If the White House wants to fire the librarian of Congress, it can. But it was interesting to have recently had the experience of meeting this dynamic, dedicated person, and feeling so proud that she was our librarian of Congress, then reading the White House’s sloppy, juvenile rationale for her dismissal; it gave me a visceral feeling for just how diseased this administration really is.
I was the recipient of the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction in 2023. Dr. Carla Hayden struck me then as energetic, engaged and utterly dedicated to the work of the library. One of the things Dr. Hayden and I bonded over was the idea that knowledge is power, that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are.
The White House, tossing out nonsense from its meager box of repetitive right-wing auto-defenses, claimed on Friday that Dr. Hayden had, “in the pursuit of D.E.I.,” done “quite concerning things.” Did it name those things? It did not. It couldn’t have. Putting aside the basic idiocy of being against that position (“What, you value diversity? You think things should be equitable? And that all should be included?”), members of the administration now use “D.E.I.” as a sort of omni-pejorative, deliberately (strategically) leaving its exact meaning vague.
What it seems to mean, to them, is: The accused is a person who is aware that certain groups have had a different experience of American life and who feels that it is part of our intellectual responsibility (and joy) to engage with that history, so as to improve our democracy (that whole “more perfect union” thing). This the administration sees not as healthy intellectual curiosity but as dangerous indoctrination. Indoctrination into what? Truth, history, a realistic engagement with the past, I guess.
The White House also stated, with an inaccuracy that would be comic if it weren’t so sickening, that Dr. Hayden put “inappropriate books in the library for children.” The librarian of Congress doesn’t put books into the library. And presumably, the American people benefit from having access to the widest possible collection of books. Even those American people who are children, who, after all, have parents to decide what is inappropriate.
In the real world, the world of cause and effect, when we tear down the best among us and provide bogus reasons for why we did it, reality will eventually come for us. To behave honorably requires that we be in contact with the truth, to be able to supply honest answers to simple questions. If the White House wanted to part ways with Dr. Hayden, why couldn’t it, without insulting her groundlessly, do so, and then (truthfully) say why? One wonders.
The firing of Dr. Hayden and the inane dissembling that followed represent a kind of diabolical Opposite Day phenomenon: An exceptional person is stupidly tossed aside, and to come up with an explanation the administration turns to its patented Random False Rationale Generator.
When a ship is sinking, there’s value in knowing how fast, and calling it out. When a country is self-sabotaging, ditto. So let me just say it: Shame on the White House. Shame on those who should be stopping this slide into autocracy and aren’t. (I’m looking at you, John Thune, Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio.) Shame on all of us if we let these ignorant purveyors of cruelty reduce this beautiful thing we’ve built over these hundreds of years to a hollow, braying, anti-version of itself.
George Saunders is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “Liberation Day.”
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