Chances are, your local librarian is a subversive, and if you’re religious, you should thank God for that.
Or perhaps not.
God is not a free-thinker, at least he wasn’t in the Old Testament. Old God took an eye for an eye. He smote the Philistines. And he wasn’t tolerant of you thinking there might be other gods every bit his match.
Old God was a violent, vengeful, jealous son-of-a-bitch.
Then God’s long-haired son Jesus came along and turned the tables on all that. Like Willie Nelson, he hung out with hippies, fallen women and outcasts and preached a new commandment: Mellow out, dude. Love one another. Care for the poor. Feed the hungry. Nurse the sick.
That message didn’t go over well with Old God’s crowd anymore than a big chunk of country music people haven’t cottoned to Willie.
Thousands of years later, the Jesus supporters aren’t even getting along with the other Jesus people, and the Old God people are sounding a lot like the original Jesus. Political lines are always moving. Today’s hard-core Republicans love Vladimir Putin but Barry Goldwater, the original article, wanted to nuke the Kremlin.
Chances are, your local librarians understand this stuff. They understand the shifting sands of human madness. Not only that, they want you to understand them as well. They are subversives because they typically don’t subscribe to ideology. They put their faith in information.
Twenty-seven years ago, a madman known only as the Unabomber was blowing up people with explosives he sent in the mail. As it took a while for the law to catch up to him, he was smarter than your average nutjob. Then he gave himself away by sending long letters to the newspapers, explaining his gripes with the world.
His magnum opus was a 35,000-word screed that I was curious about, so I went to get a copy at the Haines public library. (Mr. Google was still years in the future.) Assistant librarian Ellen Border told me the library didn’t have a copy, but that she could get me one.
Borders – a good, conservative Christian woman – gave me the phone number of a Nome gold miner who was living on the Piedad hillside. I called him and he loaned me his copy. The Unabomber’s manifesto was a lousy piece of writing, none of which I remember. It did not inspire me to send anyone a bomb, or even a postcard for that matter.
But Ellen thought I should be able to read it, that maybe the brain of a madman reflected in writing might help us understand some part of our brains or nature.
This year, public libraries are under fire for hosting Drag Queen Story Hour, a program where cross-dressers come and read stories to children. The Right Wing Noise Machine – which never stops finding monsters under the beds of your children – the same propaganda factory that warned us that long hair, women wearing pants, marijuana, working moms, gay marriage and vaccines would destroy the moral fabric of America – is coming after Drag Queen Story Hour.
Down in Ketchikan, the city council defended Drag Queen Story Hour against cranks who wanted to cancel the program aimed at celebrating the LGBTQ community. In retaliation, the cranks put a vote on the ballot to defund the public library. It failed but attracted 43 percent of the vote.
Now, ever since before Jesus showed up, some men have enjoyed wearing women’s clothes. These men pose no threat to the safety or welfare of our children or anyone else. These men were tolerated – sometimes celebrated – by various cultures since forever. What some Ketchikan kids who went to reading hour probably learned was that some men like to dress up as women and that’s okay.
Some men enjoy dressing as clowns. Some men dress in Civil War uniforms and play war. Some men wear helmets and numbers and bash each other on TV on Sunday afternoon. That’s okay, too.
Ours is a Puritan culture that is not only intolerant but violently fearful of deviation from the norm. Violent fear and intolerance of benign behaviors different from our own are a major cause of unnecessary strife in the world.
The opposite of fear and intolerance is information. That’s the subversive stuff your librarians are peddling down at the public library.