Dear Editor:I applaud your consistent dedication and journalistic vision as a conduit for community affairs, political issues that impact the neighborhoods, and of course, up to the minute Chicago Public Library watchdog coverage.
In the interest of community news and political issues, I note that, with your exception, letters to the editor generally do not take entrenched city institutions to task, even when they are in desperate need of an infusion of truth and change, an example being the fifth floor of City Hall. I discovered recently, one does not have to venture downtown to stumble across an arrogantly diseased dinosaur. Sometimes there's one right in your own neighborhood.
It has been my experience that municipal employees view the public that is their livelihood and work product as encroaching on their personhood, time and soul, and use some very creative though hostile detachment mechanisms to mentally divorce themselves while still physically collecting a salary and benefits.
Why there are no avenues of redress/remedies when the other part of a dying equation is your local public library?
It is remarkable to note that another library highlights my example, in that Commissioner Mary Dempsey has bizarrely elected to force out Leah Steele, a veteran, warm, dedicated, civic-minded librarian at Sulzer, and leave in static necrosis the director and staff at Merlo Branch.
Even if you overlook (and a regular patron can not fail to note at least in passing let alone overlook) how much money is not being spent on materials and services (and in this case the commissioner's estimation of the value and mentality of the people of Lake View), you cannot help but note that the adult reference librarians are homogeneously and psychotically enmeshed in burned-out abreaction, as though all of a piece and still yet singularly professionally schizophrenic, wiping and taping, directing and shelving, parroting referrals ad infinitum to anything, anywhere, just away, making the odd informational concession in a rare lucid moment, before lapsing into biblio-coma, enforced by armed security.
Due to the patriarchal and bureaucratic tradition of the library, (hushed whispers, police presence, fines, posted regs, exorbitantly priced services fees, confiscated credentials/property to have access to materials/ information that is never updated) its bureaucracy is now institution. I have been advised that Col. Harlan Sanders of KFC Fame is alive, quoted geographic data from 1962, and sworn at as response to patron request.
The library as an institution is not at all for patron resource access, but rather, much like healthcare, run strictly by and for librarians, at their whim and their perception of the established bureaucracy.
God forbid a patron would have the audacity to intrude on biblio-coma.
I know it's a radical concept but disgust with service providers is not a reason to leave them. Disgust is a wake up call that the situation is in desperate need of your help, not your exit.
I know that because my second verse is same as the first. Visitors are unable to move the reference librarian at the desk past a dichotomous "Hello, may I help you" constantly 180-ing to to: "I don't know," "We don't have a Studs Terkel book."
Hello! Paging Studs Terkel. Time for another field visit, to Lake View this time.
And: "Sorry, I've already answered that (unanswered) question." I consulted a copy of an association resource book, circa 1998, which was conscientiously dated 1998, piece-meal, at each entry. This is the same tiny necrotic mindset that proudly features a 1990 beautifully bound set of Martindale-Hubbel legal directories that does not list Johnnie Cochran.
Hello! Paging Johnnie Cochran. Yes. I'll be doing that personally, thanks.
I moved my debacle to the Internet (net saving=new library. Branch library (new) $7,000,000).
The vintage memorial shrines to Mike Royko and the mayor are items of municipal morbidity, not vitality. The much-ballyhooed weeding campaign spewed into a PR circus following the ouster of Leah Steele should be expanded to include obsolete staff as well as media in the stacks. The Merlo staff is not only foot bound but necrotically blighted, to where they do not so much need a Martha Stewart-type savior, but a Jack Kevorkian to put them, and us, out of our separate misery.
Pardon me digressing - how silly of me, but I seem to remember one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is the sweet and gentle caress of a foot on the throat of the media. I seem to remember being guaranteed the right of informational access somewhere in 1776. But then, although they had it back then, they didn't know it was possible to fabricate yet more creative definitions of the concept of professional prostitution.
I don't care if you use library services—we all pay taxes for them, and they should be there, body & soul, 24 hours, for those of us who do. I have no urban paranoia.
Jan Bowman
Lake View
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