Western Europe, the only unchallenged moral authority has become that of victims.
Too true. However it’s liberals who have created this problem.
This should not be read as an expression of sympathy toward the injured; instead, it’s really an extension of the culture of narcissism’s influence into the world of letters.
What he meant is the ‘culture of narcissm’ in the ranks of publishing world, which is notoriously liberal. They created a monster and now want to blame everyone but themselves for it’s creation.
It’s a view that asserts that only those who have experienced pain or torment have a right speak of it, though others may participate vicariously through their eyes. Hence our insatiable desire for tell-all memoirs of every savage and degrading form of abuse — as long as the account comes directly from those who suffered it.
Publishers are only too glad to serve that appetite, but they do so at a time when their own economics make them particularly vulnerable to fraud. No nonfiction publisher can afford serious fact-checking anymore; most do none at all.
That is a crock. Common sense would be a good place to start. White child in black neighborhood joins black gang. Yea, right; very believable.
At the same time, they know that the TV and radio promotion critical to creating bestsellers demands authors “with a story to tell.” How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?
So it’s the evil market that is the problem. Un. Real.
How about some common sense
A cursory look at the story would have made it clear that the story was at best embellished. A few minutes of research would have shown that the book could be a fabrication. It’s called a search engine people.
Why no questioning of the white in a black gang, that is paramount to the story’s drama? Why no questioning of the writing ability of a former gang member? How did she get this ability? Where? Ask some damn questions, people. There are a thousand books on how to do it.
Oops, it appears that the publisher did do it’s homework!
The latest scandal came despite the efforts of Seltzer’s editors, who fact-checked the story. Riverhead said Seltzer’s duplicity included bogus photos, letters and even fake foster siblings, whom she produced to verify her story.
It seems clear that the author was intent on deceiving her audience.
Riverhead Books canceled a planned book tour for Seltzer. The publisher will offer refunds for anyone who bought the book.
Wait, if they knew it was a fraud, then why a book tour?
but it’s great literature
To give you an idea of the arrogance of the elites you can look at the book by “Danny Santiago”, who was the creation of former screen writer Dan James. Dan James was the writer of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”, and was blacklisted for Communist activities.
“Santiago” purports to discuss his life in East LA and it’s gang culture in the book ‘Famous All Over Town’.
It’s interesting too that we in Los Angeles have been here before — though the fallout this time seems likely to provoke far more moralizing and far less soul-searching. In 1983, a previously unknown twentysomething Chicano writer named Danny Santiago published “Famous All Over Town,” a first-person account of growing up in the gang culture of East L.A. The book inspired a popular rock song of the same name and won prestigious literary awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and from PEN.
It was a first person account. Problem is that Dan James who wrote the book was 73, white, educated, and was using his days as Social worker to provide him with material.
Joyce Carol Oates mused that for James, “the cultivation of a pseudonym is not so very different from the cultivation in vivo of the narrative voice that sustains any work of words, making it unique and inimitable.”
In other words, it’s ok to lie as long as the lie is of good intentions. Considering that Dan James “suffered from writers block since being blacklisted”, it’s hard to say that he had good intentions, unless you consider getting published good intentions. Possibly, he did have good intentions. I doubt it.
[Patricia Nelson] Limerick [professor at UC Boulder and prolific writer] wrote that our literary judgments remain hostage to the ideology of authenticity, leaving “white Americans indifferent to, ignorant of, or even bored by the dilemmas faced by nonwhites.
In other words, lying is ok as long as it pushes the correct point of view. This of course is the typical liberal view in Academia and Government. They will say or do anything to advance their point of view, even if it means: lying, cheating, stealing, breaking the law, and/or hurting someone.
Seltzer seems to have learned form Dan James.
In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.
“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to, I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”
Another moralizing liberal. It’s not so bad, the stories were true, sort of true. You must as a guilty white woman masquerade as a mixed race gang banger so we can be heard. Pfft, what crap.
This is the problem with modern liberals, they are devoid of common sense, morals, ethics, and values.
the worst part
They knew it was bull.
Ms. [Sarah] McGrath said that she had numerous conversations with Ms. Seltzer about being truthful. “She seems to be very, very naïve,” Ms. McGrath said. “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.”
McGrath is the person who signed her to a book deal while at Scribner before she moved to Riverhead. She also seems to have two stories.
But Sarah McGrath, Seltzer’s editor at Riverhead, told the New York Times on Monday that the publishing house was stunned by the disclosure.
McGrath even enlisted her father (who is a writer at the NYT on occasion) to help the story along. He claims that Seltzer never deveiated from her psuedonym and kept up the charade over three years. I wonder if he and his daughter have talked lately?
The backlash is just starting. The uppity elites are now reaping what they sow.
“This is particularly distressing. Here you have an upper class white woman pretending like she understands “the streets” …. It’s condescending and offensive to people who live this reality daily.”
~~ Vidya, New York
You can read more here at the comments section.
The NY publishing industry is taking a beating, as it should.
Still others focused on the racial subtext of the story. Margaret B. Jones’ “Love and Consequences,” as many pointed out, is a familiar case of a white writer, abetted by the majority-white New York-based publishing community, appropriating the story of an oppressed minority far from Manhattan.
The “racist” part is just bunk. It’s being liberals and out of touch that is the problem.
“It could happen to any of us, no matter how sophisticated or experienced we are,” he said. “This woman in California seemed particularly engaged in her deception. She apparently had documentation of her own, so unless you’re prepared to do an incredible reference check, things will slip through.”
Others in the publishing industry said that, by now, these kinds of deceptions should be ferreted out sooner.
James Atlas, publisher of Atlas Books, said it was time for a fundamental change in how nonfiction books are vetted for accuracy.
Well, duh.
Other stories on this
She even uses her daughter to sell the story.
Disgusting.
Tags: Love and Consequences, dan james, Misha Defonseca, joyce carol oates, John Gregory Dunne, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Margaret B. Jones, Margaret Seltzer, bloods, crips, gangs, los angeles