09 July 2020
You Couldn’t Make It Up
But some do.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Songshan airport in Taipei has offered a novel holiday experience in these frustrating days of grounded flights and restricted travel. Sixty lucky competition winners in Taiwan enjoyed a unique mini-vacation last week: they arrived at the airport, passed through check-in, security, passport control etc, did some duty-free shopping and then boarded the waiting plane. They sat in the stationary plane – an Airbus 330 – for fifteen minutes. Then they disembarked, passed back through passport control, security, baggage reclaim etc, grabbed something to eat at one of the airport’s restaurants, and then went home.
It may seem bizarre to offer airport hell as an attraction without the sunshine/beach/hotel heaven which just about makes it worthwhile. But seven thousand eager people entered the competition, grateful for this chance to grab those few crumbs which remained on the ‘summer 2020 holiday abroad’ table otherwise cleared by the omnivorous coronavirus. And there was another story in the news this week which no doubt made those sixty competition winners glad that their plane didn’t take off. In fact, it probably made them leap out of their seats and jump off the plane as quickly as they could, just in case.
It’s a shocking story of pretend airline pilots, and it’s more than a match for Songshan’s pretend airport experience. Last Wednesday, Pakistan’s aviation minister announced that 262 airline pilots out of the 860 on the civil aviation register had paid someone else to take their pilots’ tests and exams for them. Pakistan International Airlines then grounded more than a third of its pilots – 150 out of 434 – for having “either bogus or suspicious licences”. The airline also said that the problem of unqualified, untrained and inexperienced pilots flying on fake licences is “spread across the entire Pakistan airline industry”. A spokesman even claimed that some foreign carriers have unwittingly employed fake pilots from Pakistan. The airline has been plagued by disasters in recent years; the enquiry which uncovered this scandal was launched in 2018 following a crash, and its findings came to light this week in the wake of the publication of the investigators’ report into last May’s disaster which killed 98 people when a plane crashed on landing at Karachi airport.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, a high-flier has crashed back down to earth with the revelation that he too had become airborne thanks to bogus qualifications. The new education minister, Carlos Decotelli, had been in the job for only five days when the country’s media reported fictions in his CV. The PhD from Wuppertal University, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany? He studied there for only three months, apparently (a PhD usually takes at least two years). “Carlos Decotelli did not obtain a degree at our university” Wuppertal University told the newspaper O Globo. The doctorate from the National University of Rosario in Argentina? Never completed, according to reports in the media. “Carlos Alberto Decotelli did not obtain his doctorate title” announced the university. The master’s degree in administration and economics from Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation business school? Partially plagiarised, according to investigative journalists. And the school denied that he’d taught there. Mr Decotelli resigned last week just before his formal swearing-in ceremony was to take place.
And in the USA, similar allegations of false pretences were made against Donald Trump himself and his place at business school. An appeal court in New York ruled against efforts to block the publication of a new book about him – Too Much and Never Enough by his niece, Mary Trump. The New York Times has seen a copy of it and has reported that Ms Trump claims that her uncle, when he was a high school student, paid a stand-in to take the SAT university entrance examinations for him, and that it was the stand-in’s high grades which got the future president into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.
I spent a fair amount of time over the last few months exploring locked-down central London. The strange, deserted, frozen ghost town offered all kinds of weird science fiction windows through time and space onto hitherto hidden or unexpected corners of its geography or history, some puzzling, some revelatory. For instance, I was surprised to discover that the address where the poet Thomas Chatterton committed suicide at the age of seventeen in 1770 was more or less on my doorstep. Chatterton is the archetypical doomed Romantic poet, his tragic life and death a literary legend, so it was something of a shock to be reminded that he was a real person who lived in the real world after all. And this real world – a modern, undistinguished, antiseptic row of office blocks in a Holborn as eerily deserted on that May afternoon as a Giorgio di Chirico townscape – was impossible to connect with the imagined, mythical, teeming world of eighteenth-century bohemian London, a glamorously unwholesome, crowded and noisy labyrinth of garrets, gin-shops, alleyways and low taverns whose ghost can still be found in odd corners of Covent Garden and Soho and the City.
Thomas Chatterton comes into this comment because he too was guilty of false pretences, and he paid the ultimate price for them. But his guilt was the opposite to that of those fraudulent Pakistani pilots and Brazil’s education minister and (allegedly) the young man who later became the president of the United States of America. Chatterton didn’t pass someone else’s work off as his own; he passed his own work off as someone else’s. While still a teenager, he claimed to have discovered an antique manuscript of poems by a hitherto unknown fifteenth century priest called Thomas Rowley. The poems caused a sensation, impressing contemporary literary lions such as Horace Walpole, so Chatterton left the Bristol of his birth to search for fame and fortune in London. There, however, his own literary efforts failed, and he was well and truly ruined when it emerged that the Rowley poems were forgeries, complete fabrications. He’d written them himself. He was three months short of his eighteenth birthday when he poisoned himself with arsenic, just four months after his arrival in the city.
The irony is that the Rowley poems had literary merit, which was recognised by the Romantic poets of the following century. Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton immortalised him as the very model of the tragic, young, doomed, Romantic poet. As soon as Tate Britain re-opens I’ll go and have a look at it and ponder some more on the difference between this eighteenth century cheat and those twenty-first century cheats, and on the mystery of why he was unrewarded while so many of those later ones prospered.
