penfield | Make a run from the Borders

I may have ranted about this before, but it deserves another spotlight: why don't people appreciate public libraries? This is a place where you can walk in, grab whatever you want and take it home, and all the folks there will do is say "please return it in two weeks." The only requirement is that you wear a shirt. No credit card, collateral or convincing necessary. Where else on earth is such a thing possible? I have friends who are less accomodating than this. And yet, these libraries are practically barren, occupied only by unnaturalized immigrants, 13-year olds and me.

Meanwhile, effete bourgeois latte-sippers loiter in the aisles of Borders and Barnes and Noble, deciding which book will look best on their shelves -- this one, for $18.99, or that one, for $24.99. This is a common testimonial to the bookstore: that it allows you to keep the book, so you don't have to return it. This is a ridiculously dumb argument. First of all, once you've read it, what do you still need it for? Just in case you need to cite "Who Moved My Cheese" in a future research paper? No, it's because people want to display the books prominently in the common areas of their homes, like intellectualist trophies for people who miss the "I Completed Charlotte's Web" certificates they handed out in fourth grade. "But what if I want to read it again?" they ask. Then borrow it again, dummy.

When I bring this up I also hear complaints that library inventories are woefully out of date or sterilized for mass public consumption. In some cases, this may be true. But the other night, I could have checked out with Barack Obama's recent tome "The Audacity of Hope," Elliot Smith's posthumous final CD "From a Basement on the Hill" and the DVD of 2005's "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," which by the way has enough gratuitous violence, obvious nudity and frank depictions of alternative lifestyles to satisfy even the most prurient viewer.

I don't know, maybe my generation has been soured on libraries by our time spent in universities, being condescended to by work-study elitists, falling asleep at oak tables and trying to avoid rogue masturbators in the stacks. (Incidentally, how long before we start seeing rogue masturbators in Borders? Bookstores, unlike libraries, actually have pornography.) Perhaps the idea of libraries is a passé remnant of an era that embraced the notion of extended families, understood that any locality has a vested interest in the edification and culturalization of its citizens, and appreciated the warmer tenets of collectivism and communism. Perhaps today's culture -- or, more to the point, marketplace -- has demonstrated that bloated Americans will enthusiastically pay for things that they can easily get for free (See also: water, bottled.)

Some day, perhaps soon, libraries are going to start closing their doors due to lack of funding, or interest, or both. That's going to be a sad day -- for me, at least.