Archives for February 2007

I’m out for most of this week, but something that did catch my eye was an
article the Matt Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone (located by way of Alternet.org)
on the subject of the White House’s 2008 budget proposal.  His main point is
maybe it serves us right if we’re footing to bill for egregious corruption and
more and insider gain at public expense:

Even if you’re a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of
budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole century
are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while
cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant subsidies
of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies and
defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly
benefit from those subsidies. Thus you’re not cutting spending — you’re just
cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to the Washington
Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did one of the better analyses
of the budget, spending will be 1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than
in was in 2000, while revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is
something different from traditional conservatism and something different from
big-government liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the
state into a huge, ever expanding instrument for converting private savings
into corporate profit.

That’s not only bad government, it’s bad capitalism. It makes legalized
bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and
competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it’s just plain fucking
offensive to ordinary people. It’s one thing to complain about paying taxes
when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling
single mom in eastern Kentucky.
But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight
year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour … I sure don’t remember
reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.

In a way, he has a good point. We The People elected these cretins, one way or another (yes, I know, there are plenty of people who insist they didn’t vote for these guys and they didn’t actually win.  Fine. While they’re technically correct, they also did not take to the streets with shotguns and torches when the Surpreme Court made its decision. If the system has been gamed , it is because lots of otherwise intelligent people have allowed it to be gamed.)

At any rate, read the article in its entirety here. And think about just
how much public funding goes into keeping hundreds of libraries in this country
open. Then imagine how many of them would stay open without it. 

As Tony Robbins might say: “Hmmm. Something to think about.”

Way back when I was returning to college after a year’s hiatus, I took an ancient history course. The teacher’s name and most of the historical details I learned have been forgotten or misplaced in that murky swamp I call a memory.  But our professor said one thing that stuck with me through the years.  "The Middle East," he said, "is  real estate.  Everybody makes the same argument, that my ancestors were there. And it’s true, their ancestors were there.  But the problem is that everybody’s ancestors were there at one time or another.  The history of this part of the world is the history of real estate trading hands, that’s all there is to it."

This short flash animation illustrates the concept better than I could. Enjoy!

If you’ve read this blog for longer than 10 minutes then you know that I’ll repost news of anything Bill Moyers does or says.  And this post is no different: on February 7, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation presented Bill and Judith Moyers the first Frank E. Taplin, Jr. Public Intellectual Award for "extraordinary contributions to public cultural, civic and intellectual life."  My favorite tidbits of the remarks are as follows:

Critics said these programs taught no one how to bake bread
or build bridges. And they were right. Despite public television—not to mention
symphony orchestras, municipal libraries, art museums, and public
theaters—crime was still rampant, the divorce rate was soaring, corruption
flourished, legislatures remained stubbornly profligate, corporations cooked
their books, liberals were loose in the world doing the work of the devil, and
you still couldn’t get a good meal on the Metro to

Washington

.
Why persist, some members of Congress wanted to know, when there are so many
more urgent needs to be met and so many practical problems to be solved? I did
not have a tried-and-true answer for members of the committee. I could not hand
them a ledger showing that ideas have consequences.  I chose instead to
tell them what they could have learned if they had been listening to the people
who appeared in our broadcasts.

They would have heard Vartan Gregorian, then head of the New
York Public Library, talk about how “in a big library, suddenly you feel humble.
The whole of humanity is in front of you. It gives you a sense of cosmic
relation, but at the same time a sense of isolation. You feel both pride and
insignificance. Here it is, the human endeavor, human aspiration, human agony,
human ecstasy, human bravura, human failures—all before you. And you look
around and say, ‘Oh, my God! I am not going to be able to know it all.’”

The whole thing is well worth the read, but as you know, I’d link to Moyers’ remarks about the menu at the local steakhouse.

This enormously spiffy article by Will Sherman has been making the rounds across Libraryland and I figured I’d sock it away for future reference.  He asks "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?" and then answers it with a big fat "No!" All 33 points why we’re here to stay are highly recommended if you’re one of the few souls who have not read them yet.

One of his main points–that the Internet is not a giant library database–comes to mind as we notes the passing of the world’s oldest newspaper into electronic oblivion, aka, digital press.  Granted, being a librarian who specializes in electronic resources, it might sound like I’m being overly dramatic when I phrase the on-line world as "electronic oblivion," but that’s how it feels sometimes.  The Internet is the world’s most amazing resource, just behind penicillin and chocolate, but it has problems.  Things disappear.  Content and metadata formats are misconstrued by various software platforms.  Packets don’t always switch on cue and some just die en route to their destinations.  Permanent storage ain’t always all that permanent.  And there is something inimitable about the tactile sensuality of holding a printed newspaper or book  in one’s hands.  I would never stand in the way of progress (whatever that means) but I think the loss to the world is real.