No Such Thing

To celebrate yet another "Banned Book Week" observance by biblioposers, we present this simple statement:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "BANNED BOOK" IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICA.
Those in charge of American libraries and commercial bookstores make acquisition decisions every day. Unless you believe that every rejection is somehow a "banning" of that title, you must accept the process as a normal part of institutional management. Now, "weeding" and selectively tossing out the printed legacy of mankind (which is also a normal part of contemporary library management) might be considered "banning," but those doing the tossing will never admit it.

How about a week for "banished books" instead? An appreciation for all those titles that were once preserved but are now being systematically trashed by their former caretakers.

The Arrogance of Ignorance

It should be no surprise that millions of uneducated, boorish people have elected to the United States presidency a man who validates their ignorance and boorishness. After all, when one holds a world view that depends on snippets of information without any verification based on careful, reasoned thought, the leadership of a narcissistic fool whose own opinions come primarily from obsessive television viewing seems completely natural and just.

What makes this current situation so nefarious is its facilitation by Information Science, from the blathering bosh bloviated belligerently on Twitter, to the hand held toys millions of knuckle-dragging mouth breathers use to consume those utterances. Other than gaining a rudimentary skill at pushing buttons, the masses led astray by their demonic digital devices have little ability and less interest in delving into the subtleties of information validation. Merely owning the toy, and referring to it hundreds of times on any given day, gives them the illusion that their stupidity equals education.

And what, pray tell, are the Biblioposers doing to dissuade these misguided souls from their deluded debauchery? Rather than promote the reading of books and tout the advantages of critical thinking gained therefrom, those currently in charge of American libraries are working overtime to destroy their codex inventory and promote searching “tools” that would be easily comprehensible to a chimpanzee. The simple truth that has manifested itself in these dark times is that if you build a search tool for idiots, mostly idiots will use it, and their use will make them feel as if their crude misconceptions are as valid as those held by genuinely educated people.

Out With the Old, and Out With the New

Consider the case of Sydney, Australia; a beautiful city, renowned for its laid-back lifestyle, sparkling beaches, and a traffic jams that would try the patience of the Buddha himself. It wasn’t always that way. At the turn of the twentieth century Sydney was served by an efficient network of light rail routes, and electric trolleys plied the streets with regular schedules that allowed pedestrians to hitch a ride to their destinations with ease. After the introduction of the automobile, however, the light rail lines were slowly destroyed by city leaders who wrongfully figured light rail was extinct due to the popularity of cars. Now, choked with people and far more personal transport machines than any of its streets can handle, Sydney is spending billions to reestablish the tram lines they once discarded.

We could learn a lot from Sydney’s experience in prematurely declaring a device as obsolete. Throughout recorded history, mankind has been marking down the wisdom of its members on a series of analog media, such as a cave walls, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, and sheets of parchment. In each case no one has advocated the destruction of the old format once the information was transferred to the new. After the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century, scholars were tripping over themselves as they collected handwritten manuscripts to allow for careful editing and widespread distribution, but somehow we cannot envision Aldus Manutius tossing a parchment copy of Ovid into the shredder once the printed volume was done.

But today is a different story. Never before (with the exception of recorded sound ) have we seen the wholesale destruction of an information format like that practiced by contemporary Information Scientists. Somehow their faith in zeros and ones has eclipsed their confidence in the printed word and their destruction of the codex is accelerating as more and more material becomes “digitized” and readers are directed to pay-per-view websites to find the text once physically available on the shelf. But someday, just like Sydney commuters, people may find that perhaps the old format was really the best, especially as they continue to shell out millions of dollars for libraries to rent the information they once owned.

Now pardon us as we go back to listening to a selection of music on our eight track tapes...