The Invisible Library

Reality has been put on hold this week so that everyone can blather on about the Democratic Convention, so I guess it’s a good thing that I’m going on vacation. This means posting will be light to non-existant for the next week, unless Kevin decides to take over while I’m gone. He may or may not keep everyone up to date on what’s happening in Convention Land or in Archivist Land.

To while away the hours until I return, I’ve posted a short story on an adjacent page. Read The Black Doll and have a good week.

See you in August!

Yahoo! News:

“‘We are on high, high red alert for the protection of our civil liberties,’ said Claryce Evans, national coordinator for United Peace and Justice.” From inside of a cage surrounded by chainlink fencing and razorwire.

Instead of fiddling with extra neunanced color coded warning systems, United Peace and Justice should have, I don’t know, been looking out for protesters being shuffled into pens surrounded by fencing, or something. Anything. I suppose locking the protesters up now just saves time when it comes to arresting them, seeing as how they’ll all be trapped in a confined area, unable to escape.

And this is at the Democratic convention. Can’t wait to see what the Republicans have lined up for New York. Wetnaps pre-doused with tear gas? Or maybe the protesters will line up in orderly fashion for the billyclub beatings, to be held in New Jersey. That way no one has to see the last shreds of our civil liberties being smothered by the Security State.

Baghdad - July 24, 2004

Time is flying here. I can’t believe I have already spent almost three months in the Green Zone. Actually, the Green Zone is now officially called the International Zone. Why the name change? Who knows? Personally, I think it was a poor decision. It helps to undercut the sovereignty that is apparently in existence by implying that the zone is not under Iraqi control but under international or foreign jurisdiction somewhat similar to the foreign concessions in China or the International Zone in Morocco. At least that’s my take on it. It is an area dominated by foreigners who enjoy certain immunities from the local government. What’s in a name? Symbolism. Mere words are of tremendous significance especially when national pride is at stake.

Read the rest.

Scout has a fantastic analysis of the 9/11 Commision report up at And Then…:

It’s a total love song to the evil that emerges the way a ‘personality’ emerges in a machine. A system of moving parts work together, and the minor malfunctions and interactions of these parts, so long as they don’t threaten the machine with complete collapse, go on to form quirks that may not emerge in a machine made in precisely the same way from similar parts. For some, prone to religious analysis of world events, the beautiful quirks become God and the 9-11’s and Iraq War ‘Intelligence Failures’ become the devil. In the end, the war on terror is really a war ‘against evil,’ against the glitches in the machine that cause us harm.

It’s a war on the existential reality of any society that functions on the level of multiple, interacting mechanisms. The 9/11 Report advises patches to the system, whereas the Bush administration has analyzed weaknesses in the system and mistook it for the function of society itself. They’ve called it the devil, and they’ve declared themselves on the side of God, and everyone seems to forget that it is simply a machine, badly in need of repair.

It’s like declaring war on the sun when your air conditioner breaks.

Lucy has a drinking problem. It should be pointed out that this is a bottle full of water, not bleech or anything like that. For some reaosn though she likes it when you squirt the water in her mouth. It’s really weird. Sometimes she’ll bite my ankles until I fetch the water bottle for her.

Archives articles are all over the news this week: the Sandy Berger story, the Archivist of the U.S. story (very well summed up by Keith in a post below), and a piece on the New York Times Op-Ed page this morning “Foolscap And Favored Sons” by Caroline Alexander.

As the Senate Governmental Affairs hearing yesterday began, Sen. Joseph Lieberman marveled, mostly for the audience’s benefit I believe, about the attention that the John Carlin nomination and Allen Weinstein’s pending nomination have garnered.  My response to this episodic hubbub is an echo of a message delivered at College Park by Robert Sink (Center for Jewish History).  Archivists are not well integrated into the nation’s political culture, so when issues of professional concern (disposition of a Governor’s papers, for example) arise then communication and understanding is forced to overcome greater obstacles, perhaps, than other professions that have a more developed relationship with legislators.

I believe that the Society of American Archivists, regional professional organizations, and leading archivists are working to build better methods of professional advocacy, but in the meantime the profession plugs away as best it can.  Individual archivists, I believe, should consider how they can personally and professionally contribute to this needed change.

“Ready access to essential evidence,” is the ringing phrase of the National Archives mission statement and the title of National Archives Strategic Plan 1997-2008, Revised 2003.  This model mission is “the great experiment” of information professionals of all kinds, and the politicians who manage them.   The great experiment requires, in my almost-professional opinion, that the challenges become less mystical.  The challenge that is taking shape for me is to bring better clarity to individuals in three main groups: information professionals, government/non-government groups, and users.

The solution to this situation will take much time and many minds to develop.  I believe the answer lies in part by following the trends in higher education generally (and archival education specifically), by professional archival organizations building a political action network, by building a greater infrastructure among national funding organizations to guide a new kind of investment in the skills and human resources, and of course a public relations strategy that takes our issues to the people–the people who are and who could be our favorite patrons and our biggest supporters.

