Culture Wars

Ostrich with its’ head stuck in the sand.

Some of the most fascinating passages in the book Project 2025, are the references to being “woke” and the “culture wars.”
The authors clearly find the idea of America as “a melting pot,” extremely distasteful.
To them, it’s obvious that white male Northern European Americans should be in charge of everything.

One goal of Project 2025 is to erase many aspects of the modern world—trans people, books on race and climate change, consideration of sexual orientation—from society.
It’s as if Trump, and his MAGA cohorts, believe that they can make all of these ideas go away.

The 919-page book proposes some bizarre actions.
It wants NPR be stripped of Government funding.
It wants all discussions of identities (sexual and racial) to be deleted from laws, and government web sites.*
Project 2025 wants “psychologically destructive” books—ie, books that discuss “woke” subjects—to be removed from libraries and schools.
Furthermore, Project 2025 suggests that librarians, professors, and doctors, be reclassified as registered sex offenders, for trying to help trans children. 

Less than 1% of NPR’s funding comes from the Federal Government.
While the percentage is small, $445-$500 million is directed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (another entity) to public TV and radio stations, under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act.
Since Trump is in charge of the CPB board, he could mold the CPB into a right-wing group, just as he made himself head of the Kennedy Center. 

Page 20 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book points out that that the book is openly about white supremacy.

As I read Project 2025, I realized that its’ authors are more than just upset with Leftists and “wokeness.”
It’s as if they constantly hear The Left whispering into their ears that they are wrong and stupid, and they want this whispering to stop!
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) remarks that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.” 

At the same time that Project 2025 wants the U.S. to discontinue DEI, it also wants the Government to load up on weapon systems, as well as build up Special Operation Forces.
Section Two of the book advocates accelerating the Sentinel system, the U.S. Space Force, and the U.S. Cyber Command.
On 3/21/25, the 47th President announced a new generation of fighter jets, the F-47.
(This one plane will cost as least $20 billion.)

Cover of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.

Nativism and fear of immigrants is nothing new in American society.
When going through a pile of inherited books, I came across a 1973 copy of Ralph Stone’s The Irreconcilables.
It’s an analysis on how16 nativist Senators defeated the Treaty of Versailles, and refused to authorize the League of Nations. 

Senator Reed (Missouri) fought the agreement because the majority of the countries making it did not “belong to the white race of men.”
Senator Borah (Idaho), feared that Great Britain would dominate the League.
Sherman (Illinois), feared that far too many League members would be Catholics.
The Irreconcilables gradually wore down 80 fellow Senators, and convinced them that a League of Nations would “do more harm than good.”

Poster for 2024’s Cabrini in which Christiana Dell’Anna played Mother Cabrini.

In 2024, a film called Cabrini was issued as a DVD, and briefly seen in theaters.
It’s about Mother Cabrini, the first U.S. citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
However, it’s also about the fight between nativists (who despised Catholic immigrants as vermin), and Mother Cabrini who wanted immigrants to be given a chance at the American dream.
(Mother Cabrini became a U.S citizen in 1909.)
New York city officials tried very hard to ship her back to Italy.

At the beginning of the film (set in 1899) a dying Italian immigrant mother isn’t admitted to a New York hospital, because of her ethnicity.
Later on, one Italian immigrant child dies, and another is injured, when they work at low-paying jobs in a dangerous factory.
In another scene, Mother Cabrini is called a “guinea,” by a WASP businessman, on the streets of Manhattan.

Director Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, was set about one generation before Cabrini.
It’s also about New York nativists who despised Italian and Irish immigrants as “guineas” and “micks.”
It’s no surprise that Vice-President JD Vance completely misunderstood this film!
Vance revealed in a 2021 interview (with podcaster Jack Murphy) that he saw Gangs of New York as the story of criminal immigrant gangs.
Scorsese’s film is actually about criminal nativists persecuting immigrants.
(Read more about 2002’s Gangs of New York in my memorandum “The War on Immigrants.”)

Page 63 of the Stop Project 2025 comic book talks about proposed changes to the T-Visa, U-Visa, and H-2A Visa programs.

Although immigrants have long been our most industrious citizens, there’s also been a “glass ceiling” in terms of the U.S. Presidency.
Southern European candidates, in particular, have never been selected for any position higher than the Vice Presidency.

This glass ceiling (for male immigrants) has not existed in big business or in earning money.
The first American millionaire—a billionaire if his worth was figured in modern dollars—was French-American Stephen Girard, a shipowner and banker.
Girard lived from 1750 to 1831.
His only child died in infancy.
Therefore, he left the bulk of his wealth to the education and care of orphans.

Andrew Carnegie reading in a library (1913). Carnegie and Carnegie money built over 2,500 libraries.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)—ranked as the second richest man in American history—was born in Scotland, and arrived in America at the age of 12.
Like Gerard, Carnegie eventually became a philanthropist.
He gave away $350 million dollars during his lifetime, and over 90% of his fortune, after his death.

Immigrants are more likely to be wealth-makers, than native born citizens, in every country in which this subject is studied.
According to an MIT study, American immigrants are 80% more likely to be successful entrepreneurs, than native-born Americans.
According to Fortune magazine, nearly 44% of the 2022 Fortune 500 list were founded by 1st or 2nd generation immigrants. 

