My one-year-old loves "Thomas and Friends," a toy model-based television series about living trains who strive to be useful for a rich capitalist on a British island. Something never sat quite right with me about the series, despite its narration by favorite comedian George Carlin. Imagine my surprise, or don't, when a Google search for "Thomas and Friends Marxist critique" came back with several hits: Slate's "Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine" from 2011, The Guardian's "Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere" from 2014, and the New Yorker's "The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of 'Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends'" for instance. Sir Topham Hat as robber baron teaches trains and children that they must be "really useful engines" to have any worth at all. Since the barrage of criticism, the show has apparently been "shunted down the left track," angering conservatives with its "Marxist undertones." This revelation dovetails with the rabbit hole into which I've recently dived concerning pure vs. applied literary criticism and young adult literature.
There is a delicious irony in using Marxist criticism (an applied criticism) to point out the death of play in literary exploration. Play is the distinguishing element between the two approaches to literature, I think. Applied criticism seeks to establish that a work is "good for something," that it serves a purpose. Articles on how to use YA literature for this or that fall into this category: awakening empathy or fighting patriarchy as well as more traditional pedagogical concerns. Marxists don't decry the concept of being "really useful," after all. They only demand that one be useful (or at the very least, not harmful) to the right people: in this case, the workers. The other two critical theories Randy Ribay suggests we teach high school kids--feminism and postcolonialism--similarly demand that one be useful to women and indigenous peoples. There is nothing wrong with this: public education has multiple purposes--among them, to create good citizens, and good citizens care about equity and justice.
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Libraries provide access to information and to activities around information (searching, evaluating, using, etc.). This is one of our central values. It is disturbing to see a large segment of the country invested in a "post-truth" culture that effectively undermines the value of information. Disagreements are no longer based on interpretations of the objective data. Each side in a wide range of arguments distrusts the other side's sources as well as their methods of evaluating data.
The degree of consensus within the scientific community on things like climate change (>97% of scientists who study climate) means nothing if the expertise of the scientific community itself is not valued. Scientific support for ideas such as separate genetic origins for gender and biological sex or the value of diversity don't stand up to knee-jerk "common sense" (otherwise known as "what we believe because we've always believed it"). I'm showing my own biases here, but my central point is still intact: Information means very little when anything we don't like is immediately dismissed as "Fake News." Federal funding is on the chopping block. Facts are subject to individual prejudice. Critical thought is undervalued. Inclusiveness is a leftist plot. "Black Lives Matter" is radical propaganda. What is to become of public libraries--champions of information literacy, diversity, and community--in this environment? At the end of a chain of admittedly paranoid logic, as government entities, we would either be used for State propaganda or dissolved. I have no answers. I'm willing to keep pushing the boulder up the hill, to do the right thing as best I can on a daily basis, but these days are getting darker fast. A rededication to openness and inclusiveness is necessary. It means being willing to serve the information needs of the public regardless of who they supported in the last election and being willing to push the boundaries of the collection and programming to show the largely conservative population here some perspectives outside of their own. This is not, I think, a prescriptive position. A library is, in one sense, a gathering of resources that tell the whole story, from multiple angles. Some parts of the story, some perspectives, the community is not going to agree with. But the availability and the introduction to those varying viewpoints can widen someone's personal perspective or comfort someone who finds him/herself in the minority. Personally, navigating this stuff requires that I stay grounded in the present. Going off into speculation about what the future holds, fighting battles not yet ripe to engage, is not only a waste of time but a distraction that costs me my peace of mind and my effectiveness in the present. It is difficult at times to remember this, but it is necessary.
I have much to learn, and I won't learn it if I'm not open to whatever the moment holds for me. I know the bit about getting rid of the Library of Congress was a joke. However, we have to ask, from a conservative point of view, what functions does the public library perform? What is its value in Trump's nation?
Public libraries preserve the best of American culture, but the best according to whom? How many voices will be counted in making these decisions? Libraries provide equitable access to information, but that costs money. And why should the “winners” in Trump’s America pay for the “losers” to have access to the Internet or other sources of information? Public libraries connect everyone to information, but will information flow in the same way? I won’t call anyone a fascist … not right here, right now, in this context. Still clinging to some vestige of professional neutrality, I guess. But let’s say fascism were to creep in. Let’s say a figure at the center of a cult of personality gained some degree of unchecked power. Let’s say that that happened. What’s the history of libraries under fascism? Books burned, intellectual freedom suppressed. The majority would be privileged and everyone else is abused, on a scale that would render the problems we see today insignificant. What libraries remain would be tools of the State. |
AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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