So here’s some of what I was going to say back when I did feel discouraged:

I know American antipathy toward the life of the mind is nothing new.  Way back in the early ’60s Richard Hofstadter, in his classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life, defined anti-intellectualism as:

a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.

So, yes, we have a tradition of suspicion of intellectuals and a related disdain for elitism.  I know this.  But it feels somehow worse this election cycle.  Regardless of where you live, where you get your news, who you talk to, you’ve probably heard someone expressing their desire for a candidate to be like a “regular person”.  Leaving aside the fact that a “regular person” is not going to be running for president in this country, why would you even WANT a regular person to be president?  What kind of allergy do we have to the idea that a leader should be better than a regular person?  Even if we’re living in a post-Nixon, disillusioned world where we know the Great Man is a myth, shouldn’t we still want some aspect of greatness in our leaders?  Hell, I don’t even want the leader of my workplace to be a regular person.  I want leaders to inspire me, to represent impossible ideals, to -and get this - be smarter than me.  So, I think of all the things this election cycle has given me to be discouraged about it’s that after eight years of total, total fail a lot of us still seem to think the most important criteria for leadership is “it would be fun to have a beer with that guy”.

Hofstadter goes on to say:

As an attitude, it is not usually found in a pure form but in ambivalence–a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intellectuals is uncommon.

I wonder what he would say now.  I think a “pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect” is pretty damn common.  I heard someone on the radio say “I could never vote for Biden, he uses words I don’t understand”.  You know what?  Get a freakin’ dictionary and thank your lucky stars that someone smarter than you is responsible for running the country.

When I first started writing this it was just after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate.  The whole “greatness” question was what actually started this whole Discouragement Series.  I started writing it trying to be all “less-political” and not naming Palin as the source of my angst.  It’s weird though.  I went through a period where I couldn’t really think about her without getting sick to my stomach, like, literally sick to my stomach.  She really represented to me everything that is the most discouraging in American culture and the fact that people seemed to love her just made me totally despair.  Her selection seemed calculated to appeal to the customer (as opposed to the citizen) and to appease those who hold greatness in contempt.  I guess I feel like I have come around to actually naming her by name because it seems to me there’s been a shift.  It seems to me there are folks out there looking at her and saying “You know what?  No.  We deserve better than this.”   Maybe I’m just choosing to believe this, maybe nothing is different.  But I feel hopeful.
But then, that’s me.

Well, what do you know, it’s not just me!  It’s most of us.  Beyond all questions of politics, one thing that I find deeply exciting about President-Elect Obama (i really like saying that) is that he is profoundly, unabashedly cerebral.  My friend Mark and I were just remarking that he is certainly the most overtly intelligent president we’ve elected our lifetime.  As Mark said “Bill Clinton is wicked smart, but he almost always hid it under that southern fried aw-shucks thing”.

I feel like we just took a leap of faith and chose greatness.  Whether or not Obama turns out to “a great man” is yet to be seen but we voted for an idea of greatness.  And I have to say I’m having a hard time staying discouraged in the face of that.

I used to work as a lead supervisor in the circulation department of a big public library.  Among other things, this meant that the buck usually stopped with me when it came to irate patrons complaining about fines.  Someone starts screaming?  Go get Rachel.  And, actually, i’m pretty well-suited to that work.  Aggro people really don’t bother me.  I have yelled at more clerks and customer service reps than I’d care to admit, so I usually feel like I can relate to the head-space that the Angry Patron is in.

One day, though, a woman came in to complain about the replacement fee she was being charged for the novel that her child tore to shreds.  Now she didn’t deny that the damage was done by her child but she also didn’t feel she should be responsible for paying it because, after all, children do bad things.  We went back and forth, back and forth, and she became increasingly angry and frustrated that I wouldn’t simply waive the charge.  Finally she said:

“I just don’t understand this!  This is terrible customer service.  If this were Land’s End and my kid destroyed a shirt you’d just send me a new one.  How do you expect to succeed if you don’t know the basic idea that the customer is always right?”

Now, listen, I had a hard job.  Also, I was in library school and listening to a lot of conversations about the “commercial model” for public libraries, about the patron as “customer”, and I was mostly keeping my mouth shut.  So…yeah…I might have been a little a bottled up.  But what I said was, calmly but firmly:

“That’s true but the difference here is that you’re not a customer.  You are a citizen of this community.  You have a responsibility to the other citizens in this community.  I have a responsibility to the citizens of this community to hold you responsible for the damage you caused to property that the library holds for the benefit of the community.  That’s the difference.”

Happily for me, something truly remarkable happened.  She said, “you’re right”.  She took out her checkbook and she paid for the novel.  In my memory, she stood a little straighter as she walked out the library but that might be me getting all cinematic on myself.  What I do know is that she always made a point of saying hi to me, of smiling at me, of talking to me, after that day.

