ALAN WRITES: 

You and your readers made many excellent points in your recent discussion of public libraries. Permit me to add these.

The St. Louis Public Library is a model of political correctness. The building itself is an architectural gem that opened in 1912. But what goes on inside the building is another matter. 

Its policymakers worship at the shrine of egalitarianism. Shelves abound with books and periodicals favoring leftist causes. Posters promoting trendy music concerts proclaim “Not So Quiet” – a slap in the face to the American library’s traditional rule of enforcing quiet so that patrons may read, write, or do research. Pretentious comic books on slick paper are called “graphic novels” and shelved alongside Dickens and Twain. Shelves in the children’s department bulge with colorful, slickly-designed books promoting the standard leftist causes of multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, and egalitarianism. That department is also the site of many books designated by the non-word “parenting.” Can you imagine librarians in 1930 or 1950 assenting to an idiot-neologism like “parenting”? 

The library ceased long ago to be “just” a library; it is also now a movie and music rental store, and a trendy café is being added. If you took your children there fifty years ago, they would have seen a large Christmas tree and heard a concert of Christmas carols in its magnificent main hall. Such things brought joy, beauty, and inspiration to library staff, patrons, and visitors alike. If you take them there today, you will not risk exposing them to those things, because those things are now outlawed. Instead, you may browse among books like: 

Dirty Old Men (and Other Stories)
Street Vengeance
Girls from Da Hood
Sex in the Sanctuary
Stud Princess
Thugs and the Women Who Love Them
Corporate Corner Boyz
Church Booty
Working Girls 

and among “music” CDs like:

MF Doom
Crime Pays
Ball Street Journal
Gangsta Party
How She Move
Super Gangster
15 Years on Death Row 

That is one example of how American libraries in 2010 differ from what they were in 1960: The beauty and splendor of Christmas are NOT ACCEPTABLE. But things that appeal to gutter dwellers – vulgar books and vile noise absurdly called “music” – are PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE. 

“There is ground for declaring that modern man is a moral idiot,” the conservative American philosopher Richard Weaver wrote in 1948 (in his Ideas Have Consequences [Univ. of Chicago Press]). Is there better proof of that than this example of library policymakers who agree to bury an American tradition – celebrating the joy of Christmas in public buildings – and to accept literary trash into their collection? 

And what can be said of people who accept such an inversion of their culture without a peep of protest? Whose moral imbecility is greater: Those who promote that inversion or those who agree to accept it? The latter are, indeed, a nation of sheep – or, in Lawrence Auster’s excellent description, “a nation of Eloi.” 

When it opened in 1912, the library declared its aims were to “contribute to the education, culture, and refinement of the community”, and to provide “surroundings of quietude and refined good taste”. It now agrees to trash those goals and accommodate vulgar books, vile noise, and new books with vulgar four-letter words in their titles. When I was a boy, the standards within that library were set and enforced by grown-ups worthy of that name. They would not have dreamed of lowering those standards, of expelling the beauty and splendor of Christmas, or of pandering to gutter dwellers. 

But as Diana West has pointed out, the grown-up in American public culture today is dead. American libraries are now run mostly by Leftist ideologues and perpetual-adolescent-witted boy-men and feminists who are drunk on The New and The Trendy. As such, they offer a splendid example of what Professor Weaver called “The mindless approval of everything modern….as something better than what preceded it…” ( In his Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time [Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1964])

Laura writes:

Thank you for this excellent and sad description of one library’s downfall.

That’s a beautiful phrase: “surroundings of quietude and refined good taste.” A library exists somewhere between the private and the public realms. It is stimulating to be in a public place that is crowded but peaceful and to sit quietly, as if in an invisible circle of illumination, and drink from books.  What has happened to the St. Louis Library is nothing less than the trashing of a public refuge, like the tearing down of trees in a park. The wealthy will always have places to find refinement and peace. Those with less money will not. Generosity and cultural pride created the public libraries of yesterday. The stereotypical sexless spinster librarian who vehemently enforced silence was a cultural warden, a stern matron devoted to knowledge and learning. She has been replaced by the accommodating careerist who runs a community center.  Why create a sanctuary for things that aren’t worth treasuring? If the purpose of democracy is to level all things, to keep people in their place and to stifle the love of beauty and immaterial goods, then the public library is now democratic to the core.

                                                                           — Comments —

Fred writes:

Alan wrote, That department is also the site of many books designated by the non-word “parenting.” Can you imagine librarians in 1930 or 1950 assenting to an idiot-neologism like “parenting”?

I hate that word — parent. I have always refused it to be called a “parent.” I am a father and proud Dad.

The sacred leftist trilogy is parent, person, and partner — not man, not human and not husband — but no body and no thing with no meaning and no value — and no one left to be offended, which is the goal of politically correct speech.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

You will not believe this. I can hardly think straight writing about it. I have two university libraries close by, which really do have excellent books. And the librarians will help with inter-library loans. I’m never disappointed.

BUT! I can eat my lunch, in the library, while handling one of those beautiful books.

About two years ago, the first time I saw someone do this, I talked to the librarians, filled out complaint forms, talked to the “heads,” stayed away for a while. I couldn’t believe it. And nothing worked. The librarians felt sorry for the students! No one felt sorry for me when I was a student. Even if I had five minutes sleep in between all-night assignments and classes.

Public libraries are difficult places also. They are becoming sanctuaries for the homeless. And being mean to a homeless man is worse than refusing a student his lunch.

I hate complaining. But the pleasure of discovering a book, and especially an art book, is tarnished with this incredible ugliness (think also of the sound, and the smell. Penny-pinching students bring in their home-cooked steaming dishes in thermos containers for a hot meal in the library).

Laura writes:

That is incomprehensible. It is almost impossible to eat something with a book and not create some kind of stain. Art books can cost hundreds of dollars. I guess the librarians have significant budgets and don’t worry about having to replace a book. Or perhaps greasy smudges don’t bother them. But then why are they librarians? How can they be indifferent and still be librarians?

In some libraries it is possible to drink coffee and tea, as if people cannot read or think without them. Again this is a dramatic departure from just a few decades ago. 

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