Decolonize The Bookshelves! Make Libraries Badass Again!
We need libraries and badass librarians more than ever. We start by decolonizing them of our self-appointed intellectual dictators, and returning to ideological neutrality
I remember when librarians were badasses in oversized glasses and plainclothes.
During the Reagan years, librarians defended their free speech fortresses against the barbarians at the gate—Christian fundamentalists with a long list of thou-shalt-not-reads, politicians afraid of criticisms of the American project, and activists like the Gablers who wanted to excise evolution from textbooks. There were a few reported book burnings in the ‘80s, mostly localized. The censormonkeys of the right really really really didn’t want you reading books they deemed ‘harmful’.
Sound familiar? Yeah.
Later, under Bush II, librarians genuinely fought for social justice and freedom to read when the USA Patriot Act allowed the FBI to secretly obtain library and bookstore records under the guise of terrorism investigations. It wasn’t much of a leap to wonder whether they also wanted to know who was reading books critical of the Bush administration, so I kept a running list of titles I would read once I moved to Canada.
Oh, the glory days of right-wing censorship! Now the left’s censormonkeys burn books (although some righties still join in).
Who holds the real power in America?
Here we are, once again, with a right-wing President still trying to control the message, but with an interesting wrinkle: Only so much, because unlike at the turn of the New Millennium, he doesn’t hold primary power.
How do we know? Donald Trump’s cancellation victims continue to work. Stephen Colbert is happily co-writing a new Lord of the Rings movie and evaluating where to go next creatively. It’s not hard to imagine he’ll return to commentary as Jon Stewart did. Why? Because Colbert and friends speak truth to secondary power, not to primary power.
Sixteen actors who have trouble finding work after mostly progressive cancellation demonstrate that left-wing power still rules the day. Not all of the listed ‘banned actors’ are on the persona non grata list because of conservative political views, but most are, their lives and careers upended by progressives. Progressives own and run Hollywood, although that’s beginning to change.
The far left holds the primary power in America. It’s much more dangerous to criticize progressive racism, sexism, homophobia, or its own colonialism. While the right colonizes lands, the left colonizes womanhood, language, public and higher education, Hollywood, publishing, theatre, mainstream media, non-profit and advocacy groups, hiring, and religious groups.
Who owns you?
Which opinion would you feel more comfortable expressing on X under your real name?
Donald Trump is a senile old coot and the most corrupt president the U.S. has ever had. Release the rest of the Epstein files! If GOP Republicans weren’t such massive wussies they’d have Amendment 25’ed him by now.
or,
‘Transphobia’ isn’t bigotry. It’s the genuine fear men pretending to be women generate when they insist on colonizing women’s private spaces. You can’t change your sex, period, and they clearly can’t change their exceedingly male and often misogynist brains.
I know which view obedient Stephen Colbert regularly expressed.
Humor speaks truth to power and these comedians don’t Stepin Fetchit for Trump.
Progressives feign oppression by the right wing when in fact, they themselves are the apex oppressors. They are more powerful than the current administration.
Which brings us to today’s libraries, with a cultural censorship dictated and curated by modern authoritarian progressives who greatly resemble the God Squad of my youth.
Libraries could be sources for The Resistance but for two obstacles: They’re far too ideologically captured, and books have become remarkably expensive.
The squeeze: The ALA will tell you what to think
Reason Number One for why libraries have become irrelevant: Lack of heterodoxy on the shelves and in the staff room.
The lack of neutrality at the American Library Association (ALA) is an erosion rather than a coup. It began in the social justice-mad ‘60s and ‘70s with an increasing emphasis on activist causes which, to be fair, was what people wanted to read then. Activist-oriented librarians formed groups like the Social Responsibilities Roundtable, to address social justice issues like racism, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and other pressing matters of the day. Many challenged the idea that libraries should be neutral spaces, giving rise to the idea that libraries should tell people what to think.
FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) continues the conversation on how ‘social justice’ librarians have abandoned institutional neutrality and enforce their ideological orthodoxy on staff and new hires.
DEI diktats ‘train’ newbie censormonkeys to think the ‘right’ way and make disagreement too costly in staff meetings. Ten-year-old library Best Practices emphasizing fairness, viewpoint diversity and neutrality, it notes, have been tossed in the trash. Staff members are encouraged to develop only four ‘competencies’ — “awareness of racial identity, manifestations of racism, commitment to countering racism, and analysis of racialized outcomes.”
And here I thought America had bigger problems than residual racism.
Everyday readers have begun drifting away. But you can at least buy the books you want easily on Amazon, right?
Why are books so expensive? The death of mass market paperbacks
Reason Number Two for the decline of library anti-normie-ism: The rising cost of books.
I haven’t been to a library in many years. They’re still stuck in the ‘90s. And we need libraries more than ever.
