The Rogue Scholar

First They Burn the Books, Then They Burn the People

I admit that whenever I hear the phrase "book burning" I get conflicted. The capitalist in me figures that the book burners have to first acquire the books from somewhere, which generally means the publisher or distributor or book seller, which means they have to buy them, which means the author gets paid for his or her work, regardless of the end result. And the book burners get to enjoy their wanton destruction of paper, cloth, glue, ink and the ideas impressed upon them. Everyone wins. Right?

At this point the librarian in me--the writer, and dreamer, the guy who thinks that the recording and sharing of ideas on a global scale that the printing press made possible is quite possibly the crowning achievement of our civilization (with antibiotics being a very close runner-up)--bundles up the capitalist, shoves him back into the closet, slams the door, and wipes the dust off his hands.  Well, no, he sighs, that's not right at all. It's a fucking tragedy.

There's a lot to unpack in that article--whenever the elder generation in a small mid-western town achieves the pinnacle of homophobia and genophobia in one fell swoop, I think it deserves some real attention--but that's not what's making the town of West Bend, Wisconsin nuts. The real problem is that the principal actors in the drama have become offended by some books' contents. Phobias can be cured with hard work and courage, but offense is something rather more insidious, making it more difficult to fix.

Books represent ideas. Ideas come in all shapes, sizes, and sexes, in all languages, and from all historical periods. Many of us are more open to some of those ideas than we are others, and all of us limit the ideas we come in contact with to one extent or another. That's normal. (Unfortunate to be sure, but normal.) There's a limit to what we can handle mentally and we tend to cringe from the unfamiliar or what we dislike, even if we've been taught to dislike them with no direct experience of our own. 

So when we find an idea we just can't stomach--"inappropriate" descriptions of sex and homosexuality, in the case of the West Bend library--we can do one of two things. We can accept that such ideas exist and that some people have them, and leave it at that while making sure to limit our contact with said people. Or we can become offended.

Taking offense is dangerous and addictive. Like any narcotic in the hands of someone who just can't handle the habit, it takes over your mind, your thoughts, your pocketbook, your relationships with family, friends, and community.  It fucks you up. It's ugly. It makes you do bad things for worse reasons. It makes you into a criminal, a killer. It makes you want to kill ideas. But since that's not physically possible--an idea, once coined and communicated is pretty much immortal--and the offended know that it's impossible, they lash out at the next available target: the books and those who keep them.

The progression always happens the same way. First they become offended by the books. Then they ban the books. Then they burn the books. Then they burn the people. In this case the offended folks of West Bend, Wisconsin, aren't actually lighting the fires yet, but a few really want to.  One of them went on a call-in radio show and declared that the library director needs to be tarred and feathered (how quaint is that?)

Remember, y'all: offense kills. Stay clean.

A Lunar Addendum

In my haste to get yesterday's post up and done with, I completely overlooked this postscript from James Howard Kunstler's website on the subject:

    Tom Wolfe wrote a fabulous op-ed in the Sunday New York Times commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.  In it, he speculated that the achievment itself spelled the end of the NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that might have furnished it with more meaning beyond its element of "single combat" between the US and the Soviets in the "space race."   This meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA's chief engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in effect) before a congressional committee that  "...we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.... Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent."
    The further trouble, of course, is now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of destroying our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds? We've fallen short both in resources and philosophy.  In our current state of evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway.  Stay tuned a few hundred thousand years....

As I wrote yesterday, a return to the Moon and a trip to Mars would be great if they happen . . . if not, well, we had our chance.

RS Edit: An additional article on the wackiness of the "Space Race" by William Normam Grigg is here.

Next Stop: Mars! (Or Not)

40 years ago we landed humans on the Moon.  It was A Very Big Deal.  It really happened.  That said, let us all watch a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face.  Personally, I could watch that clip all day, but I think once is enough to make the point.

 I was a little over two years old in 1969 and don't remember a thing about the big event. My parents did, and so did their parents friends and neighbors and coworkers, however. To some extent it was a generational thing. So, first, some review: in 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched a satellite called Sputnik 1 into low orbit and for the first time, anybody on Earth could adjust their short-wave radio to a particular frequency and listen to the signal from this artifact that the future Evil Empire had sent into the sky. The engineers and engineering students understood that nothing would be the same again. The Cold War was in full swing, both superpowers were building fleets of heavy bombers and bombs to drop from them, and the nation that could build a missile big enough to push a satellite into orbit could just as easily build one big enough to carry a nuclear bomb across the North Pole.  Such a nation would then be the Unquestioned Supreme Power in the Universe, or so went the thinking at the Pentagon and Kremlin.

Faced with this obvious shortcoming, Americans behaved predictably: we got scared. Yes, we had enough B-52s and atomic bombs to annihilate all of Eastern Europe, but the Russians had demonstrated that had something better. We needed one, too.  Preferably a whole fleet of them. So over the next half-decade the U.S. government poured money into a ballistic missile program of our own. Finally, JFK put the issue on center stage when he declared in 1961 that he would make it a goal of the United States to put a man on the Moon "by the end of [the] decade." And we did.