And I’m just so discouraged that we seem to have lost the skill of thinking of ourselves as citizens and without that sense of citizenship the less palatable aspects of our culture (greed, superficiality, anti-intellectualism, etc) go unbalanced by our finer qualities.  Maybe it’s because I was raised in a small town, maybe it’s because I had a very compelling civics education but I still actually believe that seeing yourself as responsible to your community and through that, frankly, to your country is, well, noble.

(As an aside, I just saw OSF’s production of “Our Town” and the following line struck me, on this topic:  “Over there — are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves — New Hampshire boys — had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves”. And, yeah, I know patriotism can be a breath away from chauvinism and jingoism and that as I am essentially a pacifist its weird for me to be venerating soldiering…but there you go.)

Citizens have dignity, customers do not.  Citizens are adults, customers are children.  What I love about American culture is, in theory, we’ve got both in good measure.  We’re giddy, shameless, exuberant customers and it makes us great.  But we’re also hard-working, self-sacrificing, barn-raising citizens and it makes us greater.  But, these days, it seems to me (and others), that Americans think of themselves as consumers first and citizens perhaps not at all.

I feel like everyone, all over the place, treats me like a customer.  And that’s awesome at the dry cleaners but I don’t know.  I don’t really want politicians to treat me that way.  I don’t want the media to treat me that way.  Frankly, I’m tired of being treated like a customer, I want to be treated like a citizen.  Even though that would mean I have responsibilities, that I have to work at some things, that I have to sacrifice sometimes for others.  It’s hard to be a citizen on your own, no matter how much you might want it.  Most of us, including me, really benefit from having a community of citizens, preferably with leaders, who inspire and guide us and help keep us honest.

So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.  What we have to offer is something so much more precious, more valuable than being a free bookstore.  We can offer our patrons a chance to be citizens.  When we think about how we want to “position” ourselves we should think about that patron walking taller on her way out of the library (whether she really did or not).  If we could be instrumental in helping people in our communities regain the dignity of being citizens, we could help change the world.  Honest.

But, lately, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve been feeling really discouraged.  Like really discouraged.  And I know it’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of bad shit going down making us all feel pretty discouraged but this feeling of profound discouragement is rare enough for me that I want to examine it a little.  or, probably, a lot.  Here I’m going to examine, mostly, reasons that I can plausibly related to libraries.  (Note: I can pretty much relate ANYTHING to libraries as long as you don’t poke at it too much, if you do you’ll see how far I had to stretch it).  So here it is…part 1 of “why Rachel might snap at any moment”:

I think the idea of “balance” is one of the most horrible, corrosive things that could have happened to our discourse.  And by “balance”, I don’t mean true balance, I mean this fake, intellectually bankrupt idea that has permeated the media, the classroom, and, yes, quite profoundly, the library.  The idea that when you’re discussing something about which there are multiple opinions you must, to be responsible, present “both sides”.

First of all, “both sides” is fake and lazy.  BOTH sides?  I have a hard time thinking of ANYTHING for which there are just two sides.  Dude, even the proverbial coin actually has that whole swath of surface area between the two sides.   I’ll tell you what, want to provide balance?  Start by recognizing that there are rarely two sides.  There are twenty sides.  Twenty thousand sides.  Two million sides.  When journalists (or teachers or librarians or whomever) constantly and relentlessly show “both sides” in the interest of fairness they collapse a whole range of opinion into a fake, facile pro/con.   “Both sides” is easier for all of us.  It’s easier for us as consumers of information, it’s easier for journalists as reporters of information, it’s easier for librarians as collectors and sharers of information.  Unfortunately, it also doesn’t really exist.  Except, how it kind does now because that idea BOTH SIDES has been hammered into us so relentlessly at this point that we’ve lost our skill for subtlety and our desire for nuance.  (see?  discouraged!)

So, yes, I question the whole “both sides” idea at its very root.  But say there are two sides, for the sake of argument.  Those two sides, they are not always equal.  In fact, they are often not equal.  We will take as our example global warming.  Why the hell did it take us so long to get serious about global warming?  Well, a huge part of the reason is that whenever we heard about global warming we heard “both sides”.  It is pretty reasonable for a busy, lazy, skeptical person (ie, most of us) to conclude that scientists disagree about global warming when every “good”, “unbiased” article they read shows them “both sides”.  What those stories mask is that one side is, like, 5 lunatics who can’t get even get papers published because, YOU KNOW WHAT?, they’re WRONG! and the other side is SCIENCE.

If the media would just man-up and refuse to play that game, imagine how much richer our conversations could be.  If we didn’t waste 20 years on “does global warming exist” just because there were a few ass-hats saying it didn’t and instead have the “sides” presented to us be about things that are actually debatable.  Like, say, what to DO about it.   The mainstream media is so shit-scared of being called “liberal” that they’ve more or less washed their hands of doing any kind of respectable journalism.

Actually, Anne-Marie and I experienced this first hand at ACRL in Baltimore.  Shopping in Hampstead the day after John Waters’ hilarious lunchtime keynote, shop-keepers and residents kept asking us some variation of “WHY DO LIBRARIANS HATE JOHN WATERS?”.  We were pretty baffled, having just sat in a room full of librarians ranging from drooling fangirls (okay, maybe that was just me?) to people who were at least amused by Waters’ talk.  We SAW the standing ovation.  We heard the hoots, hollers, and laughter.  So why did all of Hampstead think we hated his talk?  Well, they’d read the article in the Baltimore Sun.  What would you think if you read it?

