Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number Seventeen
Uncle Frank Goes
to the Library, Almost
I meant to go to the library the
other day, specifically, on Saturday, January 17, 2004.
I had a bunch of stuff to look up.
Being an orderly librarian, I had my look-up stuff neatly noted and
stacked in a pack of 4 X 6 index cards. Nobody had better accuse
this librarian of having a 3 X 5 mentality! I’m beyond that—an inch
in either direction—but with the payload still small enough to fit
my inside coat pocket so I don’t have to lug around some clunky old
briefcase, backpack, or cord-handled shopping bag with my junk in
it, like the rest of those weary researchers.
My goal: The Detroit Public Library.
I had to be in Detroit anyhow, that day, so it would be easy to
slide by the DPL to score some books. On the 16th, I double-checked
the library’s Website. Yup, no problem: In spite of tough budget
times, the DPL maintains Saturday hours. Good for it. And good for
it, too, for keeping in its fiction collection some books that are
mighty hard to find elsewhere. Those are the ones I wanted. My
gratitude ranneth over.
A Confusion of Dates
The 17th dawned (“gloomed” would be
more accurate) with a howling wind, flying snow, and warnings on the
radio about dangerous roads.
No problem. Uncle Frank eats
dangerous roads for breakfast. But I had to double-check an item in
the DPL catalog…. I fired up our faithful Chinese computer, and
Netscaped to the DPL homepage.
And goggled (not Googled) in
disbelief at the prominent message on the page: The DPL would be
closed—that’s KLOSED, with a kapital K—on Jan. 17 for Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s birthday.
Was somebody messin’ with Uncle
Frank, or what? Jan 19 is the holiday (for government workers, if no
one else). Jan 15 is MLK’s birthday. So why was the library closed
on the 17th? Huh? Are you telling me, in sincere sincerity, that MLK
would think it a good idea to close a library, any library, on any
day, in his name? That he would want to deny people, of whatever
hue, a day’s opportunity to pursue truth, justice, and the American
Way in the nation’s libraries? Or even that he’d want to deny the
poor wretches of the street—the winos, the headcases, the homeless
and lost—a chance on a rotten winter’s day to warm their pitiful
hides for an hour while nodding over a newspaper in the library
reading room?
I hardly think it.
Curious Celebrations
Yeah, well… Closing
libraries--denying access to seekers of truth as a function of
"celebrating" MLK's legacy--is only one of the odd phenomena
attached to his memory. Another rapidly burgeoning manifestation of
curious celebration is the "a day on, not a day off" movement. In
this well-meaning homage to King, organizations around the country
encourage their members to put in a day, or a half-day, of volunteer
work at some local social service agency. One might, for example,
sort incoming clothes at a Salvation Army facility, or help prepare
meals at a soup kitchen. Presumably this activity honors King and
his principles.
How, precisely? Where in MLK's work
(I have searched, without finding) does he advocate helping
perpetuate the status quo by volunteering to work in the
organizations that help maintain it?
Organizations like the Salvation
Army and soup kitchens and homeless shelters are indispensable
crutches for the very social system whose abuses and injustices they
seek to ameliorate. They are part and parcel of the problem; they do
nothing to address the underlying causes that necessitate their
existence.
Which is not to say that there is
anything wrong with volunteering to work in such places. I've done
it myself, spending Saturday mornings in a soup kitchen in a poor
neighborhood in Flint, Michigan.
No, there's nothing wrong with such
work--but to engage in it thinking that one is somehow responding to
MLK's radical analysis of American life is errant. Such volunteer
efforts work nothing but cosmetic relief. MLK's philosophy, focusing
on racial and economic justice, non-violence, anti-militarism and
anti-imperialism, addresses fundamental American assumptions and
behaviors, not secondary matters such as volunteering to sweep the
shop floor after the daily American routine of capitalist greed,
abuse of labor, exploitation of the poor, corporate welfare, and
global arrogance has strewn the quotidian human wreckage across its
surface.
Boiling It Down to Pap
America is gifted at boiling down
great ideas to sentimental and non-threatening stuff. To pap for the
masses, as one of my long-ago bosses liked to say. MLK's radicalism,
which challenged the nation to look into its soul and change its
evil ways, has been diluted to a pallid shadow of its original
substance. (And has also, such a surprise, been appropriated and
warped by the political Right as an excuse not to pursue the very
kinds of systemic cures that King advocated.) What can one expect?
When MLK's own family sells the rights to his image to corporate
advertisers, why would we anticipate any other outcome?
If MLK were still with us, can
anyone doubt what his positions would be on the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, the systematic abuse of the nation's poor, the
contempt for human rights endemic in the Bush administration, or any
number of other actions that spring from the nation's fundamental
assumptions about itself?
In his lifetime, the state saw MLK
as its enemy. His hounding by the FBI as a "threat" to the country
is common knowledge. But, to be sure, MLK was a threat. He
threatened the business-as-usual attitude that makes American
imperialism, and soup kitchens in Flint, Michigan, possible and
necessary. If he were alive today, the state would still see him as
its enemy, for the same reasons it did in 1968.
And good-hearted volunteer work,
regardless of whatever temporary relief it affords those crushed by
the system that King opposed, does nothing to change that system. It
does not honor King's memory by taking up his work; in an
inescapably dreary sense, it capitulates before the forces of
darkness that King sought to dispel.
A Day Off, Not a Day On
In my sputtering dismay at finding
the Detroit Public Library closed on the day I had planned to
visit, I sent an inquiry to the library’s e-mail reference address,
suggesting that it might not be such an apropos idea to close the
place to honor King’s memory. I received a polite reply informing me
that the closing was the result of a labor agreement, part of an
arrangement, apparently, to assure that everyone would get a day off
for King’s birthday. The DPL main library would be open on the 19th,
its branches closed.
Anyone can understand wanting a day
off, not a day on. I think it could be better managed; a skeleton
staff could probably keep just about any library open; those
reporting for duty could take off a day of their choice at a later
date. No? Probably not. That would be too complicated. It might
even, oh, of course it would—prompt some people to claim that not
closing the libraries on this occasion would show “disrespect” to
King’s memory.
I’d like to see MLK’s reaction, if
he could know that libraries are closing in his name, and that
volunteer work is being passed off as an inspired response to his
message.
I think he would say that some
people have missed the point.
By a mile or two.
#
Coming Soon: I Hate Him! I
Hate Him! I Hate Him! (In which Uncle Frank Struggles to Express His
True Feelings About George W. Bush)
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Graphic by Karen McGinnis |
