We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)
Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.
Rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance …, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.
—Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Chapter 23: The Sociology of Knowledge
Here again is that key insight we saw in The German Ideology: in totally changing a society, people must inevitably radically change their own ideas, and the nature of being human itself. Under communal ownership and democratic control, it would be socially impossible to be someone whose selfhood is predicated on the exploitation of others. A subjectivity that would desire such power would be meaningless, and have no social traction. Marx and Engels repeatedly stress that revolution is the transformation of people and ideas as well as social structures.”
— China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting (analysis of The Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Cruelty, venality, mendacity, sanctimony, ambition, and greed. Also self-delusion. Also ignorance.
Greg Abbott Samuel Alito Steve Bannon William Barr Maria Bartiromo Lauren Boebert Pam Bondi Don Bongino Dan Caine Tucker Carlson Kenneth Chesebro Tom Cotton Ted Cruz Paul Dans Ron DeSantis John Eastman Tulsi Gabbard Newt Gingrich Rudy Giuliani Neil Gorsuch Paul Gosar Lindsey Graham Marjorie Taylor Greene Alina Habba Sean Hannity Josh Hawley Pete Hegseth Paul Ingrasssia Kay Ivey Mike Johnson Jim Jordan Brett Kavanaugh Robert Kennedy Junior Jared Kushner Karoline Leavitt Leonard Leo Brad Little Nancy Mace Mitch McConnell John McEntee Linda McMahon Christopher Miller Katie Miller Stephen Miller Stephen Moore Elon Musk Peter Navarro Kristi Noem Bill O’Reilly Mehmet Oz Kash Patel Mike Pence Vivek Ramaswamy John Ratcliffe Tate Reeves John Roberts Kevin Roberts Marco Rubio Rick Scott Jeff Sessions Roger Severino Roger Stone Enrique Tarrio Clarence Thomas Ginni Thomas Donald Trump Donald Trump Jr. Eric Trump Ivanka Trump Lara Trump Melania Trump Tiffany Trump Tommy Tuberville J.D. Vance Russell Vought Ryan Walters Greg Abbott Samuel Alito Steve Bannon William Barr Maria Bartiromo Lauren Boebert Pam Bondi Don Bongino Dan Caine Tucker Carlson Kenneth Chesebro Tom Cotton Ted Cruz Paul Dans Ron DeSantis John Eastman Tulsi Gabbard Newt Gingrich Rudy Giuliani Neil Gorsuch Paul Gosar Lindsey Graham Marjorie Taylor Greene Alina Habba Sean Hannity Josh Hawley Pete Hegseth Paul Ingrasssia Kay Ivey Mike Johnson Jim Jordan Brett Kavanaugh Robert Kennedy Junior Jared Kushner Karoline Leavitt Brad Little Nancy Mace Mitch McConnell John McEntee Linda McMahon Christopher Miller Katie Miller Stephen Miller Stephen Moore Elon Musk Peter Navarro Kristi Noem Bill O’Reilly Mehmet Oz Kash Patel Mike Pence Vivek Ramaswamy John Ratcliffe Tate Reeves John Roberts Kevin Roberts Marco Rubio Rick Scott Jeff Sessions Roger Severino Roger Stone Enrique Tarrio Clarence Thomas Ginni Thomas Donald Trump Donald Trump Jr. Eric Trump Ivanka Trump Lara Trump Melania Trump Tiffany Trump Tommy Tuberville J.D. Vance Russell Vought Ryan Walters
I’ve never been in any doubt about the depth of Donald Trump’s depravity, but I’m familiar enough with German history to understand why half the country voted for him, and why our titans of industry rushed to provide him with the means to fulfill his vile ambitions. I am surprised, though, at some of the people I’m belatedly finding in the miles-long line of fools waiting to kiss his ass.
It’s not just the hypocritical gasbags who’ve been lecturing us for decades about ethics, morality, courage, manliness, and the sanctity of free enterprise. Everyone knows that commoditized list of virtues by heart, and all of us know at least one person who’s made a career out of preaching from it. It’s not as shocking to me as it should be to see them now suddenly burning their own books, scrubbing their own mottoes off the walls, and looking down at their shoes when I ask them why.
No, the people who’ve surprised me are those I’d come to know as decent, compassionate, human beings, who now refuse to defend the defenseless, who turn away now from those in the greatest need with a shrug, with platitudes, with lectures about choosing one’s fights, with supposedly sage advice that one must be patient, that this too shall pass. This won’t do, this won’t do at all. If we want to keep calling the United States the Land Of the Free and the Home Of the Brave without being consumed by shame, this temporizing, compromising, agreeing that black is white, that President Zelenskyy should wear a suit when invited to lick the tyrant’s boots—all this nonsense will have to go. We need to do better. A whole lot better.
What we might get if we were to draw comparisons the way the Washington Post or New York Times does. Too bad their digital editions can’t be used to wrap fish in, or line the bottoms of bird cages.
Judging by the chaos engendered by our Orange Furor’s decree cutting off all aid to everybody everywhere, it’s a good thing our cut-rate Nazis weren’t trying to invade France. And will somebody please tell Stephen Miller that even if he shaves his head, squints malevolently, and shouts a lot, people will still know he’s a Jew, and will still find a Jewish Goebbels unseemly.
Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.
Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.
In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.
Part Two has been in progress for a painfully long time, but the future is proving to be an even more elusive beast than I thought when I first began this somewhat speculative apologia.
