Ozymandias of Egypt
I met a traveller from
an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
1818
To many people’s surprise, I have resisted commenting on the
Bush library – in part because my opposition would come as a surprise to no one,
in part because others have argued much more articulately than I could against the
building of the library.
And in part because as a non-tenured lecturer, my opinion matters about as much as that of the feral cats that live around the over-crowded, run-down building (Clements Hall) that houses Dedman Advising, Education, Honors, ESL, Foreign Languages, Math, Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies – have I left anyone out?
Not to mention lecturers serve at the pleasure of the president -- not unlike Donald Rumsfeld.
What is taking place on campus is window dressing disguised
as debate, not unlike the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which the president
treated like an ugly blind date whom his father foisted on him.
That is not to say that there are not those – on both sides
of this issue – who are not sincere in their opposition or support. But to call what is transpiring
a debate is akin to calling the Bush presidency a democracy.
While the faculty debates, the
iceberg has torn open the hull of the ship.
That said, do I think the Bush library will be good for SMU?
In theory, yes. In principle, no. In theory, presidential libraries are good
for universities. The only problem is we haven’t had a president for the last
six years. We’ve had a dictator who would be king.
Kings do not build libraries. They build monuments of
narcissism to warehouse their egos -- like the (fallen) Colossus of
Ramesses II, which Shelley so eloquently mocks in his sonnet Ozymandias of Egypt.
As for think tanks – which seems like an oxymoron
considering this president’s absence of thought – a war room seems more likely
considering the neocons' penchant for waging war as a vehicle of foreign policy.
Drs. Hopkins and Ippolito, chairmen respectively of the
departments of History and Political Science, not surprisingly have weighed in on the controversy that has engulfed the University.
Needless to say, the opinions of the chairmen whose
departments will be “vitally engaged in the scholarship to emerge from the Bush
Library” matter. It is unfortunate, however, that what began as an intellectual
argument in favor of the library ended with a maudlin plea to sentimentalism.
“We should be honored,” they write, “that SMU will have the
opportunity to be a major documentary repository that will over time allow
generations of scholars and their audiences to understand better the undeniably
crucial years of the Bush presidency.”
If this is the pre-construction rhetoric, I can only imagine
the dedication ceremony.
To argue in favor of the Bush library using reason in one
thing, invoking “honor” as a rationale is another. There is no honor in being chosen to host this
library because there is no honor in the Bush presidency.
In the end, when the Bush library is built, like a new Wal-Mart
on the outskirts of a small town, people will come – but at what price?
Drs. Hopkins and Ippolito allude to the “caveats and
concerns,” associated with the library. The fact that his department is grooming
students – even before the library is built – who think that liberal professors
should be routed out should be a primary concern to Dr. Ippolito, not to
mention a scary portent.
There is no question that SMU will become more conservative when the library is built. An ideological shift will be inevitable as forces from above and below wreak havoc on the faculty landscape – not unlike the Bush administration has wrought havoc on the environment, foreign policy, civil liberties and the middle class and working poor.
The question is how far to the right (and white) on an ideological and homogeneity scale will the George Bush mega-mall push an already largely white and conservative student body.
How long before the moral conscience of the
Methodism is replaced by the moralizing intolerance of rightwing
fundamentalism?
How long before SMU becomes GWBU?
If 70% of the American public, the Baker Hamilton
Commission, and a majority of retired and active-duty generals were not enough
to dissuade a contumacious frat boy-turned-president from escalating an
already losing war in Iraq, the chances that a group of liberal academics, for
which both students and their president have nothing but contempt, could
influence the "decider" are as remote as Mitt Romney becoming president.
In the end, any discussion about the library is,
well, academic. In the meantime, that sound you hear are the bulldozers roaring in the
background.