The current climate is less than ideal.  Politically, we have a presidential adminstration clouded by a reputation of unilateral action and closed governmental processes.  The economy does not send investors a clear signal to take risks, and users are less and less interested in time-consuming research processes and simply interested in pre-packaged information products.

The archivist’s mission is to adapt.  This is not necessarily a threat to our jobs, our values - we as free individuals control those.  This is an opportunity to keep the momentum going, now as we face a potential changing of the guard at the U.S. Archives, but after the change as well.  Good luck one and all!

Jessa Crispin, everyone’s favroite Bookslut, directs us to a fantastic interview with Allen Moore in Salon, in which he has some choice things to say about Reagan, Thatcherism, and the media. But this little bit really struck me:

…My general thought is that yes, it’s depressing, but not unexpected, when this stuff happens. And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms.

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Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they’re perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain’s ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back. To be fair, he was only doing this to demonstrate the futility of expecting leaders and rulers to be able to command the forces of history and the world. But yeah, I tend to think that this conservative backlash that has been going on since the ’70s is the final spasms of a dying creature; history is not moving that way, and no matter how much people dig their heels in and assume this is the 1950s or the Middle Ages, that’s not the truth of the situation. No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don’t make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

I certainly hope Mr. Moore is as spot on about the fall of these Crypto-Fascists as he was with their rise in V for Vendetta.

Yesterday, Kevin and I and a group of archives students from the University went to the Senate Hearing for Allen Weinstein, the Bush Administration’s proposed replacement for Archivist of the United States. The thing is, we already have an Archivist, John Carlin. Why he’s being pushed out and replaced with Weinstein now was the question of the day, as the White House apparently gave no reason at all, to either Carlin or Weinstein for the change. This article form www.GovExec.com sums up the situation nicely:

At least one senator will ask the Bush administration to disclose its reasons for asking the current archivist of the United States, former Kansas Democratic Gov. John Carlin, to resign, before approving his potential successor, Allen Weinstein.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pointed to the White House’s responsibility to provide Congress with an explanation for its decision to dismiss a sitting archivist and urged the other members of the Senate Governmental Affairs committee to join him in his request Thursday at Weinstein’s nomination hearing.

This question is really the big one. “It sticks out so far that you could break it into three pieces and each one would be long enough to goose someone up in the bronx,” as Saul Goodman put it. But since there is no answer for now, all we can do is speculate. So I will.

Sitting there in the audience gave me a clear view of the situation: here was a man with, as Kevin put it, not a single political bone in his body. He seemed generally flustered by the whole affair, and baffled by the Senator’s questions concerning his appointment. As if he never really bothered to think about the hows and why fors of it all.

The Senators, being Good Politicians, fell all over themselves to convey that they each and every one respected Weinstein and thought he was more than qualified for the job (an assessment not shared by my fellow colleagues in the audience. Weinstein had no knowledge of the National Archives and Records Administration’s long term strategic goals, something we students could easily have told him as we’ve all received copies of this document in numerous classes).

Of course, this really wasn’t the real controversy surrounding Weinstein’s nomination in the first place, but a tangential one that points to broader concerns about the Bush Administrations motivations. The real controversy concerning Weinstein has to do with Openness in Government, especially with Executive order 13233, which puts the decision to release presidential papers, not with the Archivist, as a previous law states, but at the whim of the President. And we all know what a fan of Transparency in Government Bush is.

Weinstein told Lieberman no one in the White House had instructed him he would be expected to keep presidential documents secret if he took the position.

If that had been the case, he said, he would not have been interested in the position. “No job is worth my integrity,” said Weinstein, founder of the Center for Democracy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping emerging democracies. “The archivist’s job is to advocate for access.”

But Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said he had trouble reconciling that philosophy with Weinstein’s stated intention to defend the president’s executive order against court challenge.

“I think I know where your heart is, but I want to know where your lawyers will be. If your lawyers are restricting access to the presidential documents, I think you’re on the wrong side,” Durbin said.

At the end of the day, I was not impressed. Not with Weinstein, who strikes me as a rather frail old man, pliable in his politics and personal convictions, and not with the Senators, who really gave Weinstein far more credit than he deserved. But that’s politics for you; an object lesson in how to fall up, scoring promotion based not on what your skills are, but who you know. I’d still like to know who it is that Weinstein knows and who is making the money on this deal. And since Republicans are involved, you know there’s money changing hands, somewhere.

Update: edited for Fnords.

Paul Krugman is, as TBogg points out, increasingly becoming every bloggers go-to guy for biting criticism of BushCo. If you think I’m just blowing purple smoke, check out his new op-ed piece, The Arabian Candidate:

In the original version of ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ Senator John Iselin, whom Chinese agents are plotting to put in the White House, is a right-wing demagogue modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roger Ebert wrote, the plan is to ‘use anticommunist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover.’

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So let’s imagine an update - not the remake with Denzel Washington, which I haven’t seen, but my own version. This time the enemies would be Islamic fanatics, who install as their puppet president a demagogue who poses as the nation’s defender against terrorist evildoers.

Busy day, so no new post. If you’re reading this, you must be halucinating. I’ll have a new short story ready to post soon, so take heart: you may be crazy, but you’re getting new literature out of it.