In its issue of April 4, 1994, the New Yorker published an article by Nicholson Baker, Discards, which called into serious question what he was convinced was an unwise rush by libraries to replace traditional card catalogs with a computer-based approach to information access and retrieval. Baker’s article was widely read in academic library circles, not only because it was critical of the work librarians were doing, but also because it had appeared in the New Yorker. Specialists working in fields as obscure as technical librarianship aren’t normally accustomed to reading such critical assessments of their work from outside the profession, especially when those assessments turn out to be as accurate in their details, and as forthright in their judgments as Discards was about our bibliographical stewardship.
When I first took up Baker’s article that April, I admit I found myself wishing that it hadn’t been quite so accurate, or quite so forthright, and for good reason. At the time, I was employed in the Cataloging Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara Library, where for the preceding ten years I’d been supervising the work of something called the Catalog Maintenance and Retrospective Conversion Section.
Catalog maintenance, the section’s traditional responsibility, meant managing the card catalog—adding new cards to the drawers as new books arrived and were cataloged, correcting errors in the existing cards, and updating them to reflect revised entries whenever the Library of Congress made changes to its subject thesaurus, or altered its preferred form of an author’s or editor’s name.
The retrospective conversion assignment had been added in the mid-1980s, at the point when all current cataloging was finally being done on our new computer system. To complete the transition from a card-based catalog to a computer-based one, we were tasked with entering the older, manually-produced contents of the card catalog into our digital cataloging database. Once that nearly decade-long task was complete, we discarded both the cards—some 10 million of them—and the cabinets which had housed them, and replaced them with public access computer terminals. Access to the new digital catalog could be provided first on dedicated terminals within any library in the University of California system, and then, after a surprisingly short interval, to anyone anywhere in the world who had UC library privileges, an Internet connection, and a Web browser.
That was what retrospective conversion meant and what it did, and that was precisely the activity, carried out by my section from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, and repeated in libraries all over the world, which had given rise to Baker’s article. He thought that what we were doing was not only short-sighted, but barbarous—an offense against civilization itself—and was saying so in no uncertain terms.
Despite his obviously careful research, his passionate indictment of our project—in the pages of the New Yorker, no less—struck me at the time as being perverse, perverse in the sense that he seemed much more determined to condemn us for what he believed we were destroying than to evaluate what we believed we were creating, or our success in creating it. In Bakers’s view, it seemed, far from being the responsible stewards of the world’s intellectual patrimony we’d imagined ourselves to be, we were in fact vandals, the moral equivalent of those universally despised vandals who’d once set fire to the Library of Alexandria. Was this a fair judgment? I certainly didn’t think so, but just as I was deciding that the situation was unprecedented enough, and the outcome uncertain enough, not to take his judgment personally, on the very last page of Discards, I encountered this:
(U.C.S.B., incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalogue late last summer.)
Incidentally. Certainly not a word that I’d have chosen. UCSB was my library, throwing out its catalog was my job, and I could have told him, had he asked me, that there was nothing incidental about it. Arguments about intent, though, were apparently beside the point. What concerned Baker was not intent, but consequences, consequences which he was far more certain about than we were. I put down my copy of the New Yorker and recalled the end of Dr. Frankenstein’s career. Was I really a vandal? Would there be a mob of concerned citizens with pitchforks and torches waiting for me in the library parking lot after work?
Given that Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist in 1994, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. An indictment and trial of supposedly philistine librarians in the court of a public opinion generally indifferent to abstract policy squabbles was highly unlikely. Yet if Baker’s attempt at framing a public policy indictment of our work seemed perverse to me, his instinct that some sort of public policy questioning should be taking place was valid enough to be taken seriously. Indifferent or not, the public was clearly going to be affected by the technologies of the coming digital age, not just affected, but shaped by them. The disappearance of card catalogs from their libraries was, if anything, merely the thin edge of the coming wedge.
Thirty years later, deep into the age of Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia, of LLM, ChatGPT, Simon and Bard, it’s hard to recall precisely what form my testimony might have taken in the event that Baker and the New Yorker had actually succeeded in putting us all on trial. All I can remember now with any precision is my certainty that printed books were already becoming an anachronism, that libraries were already in the process of becoming museums of the printed word, and that librarians would have little future except as their curators. All of this, I was convinced, would happen sooner than even Nicholson Baker feared, and would turn out in the end to be even more radically disruptive than many of my colleagues, committed as they imagined themselves to be to our digital future, could bring themselves to admit.
I haven’t spent more than an hour or so in the UCSB library—nor any other library—since I retired in late 2003, nor have I kept up with library journals, or the professional literature in general. As a consequence, I have only the vaguest of notions what, if anything, has changed in the intervening twenty years in the mission of libraries and librarians as viewed by librarians themselves. I can’t imagine that they still think of themselves as principal actors in the digital transformation of information storage and access, but I do hope that they’ve remained principled stewards of the triumphs of the past, and skeptical about some of the more outrageous claims made those who are now in charge of the digital transformations of the 21st century. In any event, what happens now in libraries is no longer mine to judge. If there’s a problem, I’m willing to concede that I had a part in creating it. If there’s to be a solution, I’m well aware that I won’t have any part in devising it.
I’ve given up sniping at Republicans. The misanthropic lunacy which has finally overwhelmed their politics has absolved me of any further need either to reason with them or laugh at them, Frankly, I have better things to do than wrestle with the category errors that any engagement with them and their idiocies would invariably entail. In any event, we’ll all find out together in November whether they’ve finally achieved their long sought after political orgasm, or instead are forced to subject us all to yet another decade of disgusting foreplay.
