Charades at the library

HERE WE go again. Call it games public officials play. This time the far-flung Central Arkansas Library System, a great and growing public service in the very center of the state, seems to have chosen charades.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember some years back when the library announced there would be open nominations and even a popular vote on the names chosen to engrave atop the new, restored main library in downtown Little Rock? What a good idea. The names would honor not only the great minds of the past but the principle of democracy-another contribution of classical Greek civilization.

The names at the height of the new old structure would represent a literary, scientific and political canon of their own, like many of the volumes therein. Names proclaim values. And the practice of engraving them atop public temples-and a library is a kind of temple-used to be common in great American cities and on great American campuses.

But all that was before Political Correctness became the chief god in the contemporary pantheon of educational deities. And names once honored-you know, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, that bunch-were dismissed as just a collection of Dead White Males by our advanced thinkers.

It was refreshing to think of those old and honored names being revived on a contemporary public building. Imagine that: Athens Redux in the heart of what used to be just a crumbling, largely abandoned warehouse district, the kind of dark and empty urban scene that might have come out of some film-noir. (“Gotham City at Night: Calling Batman and Robin!”)

But now a gleaming new temple of learning stands there in the midst of a whole urban revival. What a bright, welcome change. From night to day again. Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth, for each brings out the other. And the people would choose the names to go atop the library in a free and open election after a wide-ranging discussion that might have been taking place in ancient Athens’ agora . . . .

DREAM ON. It all turned out be just another charade, or mainly one. Because it was just a setup-a rigged game in which the popular vote really didn’t count in the end. It seems the head librarian, the smooth-talking but gritty-thinking boss of the library system, the superficially but only superficially open Bobby Roberts had it all fixed. Instead of following the popular will, Czar Bobby would see to it that the Names in Stone would be chosen in decisive part by the usual quota system. (But always call it Diversity).

That way, no ethnic or racial or other group/interest would go unrepresented. Greatness would be determined at the Director’s will. Or whim. All the Great Names chosen for this local pantheon would be equal in his brave new world-it was just that some, to borrow an Orwellian phrase, would be more equal than others.

No one can say that the Central Arkansas Library System doesn’t represent the times; it’s just that the times are a little decadent. Cicero would know all about that: O Tempora O Mores! That would have been an apt inscription to go with this idiosyncratic, not to say a little silly, list of Great Names-if anyone still bothers to actually read them.

Fast forward to 2013. This time a new name is to be chosen for the system’s new children’s library. And once again public participation is oh-so-earnestly invited.

What a surprise it would be if the name chosen, once again by Bobby Roberts, old and new Clintonoid that he is, would be-hold your breath-The Hon. Hillary Rodham Clinton!

Maybe this new library should be named for her. Or maybe not. But such a discussion may not matter now. Because it’s hard to avoid the impression that once again the game has been rigged, that the People’s Choice has already been made, cut and dried. And, needless to say, not by the people.

According to Bobby Roberts, the putative honoree has already said she’d agree to be so honored. And the Director hasn’t mentioned any other choice. He’s said only, in his always impartial way, that this library “would not exist if it were not for her and her husband.”

Mr. Roberts’ impartiality in this matter might be questionable but never, never his loyalty and gratitude to his old patrons. For he was part of Governor Clinton’s administration and remains a steadfast FOB. Which is certainly his prerogative. But any pretense that he’s unbiased in this matter would only be another part of the charade.

The public is being told that the library’s board of trustees is now accepting comments about the name chosen for the new children’s library preparatory to its meeting at high noon Thursday at the new library on 10th Street. So let the games begin. Or rather continue. Let’s just say that, as a librarian, Bobby Roberts is a great politician.

WHY INVOLVE the public in the public’s business anyway? Why not just go through the motions instead of having a civic and civil, educational and elevating, public discussion? Followed by a fair and free election? If the library’s board of trustees has already made up its mind, or had its mind made up for it by the library’s head honcho, what would be the point? Except maybe to add a little hypocrisy to a lot of autocracy. Not that anybody is fooled.

What’s in a name anyway? What difference does it make if a public library or a public school is named for a power player or a poet, a philanthropist or a pop idol? Does it matter whether a public library in Little Rock is named for Hillary Rodham Clinton or Adolphine Fletcher Terry, the Little Rock Nine or Orval Faubus, Booker T. Washington or Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? Do the names a society chooses to honor reflect its whole system of values, or are they just ornamentation? Which names in the news or in our history unite us, and which divide us? And why even discuss such things when our betters have already decided them for us?

To pose a question that can be either an honest inquiry or just another cynicism piled atop all the others in a cynical age: “What difference at this point does it make?”-Hillary Clinton, Jan. 23, 2013. Say, maybe that’s the quotation that belongs over the main library. It would sum up this whole charade.