Invasion?

Many people are pointing to the current presidential race as proof positive that American stupidity has reached new heights, and they could be right. Here at True Archives, though, we know that the seeds of senselessness were planted about thirty years ago by the Information Scientists and their nefarious henchmen, the Biblioposers. You may recall the halcyon days prior to the digitization of everything where a search for information involved consultation with printed indices and actual human beings. Now, content with nothing more than a Google search and a Wikipedia answer, the newly illiterate citizenry can devote their shrinking attention spans to reality television shows and brief, misspelled broadsides clumsily tapped out with their thumbs and exchanged within the confines of a 120 character limitation.


What accompanies this alarming trend of mental flaccidity is the abandonment of a once noble profession. Forget the Donna Reed flash-forward portrayal of the timid librarian in the film Its A Wonderful Life, real librarians were true bibliophiles who knew the contents of the resources they recommended. They prided themselves in protecting their books as much as they did sharing them, and woe to those who abused that sharing. The beloved character on Seinfeld, Mr. Bookman, knew how to deal with punks who forgot to bring back their checkouts, and reference personnel answered actual questions beyond the building's schedule of the next pilates class. Alas, these savvy savants of sagacity and sharpness have been replaced. They are still there; they even look like the people who used to manage the gates of a shrinking inventory of print, but they replicants. Librarians have replaced by Information Scientists.