Stupid Books

In a certain episode of The Simpsons, Lisa pits Bart against a hamster in an intelligence test. One of the rounds involves getting Bart to try to eat a cupcake, which Lisa places on a bookshelf for him to discover. Bart notices the cupcake as he walks by glaring at the bookshelf and muttering "Stupid books." One often gets the feeling that our august president reacts similarly in the face of humankind's accumulated knowledge, especially since some of his most notable mistakes were made by much smarter people well before he ever got to office - everyone thought the lessons of engaging in precarious voluntary wars halfway across the world had been discredited until Bush showed up.

But Bush's apparent contempt for the Enlightenment (see below) is insufficient to stop him from seeking his own presidential library. The presidential library is kind of a funny tradition, because why should every president have his own library? Why not a regular museum? Or a generic archive? I guess it's just one of those things: lions have prides, whales have pods, presidents have libraries. As for the Enlightenment, think back to some of the central aims of that project and ask yourself how Bush is doing: integrating religion and state, replacing trained bureaucrats with private warlords, defining science and truth as dependent upon who is in power instead of universal principles, etc.

I would be remiss in my account of the relationship between Bush and books if I didn't mention that Bush was reportedly in a heated reading contest this summer with staff brainiac Karl Rove. Never mind that most of us grew out of reading contests before we had grown out of braces, it still seems a little far fetched to imagine a moron like Bush picking up Camus, as he is alleged to have done. Despite a lack of hard evidence (something which has never stopped Bush before), I am going to go ahead and aver that he is lying in almost every detail of the reading contest. With that declaration safely behind me, Bush's lies about his reading fit right in with his general pattern of lying about everything, thus embodying his disrespect for the orderly transmission of knowledge.

It gets better, though - the library is apparently intended to be attached to a new think tank at SMU, to be modeled after Stanford's Hoover Institute. Ignoring for the moment that it would more rightly be called a thoughtless tank, it's pretty scary to think of serious scholars deliberately trying to emulate this president. Alas, this is the nefarious evil of the conservative movement: establishing the intellectual infrastructure to dominate the debate. It's basically one more way for the people with money to make sure everybody thinks how they want them to. For a political ideology that values intellect so little (see also: candidacy of George W. Bush), it makes more than a little sense that one prong of the attack on truth should be bullying legitimate intellectuals from within the academy. Fortunately, I think it's going to take more than a library/tank to rescue Bush's horrendous legacy.