Librarians are the custodians and the guardians of the word. A literate, educated populace is one that can think for itself, draw its own conclusions about local, national and world events from personal research, and librarians have a vital role to play in facilitating that search for knowledge. It’s about so much more than knowing the Dewey Decimal System. It’s knowing where to look, what papers and writers to read, and what websites to research on a given subject. It’s a mixture of professional and personal knowledge. In other words, an art.

Harlan Ellison once called the birth of the Internet “the twilight of the word.” In truth, it began long before the information superhighway (or infobahn) came into being. It began the moment that obfuscation started to take the place of plain speech and writing. Now, I’m not averse to using multisyllable words–if used correctly, they lend great texture and flavor to one’s writing and speech. By obfuscation, I refer to the practice of lawyers, politicians and intelligence agencies to deliberately obscure and conceal what would otherwise be clear and out in the open.

George Orwell, in his book 1984, accurately depicted the role of the authoritarian state in hiding the truth from its citizens: its two chief weapons were the use of Newspeak (“double-plus good,” “double-plus ungood”) and the regular flushing of inconvenient truths down the memory hole. Unfortunately, a number of Trump’s cabinet also read 1984 and took exactly the wrong lessons from it, thus creating what that harridan harpy Kellyanne Conway calls “alternative facts.” The Earth must have tilted significantly off its axis that day, caused by the rapid rotation of Orwell’s corpus in its grave.

Trump wasn’t the first President to declare a War on Dissent: Richard Nixon beat him to it by 40 years, along the way pioneering such authoritarian lovelies as “enemies’ lists.” And I would argue that Ronald Reagan started that nasty trend even earlier when, as Governor of California, he had his aides draw up a list of individuals he termed subversives who should not be allowed to speak at events in the state.
But to find the real roots of it, you must go back at least to the McCarthy Era, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, aided and abetted by a loathsome publication called Red Channels, took great delight in exposing those writers, actors and artists who allegedly espoused socialist ideas or outright belonged to the Communist Party of America. Hundreds of careers were ruined as a result. If that isn’t war on dissent, then I don’t know what is.

And history will not let us forget that Woodrow Wilson imprisoned the Socialist advocate Eugene V. Debs for speaking out against America’s involvement in World War One. Ironically, Wilson gave more fuel to the socialist fire by doing so; when Debs ran for President in 1920, he did so from his prison cell. Even without the media resources we now take for granted–newspapers, radio, television and the Internet–he garnered nearly a million votes, about 3.5 percent of those who voted in that election.

The smartest thing that Warren Harding ever did–which showed that he was savvy enough to recognize Debs’ popularity amongst voters–was to pardon him and have him released on Christmas Day in 1921. But Donald Trump and his hirelings haven’t learned that lesson of history. Not surprising: the philosopher Georg Hegel once remarked that “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” They seem to think they’ve fooled just enough Americans just long enough to perpetuate the grift that they are endeavoring to put over.
I know I’m overdoing it on quotes, but I can’t resist paraphrasing this one from Bugs Bunny: “He don’t know us very well, do he?” (From Hegel to Looney Tunes–talk about quantum jumps.)

The concluding message is this: support your local library, with money, encouragement, and letters to the editor regarding the importance of libraries and literacy in a democracy. Even more important, use it regularly. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned about resources like muscles and brains, it’s that if you don’t use them, you lose them. And always remember what Frank Zappa said: “A mind is like a parachute–it works best when open.”