No 2: Lifetime Librarians and Top Gun Pilots
Put the word bureaucrat next to the word rebel. Who is going to be the hero in an American story?
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
Old Truck Good Coffee started during the Biden Administration and the run-up to a most uncertain election. We wanted to tell evocative stories of the interchanges (we avoid calling them “divides”) we see between America’s urban and rural spaces.
Now, we find ourselves…here. OTGC is called to speak to this moment from the human hearts all across these interchanges. This is part of our series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.1
Lesson 2: Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side.
In every Top Gun film, it is important for Tom Cruise's character — call sign Maverick — to request a fly by of the tower and for the air traffic controller to refuse. The rebel defies the institution and does it anyway. That's America, right? I think by weight, volume and flavor America is more Ardyce Swift the lifetime small-town librarian.
Top Gun is America because the air traffic controller works well. And the library. And the youth sports league. There is a need for Mavericks every once in a while, but there is a need for air traffic controllers every day. They make an America where not only Mavericks are safe.
In the movie, the rebel is the hero. Turn off the screen and look around you. Bureaucrats and institutionalists hold up culture, foster our young and old, and maintain order so that there is structure for the hallowed rebel to ricochet across. When they do their jobs well, institutions seem immense, permanent, and not in need of defense. They become obstacles for the rebels.
But what you see as permanent has only been permanent for your short life. Even what our grandparents report to us is flawed, informed by their own selection of a story. Institutions rise, and they can fall.
When I hear Tim Snyder tell me to defend an institution, I feel called to choose institutions of shared learning. It is visible in my home town as the library, now in a new building.
Thus far in my lifetime the institutions of learning are battered but have held. Courts and Miranda Rights and youth sports and libraries and public schools used to feel assured. They do not anymore. They used to feel like mountains in the distance. They had been there before me and will outlast me. All without any effort on my part. Now I see that all that holds me up requires of us to hold it up in turn.
Miranda rights are less than 10 years older than I am.
Before the new building, the Redmond Library was in an impossibly small building. Since she was there all the time, I imagined that Ardyce Swift lived in the stacks. She was the librarian for decades, having grown up here herself. She read storytime to me. She slid Dr. Seuss, Jack London, Conan Doyle across the counter to me. Then Robert Heinlein and (weird to think on now) L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction. I managed to dodge Dianetics and Scientology even though I consumed thousands of pages of his fiction.
When the controversy over The Satanic Verses roiled, Ardyce slid Salman Rushdies’s novel in hardcover my way. She gave me a stern look and said the only editorial comment I can recall from her, "I don't know why anyone would read this." Yet she gave it to a small town teenage boy who understood nothing of Islam, London, or much of anything.2
That was a bureaucrat-hero. She stood for learning, even learning something she didn't believe in.
Modern Ardyce Swifts have taken their budgets and transformed the artifacts in the libraries to serve the mission that they chose; getting learning into a community. Thousands of times a day they are doing the equivalent of what Ardyce did for me when she slid book after book into the hands of a growing Joel.
I appreciate the role of the rebel, but Ardyce Swift, the Deschutes County Library, and institutions of learning have done a whole lot more for me than all the Mavericks ever will. I will do what I can to support them.
Libraries, along with other institutions that have held me up like courts of law and youth soccer leagues, have endured a generation or two. I have lived in the illusion that they can not be destroyed. Snyder is right. They can be dissolved. They require defense.
I don't know that the editorialized snarl from Ardyce about The Satanic Verses was the best look. I am realizing that institutions are constituted by people. who include their own opinions and flaws in their efforts. They tend to be a more resilient type of person, sustaining public critique and private complaint. It is part of what makes them durable as bureaucrats and as institutions. Emotionally fragile bullies don’t have a place in our institutions.
It would be a mistake to paint our bureaucrats as perfect. They are not, and they are made better by critique. There is here yet another important craft of Democracy; artfully defend and critique simultaneously.
I am writing this in the midst of the May off-year election. There are no national concerns on the ballot in the May off-year election, so turnout is low. We are voting on school boards, fire and road maintenance board members, a bond to fund the pool — and a bond for the county library.
I am sending postcards to voters, realizing that these bonds are asking for money out of their pockets at a time when we are all worried about what will be left in that pocket tomorrow.
But this institution needs defending, and this is how I can do it. To have a Maverick, you need a flourishing Ardyce Swift.
To help us all feel less alone and more connected, I would love it if you left a comment on what institutions you are called to and how you are considering defending it.
Catch up on our take on Snider’s 20 Lessons at Old Truck Good Coffee.
For a chilling experience, catch John Lithgow’s dramatic reading of the 20 lessons.
I was able to go to college and read ever deeper into hard, sticky topics. After benefiting from learning built on what Ardyce made available to me, I now am absolutely certain that I know nothing about Islam, London, or much of anything
...and I just checked out Satanic Verses. I had forgotten how a fatwa was issued against Rushdie for that.