The last time I was in one, it was to beg them to make my kludgy, slow, mostly useless Overdrive app work. It’s an app that allows you to borrow e-books. Theoretically. But I can’t always get the books I want. I looked around at the carrels of old-looking books and wondered why anyone even bothered to visit anymore.
With Amazon, I didn’t have to wait weeks or months to read what I wanted. When they allowed independent bookstores and sellers to offer used books for much less money, a $100 gift card was the most exciting birthday gift I could receive.
Public library budgets have dwindled (mostly from Republicans). Certain elements of conservatism have never been at all keen on self-educating curious-minded Americans; they tend not to vote Republican. Contarily, though, research shows that opinions of libraries, among the thin sliver of Americans who still access them, are pretty non-partisan: Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, mostly enjoy perusing the shelves and risking upper respiratory infections from pulling down out-of-print books and wondering, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche? What the hell?
Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!).
But in the last two years, the cost of new books has gone way, way, up and, it’s not just the Orange Menace’s tariffs, either. Book Riot historically tracks book affordability. To access the entire article you have to join, but there’s enough in the first few paragraphs to answer the question: There was a paper supply issue in 2018; the cost of books rose between 2018 and 2023, coinciding with the COVID crisis and supply chain disruption; and the publishing industry has largely removed the reader’s cheapest access to books, mass market paperbacks.
Making books unaffordable makes well-stocked, diverse libraries even more necessary.
Publishing is begging for piracy, having learned nothing from the Napster Age. What destroyed the market for free but illegal music back in the ‘90s was the Apple iStore, combined with a Clinton administration takedown of artificially frozen CD prices, both of which brought the price of music down to the point where buying reasonably-priced music was less stressful than waiting for the music cops to knock on your door.
USA today asks, “Is reading becoming a luxury?”, noting that formerly $20 hardcovers are now closer to $30, and that fewer people are buying new books, opting for used ones, which have also gone up in price. It’s what once allowed me to buy six Amazon books for $120 in May 2023, and today I might be able to get only three or four for that price. E-book pricing is only slightly less expensive. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks drive higher price margins, which is why the lowly mass paperback has fallen into great disfavor by publishers and booksellers, but not readers.
So you can return to the library, but the dwindling choices and the lack of funding for a fix to lumbering Overdrive are a bit like trying to find a good movie on Tubi.tv: There are a few, but mostly it’s crap.
The Normie Revolution: Making libraries cool!
Libraries could be a great fix for what ails us politically, but first, we’ll need a revolution—by us normies, the maverick sans-culottes, to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the elites who consider themselves our intellectual ‘betters’, who have colonized our libraries and rendered them no longer revelant. We shall drag our DEI-addled librarian gatekeepers to the Place de la Concordia where they shall be tried for their crimes against cognitivity and their Heads of Staff forever severed from their body politic!
We shall erect signs out front that read FREE BOOKS!!! so everyone knows they can come in and browse, then check out however many books they want ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
We shall remove their narcissistic, virtue-signalling overblown Pride displays and relegate them to their own corner, no more or less than any other special interest group’s.
Down with Rainbow Narcissism!
We shall welcome coffee shops as many bookstores do, setting aside a place where book lovers can exchange ideas, recommendations, and get to know their neighbors.
We shall pressure Congresscritters to allocate more money for improving libraries so they can provide us with the books we want now, and find quickly the books they don’t have in-house. This will induce the publishing companies and booksellers to reduce their prices and make cheaper books again just as Apple once did for music.
We shall condition those funds on their return to the goddess Neutrality and her rightful place, offering a balanced diversity of beliefs, views, ideologies, and ideas, especially any book the other side deems ‘harmful’.
We shall create or adopt better apps for borrowing e-books than Overdrive.
We shall bring forth library websites where you can browse the shelves from home and mark one for pickup.
Where possible, we will also offer a patio where one can continue the conversation outside when the weather is warm.
We shall install more comfy couches.
We shall allow authors and speakers to make appearances at libraries, with big, burly security guards prepared to drag out deplatformers who try to shut it down.
‘Protesters’ who fail to observe the rules of civilized discourse will be sentenced to reading Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, a 3,000-page doorstop. They must sit at a library table phone-free near the main desk until they’ve submitted a handwritten book report of no less than 5,000 words. No open book. No help from friends with longer attention spans, Coles/York notes, or AI.
We can bring people together face to face.
We can lengthen human attention spans.
We can have great conversations and find common ground.
We can turn librarians into rock stars and, dare I even suggest it, sex symbols!
We can Make Libraries Cool Again.
And we can burst the intellectual bubbles of small-minded people, right or left, and render them about as cool as overplucked eyebrows or ‘millennial gray’ interiors. We can return diversity to starving libraries where radical freethinkers can read Genderqueer or Charlie Kirk’s Time for a Turning Point. We can resist our wannabe brainmasters on the right and left.
And don’t even get me started on Drag Queen Freethinkers Hour!
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