Monday, June 06, 2005

"Stupid White Men...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation."

I haven't read Michael Moore's book Stupid White Men...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. I think I will put this on my list of summer reading.

On another topic, Mr. Gorman, soon-to-be-President of the ALA, shows up in print in the June 2005 issue of Update, the magazine of the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) in the UK. If you've enjoyed reading other recent writings by Gorman, you will no doubt like this one too. "Today, [Gorman] says, the mission of the library and the broad tasks of the librarian ‘have far more in common with the libraries and librarians of the 19th century than they do with a computer centre’."

Computer centre? Isn't this a phrase from the 80s?

Hmmm, and this is the same person who was quoted thusly in The Chronicle of Higher Education? "That does not mean that everything can be dumbed down to some kind of hip-hop or bells-and-whistles kind of stuff."

Dumbed down to hip-hop? 'Scuse me? Isn't this using a racial stereotype and in really bad taste?

Whether you agree with any or all or none of Gorman's views on anything in Libraryland is, to me, neither here nor there...the level of discourse to which he stoops troubles me a great deal.

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