Local
Two Evenings with the Hillsdale Library Board of Trustees
Although the most thorough1 accounts of the two recent meetings of the Hillsdale Library Board of Trustees are esoterically contained in the fair-and-balanced reporting of WILX’s Cody Butler and Corey Murray of the Hillsdale Daily News, we at the Hillsdale County Review2 would like to provide a few supplemental notes of our own on Board Secretary Joshua Paladino’s attempt to preserve at least the semblance of decency in the children’s section of our public library, which attempt, even if nothing else, will have achieved the good of revealing the characters of the several members of the library’s board, and also something about the nature of board governance in general.
May 20th
While our reading public is doubtless most interested in an account of the various democratic vulgarities that took place during the public comment periods — shame on you! — we will offer instead a brief account of the board’s own comments during the first meeting, followed by a note or two on our fellow citizens in the crowd.
George Allen, who spoke first, gave no indication of how he would vote on the Paladino amendment even if a vote were possible. He called for more transparency from board members3 and suggested that more time would be necessary to gather input from the community.
Jim Bowen followed and used his time to cite the Trustee Manual, which appears to require board members to “fight censorship efforts,” whatever those are. While recourse to proceduralism usually (as here) signals craven surrender at the first encounter with the skirmishers of The Great Awokening, some solace—but not too much!—might be taken from certain lines read by Bowen which suggest that, in fact, it is part of the board’s duty to curate the library’s collection, and to do so in service to “the community.”4
After Bowen came Vice President Karen Hill, whose self-proclaimed devotion to the board and the state’s manual indicated that she would be numbered among the most passionate and self-righteous of Paladino’s opponents.
President Scott Cress, who spoke next, seems a sensible man, but in an age of second realities like ours, mere sensibility, like proceduralism, often serves only to ratify what we have recently heard described as “social revolution without representation.” Like Allen, Cress wondered why only certain citizens had access to the amendment’s language, and why the librarian(s) had time to prepare for the viewing public a tendentious display of possibly offending books. He pointed out that the narrative of bigoted censors vs. lovers of intellectual freedom does not accurately describe the deliberations of a board that must always-already engage in a “curative process.” He reminded those present that there are already mechanisms by which the public can request that the board consider adding or removing particular books.
Joshua Paladino began his comments by explaining to his most obnoxious interlocutors—at least one of whom demanded that he maintain eye contact with them as they shouted profanities—that, as he was board secretary, he must needs type what they said as accurately as possible. Paladino went on to suggest that board members are not bound by the Trustee Manual,5 and that they may promote legislation that would bind the library director to make certain selections. He said that he was moved to act after seeing on display a children’s book that tells the story of “two mommies” taking their child to a Pride parade. After some shouting in response, Paladino asked the protestors whether they would approve of a book in which parents take their child to the January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally. “No!” they shouted. “That’s hate!” Q.E.D. It was during Paladino’s comments that the Children’s Librarian took her leave.
Finally, Library Director Bryonna Barton, MLIS, said her piece. An awed hush fell over our unruly assembly as we were made aware that Miss Barton has a master’s degree—a master’s degree!—in Library Science. It has been her great work, she said, to curate the library’s collection and make selections both in accord with her extensive training and also with an expert study of our beloved community here in Hillsdale. “I have been taught how to make a diverse selection,” she said in a tone worthy of Tom Nichols’ Twitter feed. Barton ended by renewing her commitment to representing “all” of Hillsdale in making her curations.
So much for the board. As we turn to the public, we must begin by saying we respect the courage of all who were willing to speak. Our own silence, of course, cannot be interpreted as cowardice, derived as it was from our habitual diaphragm-breathing of the rarefied air of journalism’s nonpartisan “purity culture.” That will not, however, prevent us from offering an incisive critique of the masses.
We are afraid we have no great orators among us. There were a sufficient number of citizens present to give the board pause as it conducts what will surely be a deep dive into both the makeup of the community and the board’s own capacity for representation. The parents among Paladino’s supporters were the most convincing, perhaps only because their use of the library will depend on the outcome of this and similar decisions: their healthy respect for the independence of their children (these are not and do not want to be helicopter parents) makes them appropriately afraid of “social contagion.”
