It may be that I’ve had very little sleep (true), but it seems to me that we can’t honestly be surprised when someone plagiarizes.

We live in a culture of unoriginality. Everything is copied from something else. A book does well, and there’s a dozen just like it on a table at the book store (Girl meets boy. Girl loses boy. Girl gets boy back. Sigh). I’m thinking of chick lit, but this trend certainly isn’t limited to fiction. Take low-carb dieting? How many books are there on that? Oh, I see. Only 499 in print.

What was the first reality TV show? Real World. It did all right, but it wasn’t until an impending writers strike that TV executives jumped on the Reality Show Bandwagon. Hey, TV Shows without writers! Let’s all do it! Save on salaries! Get rid of those writers! Never mind that they are all copies of one another. Change the setting, change the characters, except really nothing changes. Let’s summarize the plot of all reality-TV: people are unkind to one another in all sorts of ways.

But is there a difference between plagiarism and copying an idea? Absolutely. Do people do both? Absolutely.

But when our culture only values books that seem similar to others, TV shows that are replicas of one another, and movies where we just swap the movie stars in roles of seduction, espionage, and money laundering again and again, how can we really be surprised?

We don’t value originality in life. We don’t value creativity in art. We don’t value risk-taking unless it’s filmed on TV.

That results in mass-consumed virtually identical crap. And sometimes “virtually identical” is actually identical.