Although during the speech about a dozen people left the room, most audience members guffawed and chuckled, sometimes shaking their heads as though in disbelief.

“I think it was a very engaging speech,” said Pamela Snelson, president of the ACRL and a librarian at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “It was a clear representation of freedom of speech. He’s not afraid to approach controversy. He struck a note with the audience.”

But Anne Schwelm, a librarian from Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., who walked out during the address, said she was offended by its vulgarity. “It was shameless self-promotion. A vaudeville act would have been more interesting. I came not knowing what to expect, but generally [in a keynote address], there’s a message.”

Hmm, yeah.  So there were a couple thousand librarians there, about a dozen walked out, but the quote from the hater gets equal time.  I have to say, as these things go, this isn’t even that egregious but the people we met were still left with the completely wrong idea.  I did an experiment with my class after I got back.  I had them read the article and then asked them if they thought the librarians enjoyed the talk.  Overwhelmingly, they reported that “there were a lot of people walking out” and “people were really offended”.  Now, clearly there are information literacy/critical thinking issues going on here but it would be nice if stories could be reported in such a way that we could use our critical thinking skills on actually dealing with the information that’s being reported instead of just trying to parse the truth out of lazy-ass reporting.

And librarians?  This whole “balance” thing is tricky for us.  In many ways, libraries represent the very best of true balance and neutrality.  Libraries provide, foremost, physical and intellectual spaces for the utterly free flow of ideas.  The proposition that I can walk in to a library and I pick up something glorious, something crappy, something beautiful and something hateful and make my own decisions about what I’ve read is what made me want to be a librarian more than anything else I could have been.  And, as a professional value, you can’t get much better than neutrality.  The librarian’s respect for her patron’s mind, for her patron’s absolute right to inquire and to come to crap conclusions, is one of the things that makes the librarian different from the book peddler, what distinguishes the patron as a citizen, not a customer.  But balance, objectivity, and neutrality are tricky beasts and if you’re not vigilant they can shift on you.  Thinking about this reminded me of Rory Litwin’s piece in Library Juice 4:7 “Neutrality, Objectivity, and the Political Center“.  I read this while I was in library school and it had a profound effect on me.  Litwin really clearly described something that had been bothering me about the rhetoric in a lot of my library school classes.  You should really read the whole thing but I’ll quote at length here from two parts of Litwin’s piece that keep rattling around my head the last few days:

Ultimately, we can’t communicate about facts without lending our own point of view to our representation. However, objective information, if it is not falsified by its representation, has a way of advocating for itself, as a result of calling into play human values.  What this means is that good opinions are founded on objective information and objective information will lead authentic beings to adopt opinions and act on them, according to their understanding of their interests. Accordingly, we are making a mistake if we regard information sources that express opinions as less than objective.

and, also:

Finally, the Political Center.  Of course, centrism isn’t touted as a professional value or consciously sought out in reference sources.  But having a bias toward the political center is often mistaken for objectivity, and the effect of “neutrality,” as it is usually understood, is to support the interests of the political center, the existing balance of power.

The political center exerts a strong attraction for those who prefer not to think for themselves. There is an erroneous sense that the truth is to be found at the average of what various people believe, that the truth must be “somewhere in the middle.”  This comes partly from a graphical representation of a political spectrum that ranges from one side to another on a horizontal plane.  But this is not the most accurate representation of the political field.

The currently existing…balance of power is what is commonly understood as the “political center.”  It should not be mistaken for objectivity, though it often is. And it should not be supported by our interpretation of professional neutrality, as it often is.  We should understand objectivity as referring to whatever is verifiably true apart from what anyone might believe, without an implication that to be objective means to lack a point of view or an opinion.

Try as I might, I don’t think I’m going to be able to say any of that better than Rory did.  Librarians contribute to this “both sides” cancer on our discourse when we confuse the concepts of objectivity, neutrality, and centrism.

We sacrifice our role as professionals when we cave to the notion that objectivity and opinion are mutually exclusive.  It doesn’t matter what I perceive the middle to be, where I see the “balance”, the freakin’ glaciers are still going to be melting.  And when confronted with that objective information (the glaciers are melting), I form opinions.  My opinions might be different from your opinions, and that’s cool, let’s talk.

What Litwin doesn’t talk about in the piece is how bloody hard it is to be neutral (in the good sense) but to also have opinions.  To use your professional judgment to build collections, provide services, and do programming that reflect objective information, not “balanced” information in a culture that does not prize objectivity and that values spectacle over conversation, contemplation, and dignity.

I feel like we’re headed back to the dark ages and fake “balance” is just the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceburg.

Join me in the next installment where I will despair about the future of participatory democracy in a country where the people regard themselves as customers not citizens.