Dear Fidel,
You’ll forgive me for not referring to you as ‘Excellency.’ I always thought that was a bit of a stretch for a socialist, anyhow. At any rate, I would like to take a moment or two of your time to thank you for your service to the American Library—the one with the capital ‘L.’
Dear Fidel,
You’ll forgive me for not referring to you as ‘Excellency.’ I always thought that was a bit of a stretch for a socialist, anyhow. At any rate, I would like to take a moment or two of your time to thank you for your service to the American Library—the one with the capital ‘L.’
Fidel, old friend, you have no idea how much good you’ve done for us here in the library business. I’m not sure about the circumstances down there, but some of the folks up here got to stewing pretty hot over some private libraries, or collections of books or something down there, and it made for a lot of fun during the latest ALA convention.
We could use a bit of fun up here these days. We’re in the middle of one of those regular downturns in Capitalist affairs that Marx referred to—you know, the signposts on the road to our inevitable decline. To top it off, the government (mostly dupes and lackeys of the profit system, as I’m sure you are aware) has decided to mess with us to the effect of—but I’m sure you read the papers. Let’s just say that the Patriot Act and CIPA have not made it a good summer for those of us laboring in the stacks. So we needed a diversion. You folks gave us one, and we’re grateful.
We have this thing about Freedom up here. This, like the Library, is another of our Capitalized concepts. By way of reference, our leaders deal with the Freedom idea pretty much as you do with the term ‘liberation;’ it fits in nicely where we want it to and acts as a stopper in any argument. You know how this goes: you’re in the middle of a three-hour diatribe before a captive audience in the National Assembly and just when they start looking at their North Korean Rolexes you dust off an old story about liberating Havana and their eyes light up with the old fervor. At least if they want to keep their jobs, they do. Here we have the same thing: The President’s pollster reports that nine out of ten likely voters consider him a fumbling imbecile, and pretty soon thereafter his speechwriters are inserting ‘Freedom’ in every other paragraph. When we can’t convince enough people that we’re working for Freedom on the home front, we go Liberate the peoples of distant lands so they can enjoy the fruits of Freedom. You know: Grenada, Angola. Places like that.
Given the difference in our political perspectives it was inevitable that we would clash over the issue of libraries. What was unlikely was that it would ever actually come up, but given enough typewriters and enough monkeys, eh? Well, we aren’t in any danger of running out of monkeys and here in the land of Free Expression (another of our Freedoms) the issue of those little private book collections took on a huge significance, becoming a collision point where your version of the F-word and ours met and butted noggins.
I’m sure you have your regular Party Congresses down there; we held one in Toronto, and it looked to be a bit threadbare after the SARS scare, so some of the folks glommed onto this Cuban deal, perhaps to forget about other things. The press (another of our Free Institutions) grabbed onto the issue and ran with it. Right away this little squeaker of a topic became big news.
Funny how this all worked up. It seems you jailed a bunch of folks for accepting money from the U.S. government to start book-loaning collections. Apparently that’s some sort of crime down there, an act of subversion. Up here where Freedom reigns, the federal government gives money to libraries so that people can read whatever they want, subject to certain minor restrictions under the Patriot Act, CIPA and other laws which ensure that things don’t get too free—but you know how that goes. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. I mean, how would we feel if the Cuban government sent money to public libraries in some of our inner-city slums? Damn right we’d be insulted. Your people don’t have any more right telling us our business than we do yours. Besides, giving money away to libraries without restrictions sets you up for all sorts of grief, as you have seen. Just be glad you don’t have a lot of yammering provincial libraries to deal with.
Having given some time to this issue, I think the best solution would be if you would just let your libraries be free to do whatever they like. Let them lend whatever books they want. It won’t cause any real problems for you. Most of the titles on your banned list come from this country anyhow, and there’s always the little filter of that embargo we have on trading with you folks. Hell, if we can keep you people driving 1953 Buicks and using the same hypodermic twenty times, do you think we’re going to load you down with Catcher in the Rye? No Sir. You won’t find any more bad books coming over than you do penicillin. Besides, and as you’re fond of reminding us, the whole thing is motivated by money, and your checks don’t clear the bank. You think any of those book distributors is going to extend credit to a guy who nationalized the oil industry? You really don’t have anything to worry about.
So the thing pretty much worked out to everybody’s benefit: Up here in the land of Freedom we got a chance to thump our chests on all sides of the issue, and then everybody went home to face their shrunken budgets and Internet Filtering and all that other boring stuff. Thanks again for the diversion, and let me know if you need any ideas about your library system. Last night I had a brainstorm that could really raise your ratings on this issue: Have you ever thought of marrying a librarian?
Don’t be a stranger, Comrade.
Michael McGrorty
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