[Originally posted Dec. 2, 2016]

ALAN writes:

Depravities like the “Teen Drag Show” in the library in Ames, Iowa, [Nov. 15] would not be taking place today if American libraries were still run by grown-ups worthy of that name.

You suggested that American libraries today are temples of junk. That is a charitable description.

What we should realize about libraries is that our greatest enemies are shrewd enough to permit them to continue functioning qua libraries while at the same time using them as focal points for cultural subversion.

Not that they are needed, but here are three more examples of this:

1)  Last May, the St. Louis Public Library promoted its third annual “Hip Hop Appreciation Week”, during which “workshops” in “beatmaking” and “music production” were offered.  There were also live performances in the building of the noise called hip hop “music.”

Observe the qualities in such “music:” Loudness, arrogance, anger, self-righteous bombast, Ebonics, profanity, and contempt for restraint, women, and law.

Compare that with these words that appear on a lunette above the entry to the Library’s Main Hall:

“Speak low – tread softly through these halls;
Here genius lives enshrined, –
Here reign, in silent majesty,
The monarchs of the mind.”

 These words are the first stanza in Anne Lynch Botta’s poem “Thoughts in a Library” (1852).

Note the qualities denoted therein:  Quiet, restraint, and the ability to read, to think, and to apprehend the wisdom in books preserved in libraries.

 The men who ran the library for its first 75 years also enforced a code of standards that gave meaning to Anne Botta’s poem.  All of them would be appalled at what their Library has been permitted to become today.

 Hip Hop “music” is of course not music at all.  It is “poison distilled into sound”, as American Renaissance magazine described it ever so accurately in its July 2000 issue.

 Such an event and such noise in a library building would never have been permitted or sanctioned by American library directors fifty years ago.

Things like “Hip Hop Awareness Week” are calculated pandering to the lowest common denominator:  Young, uneducated, miseducated, semi-literate, semi-articulate blacks and whites alike who go to the “libarry” to see movies or to hear such “music” or to read comic books or to borrow DVDs of trendy movies and TV shows.  They haven’t the slightest understanding of the words on that ceiling.   They don’t have such understanding because it has never been taught to them, and the older and wiser blacks know that their wisdom and advice to the young is drowned out by the onslaught of sensation now aimed at the younger generations through modern electronic gadgets and the constant barrage of Leftist propaganda.

Many years ago I knew a man who owned a sign-painting business, and he was expert at his craft.  He was also a student of history, a World War II veteran, a traditionalist-minded Catholic, and held political views roughly forty miles to the right of William F. Buckley.  He knew that symbols are often more important than words in signs.

I thought about him when I glanced at a colorful flyer printed on slick paper to promote “Hip Hop Appreciation Week”.   The symbol at the top of the page was a black hand in the classic Communist clenched-fist.  There is a world of meaning in symbols like that for those who are not too blind to see it or too brainwashed to understand it.

2)  Among the cookbooks at the Library you will find Thug Kitchen: eat like you give a f ck, published in 2014.  Its 212 pages are laced with profanity.  Examples:

“Welcome to the Thug Kitchen, bitches.”

“In your hands, you hold the first step to becoming one bad motherf cker in the kitchen.”

 One chapter is entitled “Big-Ass Cup of Cozy”.

3)  In one library department you will find 24 shelves of concentrated filth called “urban fiction”, whose most notable feature is a higher percentage of profane and vulgar words per volume than would be found in all the library’s tens of thousands of other books combined.

 This is the same library whose directors sent the Library’s traditional Christmas Tree and Christmas Carol concerts down the Memory Hole, never to be seen again.

The Library celebrates a secularized Christmas, as well as Hanukah and Kwanzaa

 Fifteen years ago on a wall in one library department, you would have seen three large portraits of former library directors.  But they have now vanished down the Memory Hole—because all three were white men.

Fifteen years ago, you would have seen a brass plaque on a wall in the library’s foyer bearing the names of all the library’s directors.  But it has now vanished down the Memory Hole—because all those directors were white men and women.

To believe that such developments are innocent or innocuous is to believe in the Tooth Fairy.

The men who built the Library a hundred years ago placed the names of 75 writers and printers on the building’s exterior walls, 71 of them white men and 4 of them white women and all of them from Great Britain or Europe.

Today’s library directors cannot erase those names only because they are carved into the walls of the building.

 On a wall to one side of the foyer is a mosaic of St. Michael the Archangel done by Volponi in 1850 and based on Guido Reni’s painting in the Cappuccini Church in Rome.

That mosaic and Anne Botta’s poem and the traditional Christmas Tree and Christmas Carols that were once seen and heard in the library represent culture.  They point upward.

“Urban fiction”, Thug Kitchen, and hip hop “music” represent hatred of culture.   They point downward.  

American libraries were built by men (not feminized men) who wanted them to point upward.  But feminized boy-men have now surrendered them to the culture-haters.

If you stand in the Library’s magnificent main hall today, you will have no idea that Christmas is approaching, not a sign or a book or a word or a display.  In that hall 50 years ago were a large Christmas Tree, a pianist, and a concert of traditional Christmas Carols.  In that hall today is a facsimile of a hockey rink.  Last summer there was a giant monopoly board.  Fun and games now fill the void created when older generations surrender excellence, heritage and culture.

The Great Hall of the St. Louis Library

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