FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Angus Take House

Worst Take of the Week: We Can Learn From Dictators Vs. Replace Libraries With Amazon

Two takes that just can't wait to push us towards full dystopia.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo) / Amazon distribution centre in Leipzig (Bernhard Classen / Alamy Stock Photo) 

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What’s the story? The rise of egotists, autocrats and “strong-men” leaders threatening across the global political sphere.
Reasonable Take: Hopefully the rise of the strong-man is some sort of end-point supernova for toxic masculinity.
Turkey Dinosaurs: We should try this in the UK!

Advertisement

Clare Foges here, Times columnist, Christian beat poet and one-time David Cameron speech-writer, with a riveting read about how the autocratic big boys might be onto something. Writing in the comment pages of Conservative Britain’s “sensible” newspaper, Foges reckons leaders like Putin, Erdoğan, and Duterte are politicians who “combine unedifying views with an ability to deliver on the issues that matter to their voters”. Opening with a dig at Barack Obama – who she calls the Elton John of oratory, criticising his words as “old feelgood tunes” – the piece goes on to celebrate the, erm, single-mindedness of dictators.

Listing her favourite strong-men, like a Youtuber listing their “Top Five Kills from Games of Thrones Season 6”, Foges praises everyone from Trump to Xi Jinping for “boosting national pride” by being “unburdened by self-doubt” – that most undignified of qualities: introspection. Celebrating their “speed and decisiveness”, she bemoans the British political system which is “painfully slow”, and “constrained by parliamentary arithmetic and the need for consensus.” For real, I’m not fucking about, she actually describes our political system as being held back by “the need for consensus”.

The Creep of Fascism

She has a particular soft spot, it seems, for “The Trump of the East”, President Duterte of the Philippines. Describing how his war on drugs “may have painted the streets of Manila red and earned condemnation abroad,” she argues that “Duterte never tried to sugar-coat his intentions (he once said he would kill his own children if they took drugs) and in government he has followed through.” She goes on to point out that, despite the bloodbath, “The ‘Build, Build, Build’ infrastructure programme will spend $180 billion building six airports, nine railways, 32 roads and more.”

Advertisement

Obviously, a cursory read of even the first two paragraphs makes it clear that what this piece essentially amounts to is an augmentation of the “say what you like about Mussolini, but at least he made the trains run on time” maxim. In fact, the comparison is so glaringly obvious, Foges attempts a piss-weak self-aware nod, adding the detail that “bold leadership does not excuse brutality.” What she fails to mention is that actually, Mussolini didn’t make the trains on time. Improvements to Italy’s railways during the 1920s were implemented before Mussolini came to power, and besides, most people who were alive during his leadership agree that the railways were unreliable for the majority of that time anyway. While this might sound like smug pedantry, it exposes the whole strong-man hero worship for what it is: mythologising.

As VICE’s home affairs editor Simon Childs has pointed out this week, while this may seem like the irrelevant ramblings of a hyper-conservative Tory, Foges is not alone. Alarmingy this week I was forced to choose between Foges’ article, or the tweets of the Tory MEP who called for treason law in the UK to be expanded to include anyone who is pro-EU. It’s not a good feeling: coming to decide which is the “worst take of the week” and having two scarily authoritarian statements from ostensibly mainstream political figures to choose between.

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? The struggle to define public libraries in the modern world!
Reasonable Take: The appetite for physical books might change, the need for public space for learning will not!
Beef Bezos: Libraries are okay, sure, but you know what’s really good… you know what the world really needs more of? Amazon Dot Com baby!

Advertisement

You know a take is bad when you return to read it again a few days after it first dropped and you’re greeted with big fat 404. Professor Panos Mourdoukoutas has received exactly this treatment for his short but punchy treatise on why libraries suck and Amazon rules. Forbes were clearly so displeased with the backlash this excoriating takedown of libraries received they nuked the whole thing, but luckily, on the internet, the past is never forgotten, so here is the gist, as retrieved by an internet archiving service:

“There was a time local libraries offered the local community lots of services in exchange for their tax money… The modern local library still provides these services, but they don’t have the same value they used to.”

Interesting professor, but what do you suggest we do?

“Of course, there’s Amazon Books to consider… Amazon Books is a chain of bookstores that does what Amazon originally intended to do; replace the local bookstore…. Amazon has provided something better than a local library without the tax fees. This is why Amazon should replace local libraries. The move would save taxpayers money and enhance the stockholder value of Amazon all in one fell swoop.”

Did you hear that “wooooooosh” sound? That was the sound of local libraries being replaced, the taxpayers being saved money, and the bottomless pockets of Jeff Bezos being filled in one fell swoop. Seriously, what a huge statement that is: to resign libraries to the dustbin of history while celebrating the enhancement of Amazon’s stockholder value as an upshot. Yesterday Amazon posted record profits of $2.5 billion but maybe we should give them a helping hand by doing away with public libraries. It only seems fair.

Advertisement

What the professor has mainly betrayed here is a basic grasp of what a library is. If you replace a library with an Amazon superstore, you’re not replacing a different kind of library. You are demolishing a library and building a shop. You may as well build a Halfords. A library is not a shop – their purposes are entirely different.

Yet on a broader level, there’s a real lack of understanding as to what a library is on a more specific, day to day level. Anyone who thinks a library is a stuffy building full of a creaking ledgers and academics has clearly never been in one, or only ever watched the beginning of Ghostbusters. To declare a brief, personal investment, my dad is a librarian and I can honestly say he spends more time helping people photocopy immigration documents, or negotiating with alcoholics who’ve fallen asleep in the behind the microfilm reader than he does thumbing through priceless first editions.

There’s no pretending libraries in the UK haven’t got a struggle ahead of them to adapt, but adaptation is the answer. Libraries don’t just provide books, they provide centres for civic life, and I’m afraid that’s something not even Jeff Bezos can drone in from a warehouse.

PRIME CUT: Say what you like about Mussolini but at least he built good public libraries!

@a_n_g_u_s