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Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Twelve
Nausea
When I enter my office in the morning, the
first thing I do is to look at the telephone to see if the voicemail
indicator light is blinking. It has been blinking a lot, lately, and
most of the time the message—delivered in a gasping, wheezing
voice—is from a reference librarian calling in sick. The flu bugs
are goin’ around, and we’re juggling the reference desk schedule
trying to maintain some semblance of reliable service. Hey, I told
(begged, pleaded, cajoled) everyone to get a flu shot last fall.
What, aren’t my nagging skills up to the job?
But there’s sick… and there’s sick. If you’re
fortunate, you get past the flu in a week or ten days, or about the
same length of time it takes to fill a somewhat trickier than usual
interlibrary loan request. Then there’s the sickness of the soul
that comes from paying attention to life in these here United
States, a disorder that ranks with that of the main character in
Sartre’s Nausea—the most depressing novel I have ever read.
If you ever start feeling a little bit too good about things, read
Nausea. It will settle your hash into a cold lump in the
bottom of your gut. But then, so does the general run of events in
these days and times.
Lies, Lies, We Can’t Believe a Word He Says
What am I talking about? Oh, well, you know:
Most everything. I could start with the way George W. Bush blatantly
lies about the affirmative action program at my alma mater, the
University of Michigan. With total disregard of fact, Bush, as you
may have noticed, recently characterized the school’s efforts to
achieve some reasonable representation of minority students as a
“quota” system.
Has this man no shame? Is no lie too egregious
to utter for the sake of shoring up what the political pundits like
to call his “base”? (By the way, “Al Qaeda” means “base,” in case
you were wondering.)
The University of Michigan’s affirmative action
program is not a quota system by any stretch of the most fevered
imagination. It involves assigning “points” to applicants based on
various characteristics. The maximum number of points an applicant
can attain is 150. An African-American applicant receives 20 points
for being born that way. Children of alumni get a few points for
being born that way. Athletes get points. Good grades earn more
points than mediocre grades, and so on.
The sorely afflicted white upper-middle-class,
from which UM draws most of its students, gets honked off about
minority group members receiving such special consideration. It
ain’t fair, they whine. Except they don’t say “ain’t.” Why should a
black kid from a crummy downtown high school get such a cushy
advantage in a college application?
Invisible Points
What the whiners prefer to ignore are the
invisible “points” the white children of privilege accrue simply as
a consequence of the accident of birth. Being black is worth 20
points on the UM admission scale. How many “points” is it worth
white applicants to have been born into affluent families? To have
attended excellent suburban public or private schools? To have
enjoyed for years the benefits of supplemental lessons in music,
art, sports, and other activities? To have had lifelong access to
first-rate health care? To have had opportunities for travel and
other forms of cultural enrichment that are totally alien to the
average inner-city kid? To have known from an early age that they
are expected to complete college, and to take their places in the
professional class?
The University of Michigan’s admissions policy
entails a modest effort to help minority students overcome centuries
of institutionalized racism, and to try to give the student body of
the university some meaningful (dare I use the awful word?)
diversity.
Those who claim that racism is merely history,
that as a society we have “gotten over” that little bout of
dyspepsia, I would invite to spend some time prowling the back
streets of Detroit with me (yeah, I do that from time to time,
taking pictures of the ruins), and try to account for the condition
of that city without acknowledging the continuing reality of racism.
And then join George W. Bush, that self-made man who never had an
advantage in his life that he didn’t earn through his own hard work,
in bleating about how “unfair” the University of Michigan’s
admissions policy is.
Do You Copy?
Thanks. I feel better now. I’ve been steaming
about Bush’s defaming my old school since the day he uttered his big
lie. One of his big lies. Now I can move on--to questions of money.
If you work in a library supported to any
extent by public funds, you’re probably dealing with the same sorts
of happy matters as our crew. How do we provide service with money
that doesn’t exist? Thanks to a decade of fiscal mismanagement by
the administration of former governor John Engler, the state of
Michigan is searching for pennies at the back of its socks drawer,
and is slicing and dicing the budget from top to bottom.
Well, yes, according to news I heard while
shaving this morning, our state legislators are all getting fixed up
with new photocopiers, at $12,000 each. We wouldn’t want the poor
dears at our state asylum for the helpless to have to share a
machine down the hall, would we? Nevertheless, the rest of us who
rely in some way on public funds are trying to live with an
austerity that promises to be here for some time to come. At my
library, we’re looking at cutting hours of service, canceling
periodical subscriptions, laying off student assistants and
assigning their work to librarians, not filling open positions, and
trooping off as a group to the commercial blood donation facility
down the street.
OK, we’re leaving the last one for next year’s
budget, which will probably be even worse than this year’s. And you
know what? We’re lucky. We’re not in California. Thanks to donors
who recognize the value of education, we also have endowment income
that allows us to provide a healthy roster of online databases for
our users. Things could be a lot worse, and in many libraries they
are.
George W’s plan, of course, will fix
everything. Tax cuts for the rich. That’s the ticket. Oh, and a nice
war, too. And some patriotic new legislation that will help the
Ashcroft Brigade nip un-American activities in the bud.
Nausea, anyone?
Graphic by Karen McGinnis
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A column from
Grant
Burns ("Uncle Frank")
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