Paladino’s opponents, fresh from an activism workshop at the local public school, couldn’t decide whether they wanted to win over the normies with liberal platitudes demanding “affirmative care” for our suicidal youth, or scoff and shame them into submission with vulgarity and eye-rolling. They would very much have liked to be worldlier, funnier, and more photogenic than their opponents, but the latter approach only served to inform the board—which may not want to know—“what time it is.” Furthermore, they inspired no confidence that they really want parents to be able to decide what their children read. On the one hand, they say that parents ought to watch like hawks while their kids are at the library; on the other, they want certain books available to groom assist those children who would rebel against their benighted rural conservative parents. Luckily for them, absent the efforts of a mensch like Mr. Paladino, board governance is designed to be always-already on their side, and will do its best to soften their image in the public eye.
So ends the narrative as rendered by Fauxglin, who was HCR’s city correspondent on May 20th. Though he was also present at the “special meeting” of May 26th, he was deeply affected by the mighty discourses of Mr. Paladino and Mr. Allen, and fears any account of his would be unjournalistically emotivist. Happily, his more-Stoic colleague, Clovis, was also present for the second meeting, and judging by the general sensation caused by his entrance—Fauxglin heard not one, not two, but perhaps even three shout out his name—he is well suited to take up the narrative.
May 26th
General assemblies, Tocqueville tells us, once included “everyone who lived in the town.” The people as a whole elected office-holders and deliberated. But in later days the general assembly “no longer consisted of all the people acting as a body.” Instead it “consisted of notables,” the members of “the urban elite.” The people, not being so easily fooled by the semblances of freedom as one might suppose, “everywhere lost interest in town affairs and lived as strangers within their own town walls.” One might find in such a place decent men, good families, private virtues, honest merchants, and disciplined landowners. Even good Christians might be counted among their number. But nowhere would good citizens be found. Last Thursday Hillsdale’s very own urban elites gathered once more to engage in their ruling rituals, and they found that normal people may not be interested in ceding liberty any longer.
After the debacle of the first library debate—as catalogued by Fauxglin above—the outcome of Mr. Paladino’s efforts remained in some doubt. Things still remain in doubt, but Thursday marked a decisive victory. After failing to pass a motion at the previous meeting to remove Paladino from the board for his bold and wildly controversial assertion that the Library Director should avoid putting non-children’s books in children’s book sections, the aforementioned board members moved to exact their revenge once more. In legalistic fashion the city’s lawyer told them that they could be subject to a lawsuit based on an irrelevant and indecisive 1982 Supreme Court decision dealing with school library censorship. (Mr. Lovinger’s legal reasoning might be better described as legal word association; or perhaps he doesn’t mean to reason at all.) Further, they moved to vote regarding the sending of a petition to Mayor Stockford to bring the argument against Paladino to the City Council, which would decide his future on the board.
Bryonna Barton, MLIS, spoke first. “I received over ten-thousand grants” decreed our highly-degreed (former) library director as she “got the facts out there” while doing away with the unnamed and unarticulated “assumptions.” In her opinion she did tremendous work, “tailoring books to the community,” unlike her predecessors who simply trusted the book experts. No, she was determined to “clarify for you” what you are getting when you pick up a book. Yet despite her labors, in her view she didn’t change anything about the library: “nothing is new,” she said as she simultaneously claimed that she fundamentally changed the direction of the library.6
Karen Hill spoke next. She is the very image of those who rule today. Her sharp head turns, her glares, her sideways glances, her passive-aggressive interruptions, her melodramatic expression, her manufactured tears, her designer clothes–everything came together in this magnum opus. And what a Psaki-esque performance it was! With grave and somber tones she attempted to elicit an apology from Mr. Paladino. When that failed, she moved to cancel Paladino for his willingness to be so mean to oppressed members of the community. Worst of all, he ignored the sacred text of the American Library Association, which exists to ensure that boards simply allow credentialed directors to run the show. Unable to stand up to the scorn of Karen, and upset with him for having views of books which depart from the experts, Jim Bowen likewise supported the motion to remove him, contriving whatever myths in his own mind that he needed to justify his decision.
Paladino’s lengthy defense ensued from here, which undercut every accusation leveled by his accusers. “What are we even talking about here?” he asked as he pointed out that the “entire discussion is based on false premises.” I dare not try to capture the fullness of Mr. Paladino’s speech in this short space, but suffice it to say that he exercised the sort of political courage which boards are designed to eliminate. What sort of library director, Paladino mused, “does not think that there was such a thing as a good curation decision?” For “to act like we are unable to define things will destroy the curation process.”
