To the library, and to literacy

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi we'll head to the library, to (re-)acquaint ourselves with its resources and ready ourselves for a bit of research in advance of midterm report presentations coming soon. 

Did any of you grow up, as our girls did, with Arthur Aardvark?

Librarians these days, having to deal with meddlesome parents and politicians who want to dictate what books can be on the shelves and what information can be allowed to flow freely in what we used to joke was still a free country, are on the front lines of the culture wars. We need to show them some solidarity and respect.

America's libraries are under attack. It's no longer enough that far-right interest groups and politicians are coming for our collections; they've turned their ire towards our staff too. In recent months, there has been an alarming trend of community members and officials calling for the dismissal of librarians over books they've purchased for their patrons — usually titles focusing on race, gender and sexuality. Groups like Moms for Liberty are training their members on how to target us on our personal social media pages. Library workers are being vilified in the same way as teachers — a troubling phenomenon that's contributing to the nationwide educator shortage... 

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them." In other words, if we lose our librarians, we lose a core element of our democracy. It's time to stand up for our librarians and their institutions before it's too late. 

Just under that Salon article:

Read more

about the right's assault on books and literacy

• "I would burn them": Republican lawmaker suggests taking Tennessee's book ban to the next level

Tennessee lawmakers are a meme, aren't they? An embarrassing one, like "Florida man" if you happen to live in the Sunshine State (or contemplate doing so in your Golden Years)?

I thought I was joking, then I looked it up. First hit is an Esquire magazine piece from 2020: 

• Seriously, Tennessee. Stop Electing These People.

Ha ha. Hard to be as amused as I'd like to be about that. State legislatures are torching democracy, and not just in the south. 

Thankfully, literacy still has able defenders like Wendell Berry. 

In Environmental Ethics today, we read in his "In Defense of Literacy" from 1970 (it could have been written yesterday) that

Ignorance of books and the lack of a critical consciousness of language were safe enough in primitive societies with coherent oral traditions. In our society, which exists in an atmosphere of prepared, public language — language that is either written or being read — illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger. Think how constantly the average American is surrounded by premeditated language, in newspapers and magazines, on signs and billboards, on TV and radio. He is forever being asked to buy or believe somebody else's line of goods. The line of goods is being sold, moreover, by men who are trained to make him buy it or believe it, whether or not be needs it or understands it or knows its value or wants it. This sort of selling is an honored profession among us. Parents who grow hysterical at the thought that their son might not cut his hair are glad to have him taught, and later employed, to lie about the quality of an automobile or the ability of a candidate.

That last line about hair is a bit dated, but the point it makes is fresh and relevant as ever. More than ever. Premeditated lying, bullshitting, and confabulating is more ubiquitous and appalling in American public discourse than any honest historian can recall. Language has been perverted, weaponized, to peddle the most preposterous fakery imaginable. Only those who read widely and critically have any chance of sorting through it all with a chance of discerning reality. It's not enough to possess the skills of literacy, one must habituate them in practice. As Mr. Twain said, those who do not read possess no advantage over those who cannot. Especially not now.

Wendell continues,

What is our defense against this sort of language — this language-as-weapon? There is only one. We must know a better language. We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature. The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best. By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

He concludes that literacy, "the mastery of language and the knowledge of books," is our most practical defense against ignorance, hucksterism, and hopelessness. "Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow." 

So we're going to the right place, classes. Thanks, Ben Franklin.