Ground zero.
Boing Boing showed me this amazing interview that Paul Schmelzer conducted with Siva Vaidhyanathan (just added to the linchinography to the right there). It’s about 10,000 things that are really one awful and all-important thing: the swirling morass of copyright and security and techonology law and regulation, recomplicating daily, that is inexorably enclosing the cultural commons, wiretapping the Zeitgeist, selling the collective unconscious by the pound. But enough shrill turgidity—it was reading this—
Schmelzer: The title of your book, then, takes on a new tenor when you think about how independent booksellers and librarians are shredding records to protect the privacy of readers and municipalities are voting not to enforce the Patriot Act. The Anarchist in the Library takes on a whole new cast.
Vaidhyanathan: For some reason, libraries have become the site of conflict. Libraries are perceived now as a den of terrorists and pornographers. And this is not only a misdescription of how libraries work in our lives, but I think ultimately also a very dangerous assumption. What we’re doing though is making librarians choose among their values. Librarians believe very strongly in recordkeeping and in maintaining archives. It’s part of the historical record; that’s half of what they do. But the other half of what they do is serve and protect their patrons. The federal government has made librarians choose between retaining records that might be useful, for instance in budgetary discussions not to mention historical research, and protecting their patrons, so their patrons don’t feel intimidated by the books they choose to read or by the potential of oversight of the books they choose to read. There are a lot of librarians around the country right now who are taking a very noble and strong stand against this situation, and I think we need to celebrate them and support them in this effort.
—that made this—
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that “this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire”. I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why?
—take on a whole new awful context. The floor dropped out from under my feet again. “Libraries have become the site of conflict.” Oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
(No. Stop being overly literal. I am not proposing a direct, causal relationship. I do not think Bush took out a hit on the Iraq National Library and Archives to send a message to recalcitrant anarchist librarians who refuse to cooperate with the Attorney General and mp3-trading college students. But there is a connection. This—these ten thousand things that are one thing, really; these ill-written laws, this repugnant greed, this ignorance and contempt, this violence and the tolerance of that violence—this is what happens when you do not care about the commons. When you treat culture as merely a product. When you think of a book as just a unit to be moved. —Burn all you like; we’ll make more.)
Vaidhyanathan: Libraries are considered to be dangerous places and librarians are our heroes. This is something that we really have to emphasize. The library is also not just functionally important to communities all over the world, but a library itself is the embodiment of enlightenment values in all the best sense of that. A library is a temple to the notion that knowledge is not just for the elite and that access should be low cost if not free, that doors should be open. Investing in libraries monetarily, spritually, intellectually, legally is one of the best things we can do for our immediate state and for the life we hope we can build for the rest of the century.
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Burn all you like; we’ll make more.
I think this pretty much sums up the message of America at this moment in history. The last part shows optimism and productivity; the first, ignorant nihilism. I wish they didn't have to go together.
Libraries
kip is probably one of the best writers on the blog scene. he's posted about libraries and keeping track of the books patrons check out....