02/08/07
President Bush's wife may be a librarian by profession, but he's not exactly known for his bookishness. People snickered when he mentioned Camus's The Stranger, with reason. He seems a stranger to high culture, more at home cutting brush than sitting down to tea and French existentialism.
Still, he and his people are planning a whopping, humungous Presidential Library, bigger than all his predecessors.
It's no shock that early plans for its location at Southern Methodist University in Dallas have been protested by faculty and student body.
It may come as some surprise, though, to learn that certain executive orders signed by the president circumscribe the ways presidential papers can be accessed by the public, forever to be controlled by the ex-presidents themselves.
How imperial. How un-republican. America's presidents are public servants, and their papers become public property.
The president could still do the right thing and make a presidential library as a sort of adjunct to his local library in Crawford. That would be neat. Very accessible, very of the people,
which President Bush often seems honestly to be. But how unlikely is that?
What the pyramids were to the ancient pharaohs, these presidential libraries are to modern presidents. All public support, in the form of maintenance of these monstrosities by the National Archives, should stop. We shouldn't have modern temples and tombs to past presidents.
Not unless we get to disembowel them first, put their brains in jars, and ogle at their shrivelled remains.
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