The thing to remember is that the Apollo program didn't just happen because the American president wanted it to happen, even one as renowned as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The work that led to it was a long string of failures, partial failures and some pretty darned cool successes as engineers in the U.S. and Soviet Union perfected their understanding of ballistic science, life support systems, microgravity and acceleration, and multi-stage thrust systems. It's one thing to comprehend the trigonometry that enables you to plot where a given projectile, traveling at an assumed speed, in a particular direction for a specific amount of time, will land. Building a rocket big  enough to transport three human beings a quarter million miles of harsh vacuum and return them safely to Earth is something else. But marrying these two accomplishments into the Apollo program is several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are relatively few among us who truly grasp the difficulties and labor involved in making that day happen. There's a good reason that Buzz decked the conspiracy wacko.

But in today's news environment, the Moon is considered boring. Now, we're told, the next stop on the journey is a manned mission to Mars at some point in, say, the next 20 years.  That's fine. Dandy, even.  But what do we do in the meantime? Our existing fleet of space shuttles is A) over 20 years old and B) due to retire in a few years. The Air Force no longer builds the heavy Atlas-type boosters that were the mainstay of NASA's heavy lift fleet 30 years ago in quantity (although if the Atlas V proves anything it's that somebody can still build them well.)  And now they want us to believe that sending astronauts 35 million miles away is the answer to maintaining a viable human presence in space? I don't agree. A better choice is going back to the Moon.

I can think of a few reasons for this. The Moon is A) known territory, having been explored thoroughly by us and the Soviets back when we had the money and drive to do it, B) only a quarter million miles away, and C) getting there is something we've done before. We need to go back and dig in. There are plenty of ways to do this, some of which are insane and others pure genius. It can be done. And it makes sense to work the kinks out of any space colonization program we adopt closer to home than not.

That said, it remains the case that Mars is by any reckoning A Very Big Deal.  The thought of going there captures the imagination of astronauts, politicians, science geeks (including me) and Joe and Jane Average in a way that few projects do.  But putting some very big (and valid) parts of that deal--the price tag, the timing, the political will, for starters--off to the side a moment, there is one concern that looms large in my mind about this particular proposal: if something goes horribly wrong, we lose the entire investment. It's 35 million miles from here to there one-way and let's face it, things go wrong.  Sometimes they can be fixed (or, such as in the case of Apollo 13, not fixed but at least navigated through and endured). But, as in the case with Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and more recently, the Columbia in 2003, when something goes wrong, it often all goes wrong at once and the result is destruction and death.

I totally buy the argument that says that when you explore new frontiers, you need to pay the piper, and in the case of our collective space programs, that means the occasional blood sacrifice.  I agree, that much is the nature of the game. Only a fool or a Pollyanna would argue with it.  But let's also admit that planning a trip to Mars is a long-term goal (ten years? twenty?), so while we plan for Mars, why not get in as much practice as possible in the meantime? Why not go back to the Moon and this time stay there?

The bottom line is that a manned mission to Mars would be impressive as hell if it ever happens but not in the same way the Apollo missions were back in the seventies. Then, the Cold War was still on and the space shuttle--a remarkably successful program for all the problems--hadn't even been built yet. The entire industrial world relies on satellite communications and a dozen countries have ballistic technology sufficient to launch them into stable orbits now. But a working Moon base that gives us the reason and opportunity to develop and refine the infrastructure to get our carbon-based monkey asses off this pale blue dot and into the inner solar system for the benefit of future generations would be infinitely more worthwhile.

If it ever happens.

Codex Sinaiticus Now Viewable Online

The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known extant bibles and one of the most important handwritten manuscripts in the world, is now online for your viewing pleasure. (Mmmm, manuscripts...)

5 Things You Should Read About Gaming and Learning

This comes from Chris Cox, on behalf of the ALA Research & Scholarship Committee via the ILI-L listserv:

Looking for some reading material over the summer?  Want to learn a little more about a hot topic in instruction to inform your teaching next year?  Just in time for ALA Annual, the Research & Scholarship Committee of the Instruction Section of ACRL presents “5 Things You Should Read about Gaming and Learning,” the latest in the “5 Things…” Series.  Based on the popular EDUCAUSE series, "7 Things You Should Know About...", “5 Things” seeks to instruct and educate readers about topics relevant to library instruction, presenting articles, video and audio clips, blogs, etc., from outside librarianship to inform our work as educators.  This installment presents readings which illustrate some of the issues and challenges of incorporating gaming into education, highlight good learning principles, and discuss commercial, modified, and custom‐designed games.

Enjoy!

Happy Independence Day!

While you're out in the backyard or at the beach setting dead animals on fire and drinking your weight in beer (as I and mine will be), at some point in the festivities please take a moment to read and remember two documents that made your debauchery possible: The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Recommended reading, both of them.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Most Important Person in Town

A few weeks ago I located a new copy of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank in a Brentano's in a mall near Seaford, Long Island. It was frankly a surprise both for me and the woman behind the counter: I was under the impression that the book had been out of print (and that Brentano's had been out of business) for years and the store manager hadn't remembered it being on the shelves.  I'm into end-of-the-world stories, and this book has been on my list for some time (along with On the Beach,  Level 7 and a few other genre classics) so I snapped it up and started reading.

