Narrative Whiplash in Warren County: From Libraries to Data Centers, What Are We Really Debating?

We are seeing an active narrative shift in the key issues defining local elections from “the structuring of the  Samuels Library” to “data centers.”

This shift builds upon the one in the last election from “Pornography at the Library” to “Taxpayer Accountability.” The intentional rapid movement from one political focus to the next is analogical to, even if not identical with, what political theorist Hannah Arendt identified as the “adaptability and absence of continuity” and “perpetual motion mania” of totalitarian movements ( Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1968) p 306).  Even if one were to agree with the focus of each of these issues in isolation, these shifts represent an intentional coordination of manufactured narrative by a political faction within Warren County.

I would like to slow down the perpetual motion machine and examine the language present in the latest statement of the BOS (minus Cheryll Cullers) regarding the Samuels Library.

The BOS  (minus Cullers) accuse the library in their statement of “historical entitlement.”  The processes by which a local community slowly organizes itself over time in efficient and mutually beneficial ways is not “historical entitlement” but the active principle of subsidiarity at work in the trial and error that produces the wisdom of a people particular to the time and place they occupy.  Are we also going to abolish the human family, marriage, and countless other organic ways of organizing society that have emerged over the course of history because of  their “historical entitlement?”

In section 5 of their statement, the BOS (minus Cullers) singlehandedly dismisses the library’s nuanced history with the county in a public/ private partnership as “semantics”.  The idea of “public partnership” is effectively flattened into a “vendor/consumer” relationship.  In doing so, the BOS (minus Cullers) creates a precedent for ignoring the nuance and depth of other public partnerships, such as marriage, families, or religious communities.  These partnerships also exist in a legal dimension, binding two or more people, but beneath this legal status exists a rich and vulnerable community of human trust.

The statement also accuses Samuels of being “anti-competitive”. Samuels Library is a 501c3 non-profit, an arrangement that has saved the county significant money as the library benefits from donations and many local volunteers.  A for-profit library will certainly be more “pro-competitive”  than a non-profit.  They will be so pro-competitive that they will have as their bottom line their own company profits and not the needs of the taxpayers of Warren County on whose behalf the BOS (minus Cullers) bewilderingly seems to be making the accusation.

Now you might think that the BOS (minus Cheryll Cullers) had run out of doublespeak by this point of their statement. But they were saving their best pearl of wisdom for last!  They claim, “What matters is the services delivered per dollar, REGARDLESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE” (emphasis mine).  With this sort of wild claim, even a slave-labor-run library is definitely going to be making a competitive bid with the county.  After all, who cares about pesky organizational structure?

Beautiful bridges, walking trails, museums, monuments, libraries, and parks are the very definition of public services that do NOT want to keep dollar value as their bottom line.  The idea of making dollar value the be-all and end-all of a library service is born of utter ignorance of the notion of social and historical capital, both of which Warren County has in spades and which cannot be dismissed without serious loss to the citizens of this county.

If the last century has taught us anything, it is to be wary of how authorities can use language to manipulate and propagandize citizens of modern nations. British writer George Orwell penned his famous Animal Farm in 1945 as a satirical exploration of just this phenomenon in the events of the Russian Revolution. In Orwell’s narrative the pigs of a fictional farm overthrow the farmers and seize control of the running of the farm. As the plot unfolds, language is used by the pigs to manipulate and control both the narrative of the revolution and the other animals of the farm, creating, in the end, an even worse tyranny than before

If the BOS (minus Cullers) has its way, we’ll be living on Orwell’s Animal Farm.  We will witness the erosion of the human dimension of civic partnerships and, by extension, public understanding of other civic partnerships, such as marriage and the family, in the name of family values. We will see the  BOS (minus Cullers)  step on human lives and county history in the defense of anti-historical entitlement and taxpayer accountability (to taxpayers who have overwhelmingly asked them NOT to do these things.)

Our award-winning library which has been accused of being a monopoly will end up being replaced by a library run by a for-profit corporate monopoly that specializes in failing libraries.

And the coup de grace?  Library Systems and Services prides itself on giving its clients access to the Palace App, an online digital library with access at the click of a button to the very books that men like Jamieson and Belk flooded the library with requests to remove.  They are made even easier to access than ever under the “Banned Books” section on the app. Although I am sure Belk’s new library won’t offer this app, the profits Library Systems and Services make from our county will make banned books more available than ever to children somewhere else! So maybe now everyone wins? Or does nobody do? I am feeling confused because books have suddenly started looking like data centers and I can’t quite tell the two apart.

Oh well, just remember…..“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Anna Hatke
Warren County, VA

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