The dismantling of Occupy Wall Street’s library is a metaphor for how our culture is policed.
It would appear that the New York Police Department has finally jumped the shark. One day after the eviction of Occupy Wall Street, the image that has shocked the world most profoundly — and I mean image in a purely theoretical sense, since a solid wall of state heavies, now part-financed by JP Morgan Chase, stopped the press getting near enough to take photos — was of police and sanitation workers tearing up the tent of the encampment’s extensive library, and reportedly tossing the books into dumpster trucks. I mean, books.
Who destroys books? Is this a Ray Bradbury novel? Is their new tactic to ape the semiotics of fascism to such a point of cliché that comment is impossible?
I mean, books. Thousands of books. Books of politics, books of poetry, rare and precious books, books that the young, the strange and the curious had shared and treasured and pored through for guidance and diversion over the two months of the Liberty Plaza occupation . If police were looking to evict the Occupy Movement with pantomime bastardry, they could at least have done something a bit original. Like, say, pepper-spraying a pregnant woman.
Even in this digital age, where text is cheap and people’s movements are orchestrated online, there is something about books. Books are important. Books make us better. Books are about learning, about sharing, about stories. There is something in the lizard-brain of human civilisation, something in the superego of the species that drove us down from the trees and into the agora that abhors the destruction of books. The gorge rises. You know it’s deeply, horribly wrong ten seconds before you remember why.
When the news of the vandalism of the Occupy Wall Street library came through, Twitter was alight with outrage. Even the most dribblingly obnoxious right-wing troll finds it hard to argue when people tell him trashing books is bad karma. Such was the uproar that the Mayor’s office tweeted a photo of what appeared to be part of the OWS library, stacked in a sanitation department garage, ready for protesters to pick up on Wednesday, if they were polite about it.
The image looks like nothing other than a hostage photo, which is exactly what it is: here is your library, more or less intact. We will give it back if you hand over your collective future without argument. Just leave it in the trashcan on the corner of Wall Street.
It occurs to me that the impounding of books is a subtler and more appropriate metaphor for how culture is policed in modern times than the burning or destruction of books. Across the developed world, as austerity programmes kick in to finance the cataclysmic self-indulgence of the super-rich, it is libraries, schools and universities that are being priced out of the reach of ordinary people.
Higher education fees are soaring, public funding of universities and schools is being gutted, and the private sector is being invited in to place more branded locks on the doors of our institutions of learning. In Britain, even the libraries are being closed down. They’re not burning books; not precisely. They’re just tossing them where no one without means can get to them. They are kidnapping books.
When the Occupy Wall Street librarians went to pick up their books, as promised, they found that several thousand appeared to be missing, and many reportedly had been destroyed, along with personal belongings and the library’s reference section. Appeals went out online to re-stock the library. The NYPD, however, have been hovering with menace around the fledgling collection in Zucotti Park, where anything that looks even vaguely like an occupation is now forbidden by order of the city. They have already confiscated a second load of books, and a third is being accumulated
As it happens, however, I visited the Occupy Wall Street Library about six hours before it was dismantled, and I talked to the librarians, and I borrowed a book. In the process, I inadvertently saved the volume from Brookfield’s dumpster trucks. The book is Martin Luther King’s Where Do We Go From Here?. In it, the great civil rights leader writes that:
One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.
I shall be returning the book to the Occupy Wall Street Library with the suspicion that the social imagery of this people’s movement has very nearly jumped the shark.
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