George Allen likewise delivered a masterful oration, emphatically dismantling his opponents. He drew in the activists with a soft opening line, earning applause before proceeding to defend Paladino on every count. “We have no grounds to remove Mr. Paladino from his position,” he railed, reprimanding the activists for their barbarism. “His only crime,” per Allen, “has been to express political and social views that are shared by millions of people in this country, and by many people in this community.”7 Scott Cress took a decidedly weaker approach, but nonetheless moved to keep Paladino on the board. The meeting concluded with a brutal two-hour public comment period for those who believe that public comment periods are anything more than sham democracy used to justify the already-decided expert rule.8
For all of this commotion, and despite the the Library Director’s resignation, the initial proposal has not even been voted on by the board. But some important things have been clarified. Our notables wish to rule us, and they will do so with no pity. They have left no city, no hearth, no soul untouched, and they do not intend to stop. Every institution that they control will be used in opposition. Must one live in perpetual fear of petty fines and bureaucratic entanglement? Must one fear to act in the face of mass opinion? The answer to these questions is a decisive ‘No.’ Perhaps this development will awaken the citizens of Hillsdale. Perhaps men will return once more to public life and some lost strength will be realized. Perhaps then might the city be free of the pieties of the state.9 We would be remiss to let this chance pass us by, to let Mr. Paladino’s heroic efforts go to waste.
—Clovis
A Cosmopolitan Adventure: Jonesville’s Mill Race Golf Course
An unmitigated disaster struck your editorial board two weeks ago. Feeling as light as the May air after pretending to enjoy the Michigan March, Fauxglin skipped to his truck en route to another board Summit (Fauxglin himself occupies seats on two boards despite his decidedly unboardsmanlike carriage), this time to be held at Hillsdale’s much vaunted White Oaks golf course. But upon our arrival we witnessed a scene normally reserved for the concrete slabs of the big city: a parking lot packed full of cars. Sickened by the sight, we covered our eyes and drove to the aptly named Jonesville to partake in our version of Macomber’s court sports.10
Jonesville’s Mill Race golf course pleases the eye in many respects. The course is covered over with large old oaks and high canopied maples. Flowing by the sixth hole’s green is the gentle St. Joseph’s River. This time of year one is struck by life’s bursting out of the earth. Yet we cannot understand why they would not sell beer on site—a travesty which we can hardly bring ourselves to believe. Need we any further evidence that the invisible hand is a lie?
But alas! Mill Race is to White Oaks as Jonesville is to Hillsdale. I—and I believe I speak for the Review here—prefer to golf at home among corn fields and impassable swamps with a cooler of cheap beers and nearly broken golf carts than away in the manicured bourgeois prestige of our northern neighbors with their precious money and their precious highway.
—Clovis
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
HR on Safari
Hemingway’s Macomber is no story made to flatter: the American goddess of equality dies in the soul of Francis Macomber, and in so happening he recovers something of himself. Hemingway’s image therefore jars the American soul. His vapid Margot runs everything down toward mediocrity because she cannot bear the thought of order imposed from outside of her own mind. The American facade which dominated Francis when backed by the full weight of popular opinion cannot hold sway when the circumstances change and he meets the sort of risk which he had not faced in his “court games,” finally proving worthy only when he has little left to lose.
What appears to be Margot’s great error in the Macombers’ “much envied and ever-enduring romance” game is believing that she can claim a final victory; she simply needed to encourage more tennis to secure their “sound basis of union.” Yet Margot’s error is peculiarly American: she assumes–not without reason–that “all things at one common level lie,”11 and therefore gives up her advantage by going to a place where the “foul and ugly mists of vapours”12 have not yet shrouded the “fallen sun.” Her dominion is outside of the sun, be it the camp, the night, or the camp at night—and it ought to stay that way. “Can’t we go into the shade?” Margot asks in desperation after Francis has successfully “chased some helpless animals in a motorcar” with the aid of Wilson. Margot could exercise her masterful “female cruelty” for higher ends, but instead serves Envy.
