Boomer with Attitude
Ron called up and started chatting about some talk show listeners he'd heard who think this county's library system is largely a waste of money. One genius, said Ron, called in with this bit of wisdom: "Why can't people pay a couple of bucks whenever they want to check out a book, or just borrow them from friends?" As if just any book would do at any time for any purpose -- and never mind the overarching fact that centrally located collections of knowledge, made available to the general public, are a cornerstone of civilization. Another insightful listener suggested, "These days, you can find anything you wanna read online, so why are we paying so much for all those buildings?" Laugh or cry; your choice.
Last week, the daily paper ran letters from readers who opposed diverting funds to save the library system. One reader questioned the need to keep library branches open in as many areas of the county as possible, and another delivered an odd threat of a Loonytarian lawsuit against Mayor Foxx for crossing over the city/county line to offer help.
I suspect that critics who talk about libraries this way, or who refer to libraries as mere places to "check out a book," haven't been inside a library in quite awhile. Head to one of Charlotte's library branches today, and you'll find them abuzz with activity -- computer keyboards clicking away, kids taking part in special reading programs, library employees teaching senior citizens how to navigate the Internet, folks who've lost their jobs using the library's resources to build new resumes and bone up on interviewing skills, patrons asking for hard-to-find research material from other libraries around the world, and I could go on and on.
In normal times, you could dismiss the irate radio listeners and letter writers as isolated half-wits, but unfortunately, they're not alone.
As others have pointed out, America is going through a cycle that rolls around now and then in our history, generously called "anti-intellectualism." It usually shows up during times of swift change, and takes the form of a distrust of experts, educators, and what the late Alabama governor George Wallace called "pointy-headed innallecshuls." (Don't laugh, he won five states in the 1968 presidential race that way.) Usually, the distrust takes the form of rhetoric about "elites" who supposedly want to tell the complainers what to do; think of the weird accusations during the health care saga that Obama was going to "pull the plug on Granny." I'll never forget a TV news item in which a middle-aged woman was calmly arguing with a young, male health reform foe, explaining why his "death panel" charge was simply untrue. The man jumped back as if she had hit him, yelled, "Oh, and I should believe you, I guess, because you're soooo smaaart," and laughed at the woman. That's the attitude I'm talking about. It's called being a deliberate dumbass, and it's currently in epidemic mode in the land.
The economy stinks, people are worried, and many feel as if the earth is moving under them. Those things -- along with the fragmentation of the media that allows viewers to avoid any opinions or facts they find uncomfortable -- lead many folks to embrace a locked-in fear that supports their loathing of anything unfamiliar, and which often morphs into a belief that the hated elites are conspiring to destroy everything those folks hold dear. The mistrust can come out as a "reasoned" argument that Obama = Hitler on national TV, or, on a local level, as slurs against libraries or xenophobic gripes about a July Fourth symphony program's inclusion of a medley titled "Fiesta Latina."
Any way you look at it, you're talking about a spread of fearful ignorance as a way of seeing the world. Worse, it's a willful ignorance that can't be talked down from the ledge, since counter-arguments are, you know, probably what they want me to think. Folks who think that way are, to quote colleague Hal Crowther, "wisdom-proof and lethally repetitious."
All I can say is God help us. The hounds of deliberate idiocy -- perhaps best personified by Glenn Beck's self-satisfied, grotesque misinterpretations of history -- have broken their leashes and now run amok on our airwaves, infecting what I seem to remember as having once been a reasonable country with lots of reasonable people. The German writer Goethe, once said, "There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity." Unfortunately, it often seems these days as if the "nothing worse than" crowd is running the show.
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