[Reposted from Dec. 22, 2021]

ALAN writes:

If you walked up the grand staircase and into the beautiful St. Louis Public Library in downtown St. Louis in December 1966, you perhaps would have seen well-attired library patrons enjoying the library Christmas tree and a concert of Christmas carols, as depicted above.

If you walk into that building today, you will search long and hard for any indication that Christmas is approaching, and you will not find a trace.

Instead, what you will see are hideous mannequins throughout the building outfitted in the most preposterous “garments” you could imagine. It is an “exhibit” called “Rockin’ the Runway,” billed as “avant garde garments” created with “unconventional architectural materials.”

It is, in fact, a festival of absurdities. It has nothing to do with apparel or architecture. It has to do with mockery. Its purpose is to mock beauty, restraint, and tradition—and to mock those things at the same time of year when, in previous decades, precisely those qualities were celebrated and honored in that building in the national and religious holiday of Christmas.

St. Louis was once home to a thriving garment industry. A group of companies operating under the name “St. Louis Fashion Creators” produced beautiful apparel for women. Several women in my extended family worked in that industry. But it will never be the subject of a library display because those companies were run mostly by white men and they employed thousands of non-feminist White women. SLPL will never say anything favorable about white men or non-feminist White women.

As late as 1984, library staff members assembled on the grand  staircase in front of the building and sang Christmas carols for passers-by.

Today you will hear no Christmas carols or Christmas music at all in a Library that is militantly opposed to such things.

These are additional proofs (following dozens before them) that American libraries are now run not by men like those who ran them when I was a boy, and indeed not by men at all; but by a free-floating coalition of socialists, Communists, Fabian change agents, and feminist airheads. American libraries are now way stations on the path of the Permanent Leftist Revolution. The only thing they have not done is take down the American flag in front of the building and replace it with the hammer and sickle.

Christendom and its attendant beauty are thus buried from view and replaced by Progressivism and its attendant ugliness.

There was a time not that many years when I imagined that most Americans would oppose that trend. But I was wrong. They didn’t and they don’t. Most of them remain silent, indicating their approval or acquiescence.

I once knew a man who spent many happy hours in that library looking up information in old books about sports and acting. He and his family had come to the USA in 1957 to escape from living under the tyranny of Communists in Hungary.  My father also spent many happy hours in that library looking up information about his ancestors. If they were here today, I am confident both men would be appalled by what that library has become.

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