Thus the Human Resources department meets the Safari. The family has been smothered by the “base contagious clouds” rising out of America, and in true sense of the word no longer exists; the father exercises uncontested superiority over nothing—he is a mere adviser, and even in that role faces the scrutiny of the better part of mass culture (not to mention the law) both of which take as their premises the self-evident truths of the HR regime: the natural rights to safety, niceness, and the pursuit of bitchery without consequence.13 These tenets form the method of the democratic pseudo-philosopher, who overturns with indiscretion every sacred stone in the name of his truth (which he has of course grasped from a young age) except the sacred teaching upon which all his premises rely. Thus the American becomes one of Wilson’s “great American boy-men”—a child older and and perhaps wealthier than his offspring. But someone must always rule, and Hemingway shows who rules America.
—Clovis
Luxory
From beginning to end, Hemingway’s “Macomber” is shot through with “bitchery.” This “American female cruelty”—of which Margaret Macomber is an expert practitioner—is the way a beautiful woman has of dealing with being married to “one of the great American boy-men” whose skill at making and keeping money allows him to marry beyond his dynamism. Although their union has a “sound basis” in his money and her beauty—“Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him” (18)—he is, despite being “very fit,” a cuckold and she is a “five-letter woman.”
The couple has gone on Safari in Africa so that Margot can feel herself to be beautiful again, and so Francis can discover a kind of manliness that will make him worthy of her respect. Although she promised that there would be “no more of that,” Margot sleeps with the English hunter Robert Wilson almost immediately after her husband reveals himself to be a coward. According to Margot, Francis’ cowardice “spoiled the trip,” and she cannot be held responsible for pressing her new advantage. Those are the unwritten rules of the game. After all, she says, she “didn’t come out here to be dull” and waste the newly shining invitation of her beauty on an unworthy man.
Hemingway takes some pains to inform his readers that “the way they were together now was no one person’s fault,” but Wilson lays the blame squarely at Macomber’s feet. The problem, of course, is precisely those unwritten rules of this sort of romance, which can only serve the interests of the beautiful and the damned. Wilson can cuckold Macomber without compunction because the latter can’t “keep his wife where she belongs,” but Macomber is judged uncouth and has to be warned not to “talk rot” when he “make a scene.” These rules are good insofar as they keep men like Macomber from acting passive-aggressively, but bad insofar as they reduce real men like Wilson to professional adulterers.
As for Margot, she couldn’t be worse than she is. Here Hemingway has no pity. He tells tales of the decline and fall of a man’s ability to act in the world, certainly, but they are also tales about the decline and fall of female prudence, which in certain eras leads beautiful women to marry men they can “govern” rather than men they can respect. The woman acts to secure her bourgeois comfort, and then spends the rest of her life avenging the commodification of her splendor. But we will say this for Hemingway’s Portia: she is properly frightened by what Macomber has become in the final moments of the story.
—Fauxglin
Miscellaneous
XZeno(pho)bia
Hillsdale, unbeknownst to you, this past month the cultural world out beyond your ken has been treated to the dulcet tones of a new single by the genre-bending midlife crisis rock band, Skatepark Kids.
In “Zenobia,” the Kids have reached vertiginous new heights of musical intersectionality — here be beats and melodies that benighted ages past, all innocent that new works of genius were being summoned, might have dubbed arrhythmic or discordant.
The Kids’ songwriter and lead singer has pioneered an innovative vocal style that we like to call “Irony C(h)ant.” Is this really his singing voice, or does he fall asleep every night listening to David Bowie-inspired 80s space rock? Ground control to Major John, you’re floating in a most peculiar way!
We could swear we’ve seen this man at Prime Fitness of a Wednesday morning, straddling the leg press machine in an all-too-tight basketball jersey and a pair of jorts, mainlining Monster energy drinks and rolling his eyes at the two BAPtist beards ostentatiously throwing weights around. This is the sort of man for whom it takes three swings of the machete to kill a duck, if you know what we mean.
As for the rest of the band . . . we once read that the genius of Sting’s fretless bass-playing lay in his use of rests, but even Sting can be no match for a bassist whose subtle discretions mark him out as a Milford man. The guitarists play as if they know this is their last performance before before their fingers are broken by cruel fate. Here, in company with the drums, sounds something resembling talent, but it is a talent, alas, that announces itself over a lagging Zoom call.
Damn it, gentlemen! Move to the same small town and make a go of it!
