Hungry & hollow for all the things you took away
I do in fact have a plan for this newsletter, occasionally shambolic though it may seem. Like: I have a content calendar, and a publication schedule (every other Tuesday, about noonish PST). In the future I want to delve into why libraries are so plagued by bad leadership, and my own choice to leave libraries, and also other things, like how powerful grudges are, and how working in dysfunctional environments prepared me to take a corporate job where I sit serenely in the cubicle through every re-org.
At the moment, though, I am thinking about how on March 31, the entire staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services has been placed on administrative leave. IMLS was targeted in one of these orders signed by the president with his big sharpie while sitting behind his big boy desk, where every day or so he gets to sign things and take questions from an increasingly credulous white house press gaggle made up of reporters such as: right wing podcasters who wear beanies, substackers who were fired from legacy media outlets for racism, and a handful of people from those legacy media outlets desperately trying to transcribe his ramblings into something semi-coherent. The mainstream media bends themselves into knots to make all this credible, calling things “controversial,” “unique,” “novel,” reporting without commentary on actions which are not actually legal. Take, for example, the gutting of various organizations like IMLS, or the Voice of America, or the US Institute for Peace, organizations which arguably are not eligible to be defunded, dismantled, and closed by the stroke of one man’s chisel tipped sharpie: and yet. We wouldn’t want to take a position on any of this, right? That simply wouldn’t be objective.
Post election, the main thought I had was: “Who’s going to stop them?” As things wend their way through the courts - so many things, so many courts - the answer to my question is, probably no one. In the mean time, offices close. People are put on administrative leave. Buildings are seized by groups of programmers employed and led by the richest man in the world. Apparently they sleep in their offices and are going to transfer the social security administration’s codebase off COBOL in three months. Among the disasters, large and small, the slow destruction of IMLS is a small one: less than .0046% of the federal budget. They (the madman with the sharpie, the madman with the chainsaw, the madwoman lying constantly on the news, take your pick) argue that eliminating it is part of the larger plan. The federal government has grown too big, they say, too unwieldy. They are dismantling it piece by piece in order to bring efficiency.
Here in California, the funds received from IMLS are administered by the California State Library (I believe this is similar in other states). The California State Library used that money for different things: program grants were the largest, and also things like training and working with vendors to offer statewide access to databases. One time the state library gave me $70,000 for a workforce development program. Another time I was tasked with spending $200,000 for a mobile lab. My favorite grants were small ones: $5,000 to offer craft programs, which we pivoted to buying craft kits once the libraries paused public programming during the early COVID months. Another $5,000 to offer legal programs where lawyers came in to discuss different subjects. And those are just grants I worked on directly. I know librarians who offered financial literacy programs, created “welcome baby” kits with books for hospitals to give to new parents, offered digital resources like free ebooks, expanded collections, created programs for veterans. Kelly Jensen at Bookriot, an always indispensable resource on fuckery, compiled lists from various states on what the loss of IMLS funds will mean for their communities.
And that’s just libraries, and that’s just IMLS. This morning, staff reporting to work at Health and Human Services are finding out by swiping their badges at their offices if they are still working or if they have been placed on leave or fired. The people who check our food for lead, the people who create programs to expand health services in all parts of the country, are now “reduced,” dispensed with. The thing about the IMLS funds is people will push towards hyperbole, fretting about library closures, but it’s more likely just more of the same cuts and gradual loss of resources we have come to expect from all public services, somehow. Somehow it’s normal that teachers buy their own supplies. Someday it will be normal that despite farmers growing more food than they can sell in the US, we won’t ship that food overseas for humanitarian aid, or the medicine, or the doctors. We will tolerate the gradual increase in listeria outbreaks; we will not bat our eyes at the forever chemicals in the water (after all, they’re already there!). This makes it easier, one day, to dispense with the “public good” altogether. After all, if people stop going to the library because it never has the programs or books they need, then who cares if it closes? So it goes.
It sounds like a demoralizing note to end on, and it is! It is a demoralizing time. The real question is, will demoralization lead to action? Will these outrages eventually be answered for? One can only hope.
Recommended
Normally I put the song link at the end but what if Everclear had a banjo? I love this song deeply and unironically and every time I hear it I remember it was on the Clear Channel list of songs not to play immediately after 9/11, and I marvel.
The Rumpus has been purchased by Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman. Seems good!! My essay was featured in the Rumpus two owners ago. Time flies when the arts are constantly scrambling to remain afloat.
Meanwhile, this is what keeps me afloat:
Anyway, have a good Tuesday, see you in two weeks, and remember: you don’t have to ask for permission to take more than one mint at the counter. You can just grab a whole handful of those suckers.
Love,
The nailbiter.