Because the colonies were originally settled by the Virginia Company of London, and the Plymouth Company (also of London), some people believe that the U.S. was built by Northern European Christian men, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens.
Just because wealthy people in the South lived off the unrecompensed labor of black Americans for five generations, that’s hardly an argument.

*All references to Enola Gay (the bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima) were removed from U.S. government web sites (because the paragraphs and captions used the word “gay”), as part of the initiative to eliminate DEI content.

A 40,000-book Personal Library

I recently read Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.
However, I was left with two burning questions after finishing the book: where did his library end up, and how large was the collection that he packed up?
Wikipedia (not Packing My Library) gave me the answers.
Alberto Manguel donated his 40,000-book collection to the Center for Research in the History of Reading, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alberto Manguel is a novelist, translator, editor, reviewer, and library director.
Over his life, he’s lived in at least eight countries—Argentina, Canada, Israel, France, England, Tahiti, Mexico and the United States (New York City).
I wonder how many times he’s packed up his books, and how long some sections of his collection have been in storage?

The burning of the Library of Alexandria.

I especially enjoyed the ten digressions in Packing My Library.
One digression is about the Library of Alexandria, which some historians say was consumed in a fire started by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 B.C.
Manguel believes, however, that only the overflow of books (near the port), was actually set aflame.
He considers the great library’s actual fate to be a mystery.
The digression mentions some of the great plays that were lost forever with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria—72 by Euripides, between 63-73 by Aeschylus, and 116 by Sophocles.

Scene from Games of Thrones, showing the vast library of the Citadel.

My husband and I are long-time bibliophiles.

However, our combined libraries aren’t even close to 40,000 books.
One of our brother-in-law’s parents were both librarians, and their joint collection (all left to him after his parents died), was once bigger than ours.
It was never close to 40,000 either.
I think I understand why Mr. Manguel packed up all his books.
He was in his early 70’s when, for various reasons, he had to give up the large space (in France) which had held his spectacular collection.
He needed to make sure that his books had a good home—a home that he could visit, on occasion—but not one that he owned, or paid rent on.

Manga version of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

A few years back, Marie Kondo (Konmari) wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up—all about how we should only have items around us that we truly need.

As a result, I do attempt (periodically), to “prune” my book collection.
(We only have so many walls, and we need room for new books.)
I go through each shelf and follow her advice—deciding if each book “brings me joy.”
Some books bring so much joy, that they’re added to the stack near my bed.
Others don’t, so I place them in a box to be donated.
(I find that I miss certain books years after I’ve donated them.)

Cover of Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Another book on the subject of possessions—and having enough space for them—is Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.
One point in Magnusson’s book is: “Someone will have to clean up after you.
Whoever it may be will find it a burden.”
Her book made me worry about what would happen to our treasured book collections, if my husband and I died together, not separately.
What would our families do with our valued books?
(None love books quite as much as we do.)
Would our carefully-selected books be donated to a library?
Would they be sold?
Would lovely older editions be tossed in an alley, and only the newer books given good homes?

According to a March 2023 Gallup poll, Americans say that they read less than 13 books a year—the smallest number since 1990.*
Reading among subgroups—like the college-educated—is going down more rapidly.
A few famous people (like Bill Gates) say they read over 50 books a year.
(That’s a number my husband and I are comfortable with.)
However, other well-known people (like Kanye West and Donald Trump), brag that they don’t enjoy books, and have never read for personal pleasure.

My husband and I both realize that to be a lover of books—to the extent of owning a lot of them, or carrying them about—is to be an “oddball.”
The purchaser of our condo, a few years back, refused to buy that apartment unless we first removed the built-in book shelves.
(We were deluded enough to believe that book shelves were a “selling point.”)
Recently, when my husband and I brought books and newspapers to a hospital ER waiting room, a young man warily asked us (as if he was dealing with crazy people) if we really planned to read “all that stuff.”
Yes, we did!

Scene from Twilight Zone's “Time Enough at Last” with Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) enjoying a book, before his eyeglasses are accidentally crushed.

A favorite The Twilight Zone episode deals with a book worm—Time Enough at Last (season one, episode 8).
This episode features Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) as a bank teller who “lives to read,” and cares little for human companionship.
(According to the IMDb trivia for this 1959 episode, of the 92 episodes that creator Rod Serling wrote, this episode was Mr. Serling’s personal favorite.)

One of the plot points in Time Enough at Last is that Mrs. Bemis (Jacqueline deWit) dislikes her husband’s love of books, and has actually destroyed some of them.
This lack of harmony is not the case in our family.
Both of us have loved libraries and reading since early childhood, and we are in complete agreement about “book love.”
We routinely point out interesting paragraphs to each other, and read them aloud.
We’re fans of book stores, catalogs, sales and festivals.

Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier) holding an open book.

When asked by Polonius what he was reading, Hamlet responded: “Words, words, words.”

My husband is something of an extrovert, and I’m very much an introvert.
Although Henry Bemis was an introvert, I’m sure that’s not a factor in loving books and reading.
For a while—after COVID hit, in 2020—I found it hard to pick up a book.
This change in my behavior made me realize that I was in an emotional crisis.
After a few months, I was back to reading every day again, and I knew that all would be well.
Reading books is one of the things that makes life worth living.

* According to researchers at the Australian National University, Estonians own an average of 128 books per household, with a third of respondents owning 350 books, or more. The average American household only owns about 29 books.