—Fauxglin
Links and Notes
—We recommend that you listen to Professor Adam Cooper of Wyoming Catholic discuss Dante’s Ulysses, and read and discuss his own “Ode to Constantine IX.”
—A certain well-sandaled man was making the rounds at the Farmer’s Market last weekend, brandishing (somehow) the June issue of First Things, and condemning the “old error” made by Pater Edmund Waldstein in his exchange with Ross Douthat on Jacques Maritain’s attempt, as Douthat puts it, to “develop Catholic teaching on church-state relations.” We threw ourselves between this man and several alarmed Amish children, and demanded that he explain himself. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” the well-sandaled man screamed. “Maritain towers over him.” Try as we might, readers, we could not get him to be more specific, so we chased him back to his hot dog cart and took our leave.
—Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, The World Beyond Your Head, and Why We Drive, writing at UnHerd: “A variation on this theme is the utility of moral panics — spiritual warfare — for pursuing top-down projects of social transformation, typically by administrative fiat. The principle of equality under the law, which would seem to be indispensable to a liberal society, must make way for a system of privileges for protected classes, corresponding to a moral typology of citizens along the axis of victim and oppressor. Victim dramas serve as a permanent moral emergency, justifying an ever-deeper penetration of society by bureaucratic authority in both the public and private sectors.”
—Christopher Caldwell argues in First Things that Nixon’s resignation marked the beginning of a new kind of regime change in the United States, where impeachment “became a routine way of changing an administration.” Nixon was no more corrupt than anyone else, Caldwell says, but he could not prevent the introduction of “a new system for disciplining the country’s chief executive and a new balance of constitutional forces,” one that created “many novel forces unleashed by the litigative revolution of the 1960s, against which no reliable defense had yet been devised.” Trump, for example, saw “his White House penetrated by hostile investigators in a way that effectively ended his administration in its first weeks.” Caldwell also criticizes the class of “investigate journalists,” who are little more than vessels for administrative state in-fighting.
Farewell
This weekend our editorial board will be attending a New Polity conference in Steubenville, Ohio that addresses the question of whether America is a tyranny14, over the objections of those who would prefer we read their postliberal material instead. Our only aim is to catch sight of the great D.C. Schindler, but we will perhaps have something to report upon our return.
That is to say, thoroughly curated.
Italics, the great equalizer.
Transparency that would include the answer to a question like: “Who summoned the protestors?”
Michigan Public Library Trustee Manual, Chp. 9, to be read in reverent tones: “The library board has the responsibility of championing the cause of intellectual freedom, which includes fighting censorship efforts. This responsibility calls for the right of all members of a community to obtain information at the library. This is a challenging and sometimes uncomfortable responsibility, but it is one you agreed to support when you became a library board member. The selection of library materials is a central activity in support of intellectual freedom. Collection development includes a selection policy proposed by the library director and approved by the board, that reflects the library’s objectives in providing materials. It also supports the right of all members of the community to have access to a wide, objective range of materials, including items some people might find objectionable. A library’s collection should reflect the culture and diversity of the entire community.”
Scandal!
[During her tedious rant, which was designed to bore the public into abject sympathy, Miss Barton, despite her expensively acquired expertise, showed that she knew little to nothing about three rather important subjects: books, Christianity, and our beloved city.—Ed.]
[During Mr. Allen’s speech, it became clear that it was other members of the board, and not Mr. Paladino, who had engaged in manipulating both the public and the board behind the scenes. Though we do not know who summoned the protestors for the May 20th meeting, it seems clear that Miss Barton failed in her duty to post Mr. Paladino’s amendment to the board’s public site—either because she wanted Mr. Paladino to appear delinquent, or because she did not understand an official email thread in which City Manager David Mackie, among others, fretted about potential violations of the Open Meetings Act.—Ed.]
[We are one of those people, and we will do battle with Clovis on the subject in future issues.—Ed.]
Mr. Paladino: “We have the absolute right to choose which books come into our library. [If you believe otherwise] you may as well say that the board and the library are simply functionaries of the state, and we accept whatever books they bring in.”
Luckily after a moment of panic and desperation, we discovered that we had merely run into a golf league.
Yeats, These are the Clouds.
Henry IV, Part I.
Attend any board meeting if you don’t believe this to be true.
All Hail Paladino!
"We are afraid we have no great orators among us." Blessedly, we have at least two too-precious writers.