I wasn’t going to say anything. I mean, what is there really to say that hasn’t been said already—and better, without the stultifying pretensions of a college education—by a bunch of sixth-graders with bilingual cardboard signs? Closing the main library in a city of half-a-million people (more or less) with no real plan to replace it is both tragic and stupid. Isn’t that obvious?
So I wasn’t going to say anything about it. I hoped—with some trepidation, an emotion that lately always seems to come along with hope in a sort of package deal—that the residents of this cement grid we call home would speak up and settle the matter quickly. There would be outcries, massive protest, and Mayor Foster—a reasonable man, it is always said and so it seems—would see the light. Surely, from somewhere in that 571-million-dollar bond we can scrape up a few billion pennies to keep us on par with urban centers like Pittsburgh and Timbuktu.
Or not.
We need a library in the civic center, and whether we fix this one (my vote; I hate waste and the disposability that characterizes our culture) or commit to building another, we cannot have nothing. We need books.
Why do we need books? This once ridiculous question sounds somewhat less ridiculous after a few hours of Googling and Wikipedia and the searchable Library of Congress database. It might even be prescient.
After all, no one in Renaissance Europe talked about preserving scrolls and stone etchings and hand-printed texts, did they? There may have been a few naysayers, but they look foolish now. For the mainstream and the elite, it was ready, set, Guttenberg—and off we went, into a future where information was stored more efficiently, more accessibly, and without having to wait ten years for a monk drunk on pilsner to translate. Is movable type any different from silicone?
Not necessarily. How much of value is there in a library that cannot be found on the Internet? Some perhaps—obscure medieval texts, certain journals; it exists, but how often do you miss it?
And how much is there on the Internet that is not in the printed matter at a library? The difference is closer to infinite than a human being has ever had call to think about, except when thinking about God, love, death, and maybe chocolate.
Everything humanity has ever thought, said, done, created… it’s five seconds away. And you don’t have to go downtown, or wait ten minutes for a librarian to remember the godforsaken Dewey decimal system (they don’t use that anymore, do they…)
So what’s the library for? Do we remember?
Well, for starters, you can’t take home a computer terminal. Not everyone’s got the web at home, and printing up your War and Peace—or better yet, Obamanation—and five other books you want to “borrow” is clearly not a sustainable plan.
But what if everyone had the Internet? There are those who say they just “prefer books,” for something like sentimental reasons one supposes, but that doesn’t much matter. A romantic notion, absent other arguments, cannot found civic policy. If everyone had the Internet would we need libraries? Is a library just meant to give people who are poor or technology impaired access to information? If so, no need for a big building—just enough for a hundred or so terminals; we could afford that many if we stopped storing books.
Mayor Foster made a crack about the size of the main library, noting that it’s nearly as big as the Union Bank building (it’s not even close). Any wisdom in his point was lost in the connotation—the reading public and residents of downtown don’t need or deserve spaciousness, but the bankers—who run this and every town on Earth—do. (Or am I reading too much in here? Could it be Mayor Foster has escaped the fate of nearly all politicians: to be bewitched, bothered and bewildered by big business? Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.)
In any case, it is probably true that both the library and the bankers’ quarters have more space than they really need; of course, the bank could afford to give its every fax machine a separate yacht if it wanted to; the library’s fax machine, I heard, was destroyed by rain and never repaired (actually, I’m making that up, but it sounds plausible, doesn’t it?) Spaciousness is nice, but leaky roofs are easier to fix the smaller they are. And we apparently have no money (see above.)
No, none of these arguments convinces me we need to save the library, or any library for that matter. We can find other, more modern and efficient ways to serve the information needs of people—and if we downsize the print media in favor of electronic, we can do it very cheaply, and even leave room for leg-stretching.
But we do need to save the library, and here’s why:
1.
It’s a civic center. Okay, maybe it’s not, but it could be, it should be. A library is one of the marks of a great city. Okay, maybe it’s not, but it used to be. Have I convinced you yet?
2.
There’s a bunch of lies and nonsense on the Internet. We need books so we can go back and see what really happened in that strange time called “history”. The advance of information flow has coincided—not to say caused, but I’m open-minded—with a steady decline in reason, memory, and social connection. Books are relics, er, that is, artifacts, no, I mean, leftovers… books are the gifts of a previous age (whew) that contain the wisdom and knowledge and, perhaps most important, the record of what once was, which is to say, the record of how we got here. I realize books are also full of nonsense and lies. Now you must really be convinced. Or not.
3.
Not having a library is shameful and will hurt our already beleaguered image (if you didn’t know that our image is beleaguered, well, please don’t blame the messenger, but you need to get out more.) Tourists may be seen to flock to Outback and the Gamezone, or whatever is down at that shopping center/freeway ramp/beer-boat place next to the fake roller coaster, but in reality they come to Long Beach because of its reputation as an intellectual center. Ahem.
4.
If the main servers in Dick Cheney’s underwear fail, all the knowledge of the theories of Leo Strauss and Dr. Moreau will be lost, unless we still have the original books!
Hmm, this column isn’t going as I’d planned.
One more try:
5.
If they kill the library, the civic center will probably become a shopping center. It will suck. Long Beach needs to wake up and reclaim its character, instead of selling out to mass-produced mall culture in search of a quick fix. Saving the library is as good a Stonewall as any.
There, I feel better. I knew there was something to this sentimental romanticism: libraries are the anti-mall. We need them because of what they stand for as much as what they do. We can remake them for modernity, but we need the public spaces, the quiet togetherness, the shared intellectual intention that is only found around libraries—whatever those turn out to look like.
We even need the stacks of books, if only to remind us that knowledge must be compiled, and thus can be lost. A library is the heart and soul of a real City, and if Long Beach is to be a real City, as opposed to an urban sprawl of worker bee consumers, a city with culture, with a brain, and with a memory, we need a central library.
Do we need this central library? Maybe not, but until the Mayor’s team offers a plan and a commitment for a real replacement, it’s the only one we’ve got.
Fight for it.