Libraries 2040, Cartoon by Kevin Moore
May 4th, 2015 by Aldouspi

  

I was recently asked by a librarian colleague to contribute a cartoon to a time capsule. Held by the Oregon Library Association, the capsule will open in 2040. Although I had the option to pick any old thing I had already done, I really liked the idea of creating a cartoon for an audience 25 years into the future; and using that time frame to speculate on how current issues of librarianship will play out over the next quarter century. Will we still have privacy issues, problems with technology, and questions on the relevance of libraries in the Information Age? Yeah, why not?  I have more confidence in that than in the likelihood that this cartoon will make the librarians 25 years from now laugh; or any of them reading this right now. But I’m amused, and that’s all that really matters, right? Right.

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A Few Words on Libraries

A public library provides services to the general public. If the library is part of a countywide library system, citizens with an active library card from around that county can use the library branches associated with the library system. A library can serve only their city, however, if they are not a member of the county public library system. Much of the materials located within a public library are available for borrowing. The library staff decides upon the number of items patrons are allowed to borrow, as well as the details of borrowing time allotted. Typically, libraries issue library cards to community members wishing to borrow books. Sometimes, visitors to a city are able to obtain a public library card.

A library may make use of the Internet in a number of ways, from creating their own library website to making the contents of its catalogues searchable online. Some specialized search engines such as Google Scholar offer a way to facilitate searching for academic resources such as journal articles and research papers. The Online Computer Library Center allows library records to be searched online through its WorldCat database. Websites such as LibraryThing and Amazon provide abstracts, reviews and recommendations of books.

Libraries provide computers and Internet access to allow people to search for information online. Online information access is particularly attractive to younger library users.

In 2006, for example, 73% percent of library branches reported that they are the only local provider of free public computer and Internet access. A 2008 study found that “100 percent of rural, high poverty outlets provide public Internet access.” Access to computers and the Internet is now nearly as important to library patrons as access to books.

Public library advocacy is support given to a public library for its financial and philosophical goals or needs. Most often this takes the form of monetary or material donations or campaigning to the institutions which oversee the library, sometimes by advocacy groups such as Friends of Libraries and community members.

Originally, library advocacy was centered on the library itself, but current trends show libraries positioning themselves to demonstrate they provide “economic value to the community” in means that are not directly related to the checking out of books and other media.

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American Sniping, Cartoon by Kevin Moore
Jan 20th, 2015 by Aldouspi

american-sniping

I haven’t seen Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper”, so I cannot rate it as a work of art. I’m more interested in the conversation … no, that’s not the word. Social media doesn’t seem to support conversation or debate. More like sniping. Ironically, I guess. Anyway, I was reading about the chilling, disturbing things Christopher Kyle had said in interviews and in his memoir, and following the online back-and-forth, when I saw a number of people contend Kyle had killed a kid. The trailers for the film show a terrifying moment when Bradley Cooper as Kyle gets a little boy and his mother in the cross-hairs, waiting to take a shot. Children are far too often casualties of war (and famine, social neglect, domestic violence, etc.), but there was something so sensationalized about the scene, that I just had to see if it was true.

It’s not:

Did Chris Kyle really shoot a boy who was concealing a grenade?
No. In the movie, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) shoots a boy and his mother who are approaching a U.S. Marine convoy concealing an RKG-3 Russian Anti-Tank Grenade. In the book, a woman does come out of a small house with her child, but she approaches the convoy by herself as she conceals something beneath her clothes. She sets a Chinese grenade, not a Russian RKG. Kyle hesitates shooting the woman but does take the shot. The grenade drops and he fires again as it’s exploding. It was “the only time I killed anyone other than a male combatant,” writes Kyle. In the book, he indicates that this is his first kill in Iraq.

In his autobiography, Chris Kyle does scope a child at one point. The moment is also depicted in the movie. The combatants had sent the child down the street to retrieve an RPG (in the movie, a nearby boy simply wanders over and picks up the RPG). “I had a clear view in my scope,” writes Kyle, “but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.”

The late Kyle’s use of “savage” (as well as “evil”) to describe people resisting the occupation of their country by foreign powers is deplorable. The body count is pretty vile, too, but at least this little boy isn’t among the corpses. But I find it pretty irresponsible to portray Kyle killing a kid when he did not in fact do so. I don’t know what Eastwood is getting at, and I support artistic license, but only if it serves the truth; this muddies the water. The fact is real children have been killed by our weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and many other places; they have been killed by people with Kyle’s stunted view of morality, and by much more sophisticated intellects in the halls of power, using euphemisms, weasel words and other linguistic deflections to obscure the impact of their destructive policies.

Oh, and: The dude in the last panel with Obama is John Brennan. Like a good CIA Director, he keeps a low profile. He was Obama’s right hand man in the early escalations of the drone program, and remains actively involved with it now.

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