Alas, Babylon is a story about the end of the world.  Specifically, the world that the people of the small town called Fort Repose in Central Florida ca. 1959 have come to understand and experience as normal. It's a heavenly place of constant fresh food, electric lights, easy motoring to distant cities, air travel, plumbing, medicine, comfort, and leisure.  It is as close to Heaven on Earth as human civilization has ever come in its 100,000 years on this planet. But it's as fragile as it is comfortable and convenient, and one day it ends at the hands of Soviet bombs.

Life for many of the town's inhabitants fall apart. But there is one bright spot in all this: Alice Cooksey, the town librarian finally gets a chance to shine:

Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton.  It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.  Alice would never admit it out loud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.

It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose.  She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning.  An expensive frill, they'd said.  But without air conditioning, how could a library compete?  Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned.  You couldn't expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn't end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television.  Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.

In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled.  So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled.  There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to the springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing.  Now all this was ended.  All entertainments, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library.  The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now.  There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against the walls of stacks.  They read everything, even the classics.  And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them.  And there was useful research to do.  Randy and Doctor Gunn didn't know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter.  It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust  to make her own life worth living.

This passage stopped me cold when I first encountered it and the last few lines made me positively misty-eyed. The image of a town library, long abandoned to the "distractions" of modern life, now literally packed with hungry, anxious, physically and spiritually drained survivors of a nuclear war, every one of whom is suddenly rediscovering the fact that civilization has rested upon the printed word, is beyond description.  The last line is a bit of manipulative violin-playing, but it's easy to overlook that bit in light of the larger point that Frank is making. Namely, that this, too, shall pass. The cheap, abundant electricity that powers our society is slowly ebbing and one day, we'll have no choice but to rely on our print collections as our primary--or possibly, our only--resource.  This is not to say that digital collections are a bad idea--I have created them, maintain them, and am happy to be able to say they we have them to offer--but I am saying that they may not be the be-all and end-all of librarianship.  Even if the electric current keeps running without fail for the next thousand years, our DVDs, CD-ROMs, flash drives, hard drives, etc., are doomed to fail within a few decades. There are too many moving parts, the parts are continually redesigned and the mechanisms into which they are integrated fail and need to be replaced. During that process, the mechanisms are "improved" and data are  frequently lost because of reverse compatibility issues (meaning where old data cannot be read by new mechanisms or applications).  At the very least, library directors and librarians all over the U.S. remain infatuated with the idea that new technology must by definition be better technology.  It isn't.  New tech is merely new. Better is a judgment that each librarian must make for him or herself. Added to that is the fact that electronic resources and collections rely on a very complex web of infrastructural necessities, which itself relies on nearly free and constant flows of electric current.

Granted, writing in 1959 Pat Frank had no idea about the communication medium called ARPANET that the Pentagon would soon begin funding, or that in a generation or two, it would become the backbone of the most amazing world-spanning information exchange ever built.  But he understood just how easily and suddenly all that his generation (and ours) regarded as normal could end.  He further understood that if it did end, the books would remain, and be sought after. In a word, let's not throw out our books just yet.  One day, we will need them.

A Lesson in British Libel Law

The thing to remember as you read the article, from Sue Reid in today's Daily Mail, is that under British libel/copyright law, the defendant is presumed guilty and must prove his or her innocence, rather than in criminal cases, where "innocent until proven guilty" is still the test.

Back 'cures', a brave scientist and an epic court battle: How Britain's libel laws are threatening free speech

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:38 PM on 01st July 2009

With his round, John Lennon-style specs and nerdish good looks, physicist Simon Singh is an unlikely hero.

As one of the country's most acclaimed science writers, he has spent much of his 45 years cloistered in his Home Counties study penning Number One bestsellers on mathematical conundrums, code-breaking and the Big Bang theory.

Turning his hand to alternative medicine, last year he published a book called Trick Or Treatment? that included a chapter on the history of chiropractic therapy (the manipulation of the spine to realign the back), which was invented by grocer and spiritual healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America.

Inspired by the 'miraculous' recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by manipulating or 'racking' his back, Palmer said that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by trapped vertebrae.

Suddenly, the therapy (which takes its name from the Greek word for hand) became a near-religion, with Palmer boasting he was a successor to Christ and Mohammed. He even practised vigorous 'racking' on his own children, which led to him beingrrested and jailed for cruelty.

Palmer's ideas caught on and, in 1925, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) was set up and several clinics opened specialising in the treatment. Chiropractors were able, it seemed, to cure a myriad of ailments and began to broaden their therapies.

Recently, the association has said that even children suffering from colic, eating problems, ear infections and asthma can be helped.

However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion. Though the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners advocate its use  -  especially for back pain  -  some scientists say there is no evidence that chiropractic spinal manipulation is better than other forms of back massage.

This has led to widespread debate in the medical world, with some doctors refusing to refer patients to chiropractors, claiming the treatment does not work and can even cause harm.

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy!