Hell Yeah! It’s time to learn. President George W. Bush, or Jorge, to you Hispanic voters, has decided to drop a fat pile of books on us and let us build the house to put them in. So with this power comes responsibility. Let’s reflect for a minute what it means to be a Library, and how we might craft such a building to honor our glorious leader. For the fatherland.
Out of respect, we need to include the kind of material our shepherd would use himself. Now I’m not suggesting we make it a children’s library, but at the same time you can’t go building libraries without making it a kind of homage to the namesake. In that vein, I have taken it upon myself to suggest a few things that will characterize this house of knowledge as the stomping grounds of the historical juggernaut it is named after.
For one, let’s make some cuts to the history section. Who cares? Most of that crap went down in the past and therefore won’t happen again. Last thing we need is some jerk with a degree explaining what went down six hundred years ago. I mean, come on, we remember the important stuff, and everything else, right? Well, the people who did that stuff are long dead, so let’s just cut it out. We need to focus on the future and what’s important.
Let’s get a section on warfare and nation building. Get some John Keegan and Peter Paret and maybe 20,000 copies of “The Forgotten Soldier” so everyone can understand the kind of weight our president sleeps under every night.
Okay, let’s also include a few copies of the Declaration of Independence. That thing made a pretty big difference on our country. In fact, it’s the most important document in our nations history – far better than that silly little Constitution, which was written by a bunch of idiots long before we had the Internet or MySpace. Besides, look at all the arguments that have started in our government over that thing. We are a nation of peace, and all the Constitution does is start fights between Democrats and people who care about your safety. Let’s forge ahead with unity.
Have some faith. All you hear nowadays are complaints about science versus fact and religion versus baby-killing stem-cell research. Let’s just keep the parts we like. I like the bible. It’s full of helpful proverbs and nobody can deny that the Ten Commandments are a pretty good indicator of how to find love and happiness. All that science ever gave us was the atomic bomb and LSD and hate.
You can find that trash over in Dedman.
We only have one library on campus devoted to the joy of God, and it’s tucked in right next to Meadows, so the only people who ever go in there are confused stoners and other artistic types. Let’s have a section for religion, and ban all government-based literature. Church and state must be kept apart for the sake of America.
We do need some medical texts, so maybe a few seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy” might be in order.
We also need a statue. Maybe a giant bald eagle, wings spread, shedding a tear over the ruins of Ground Zero. Let’s cast 10 little Iraqis under its wing and maybe have Saddam hanging from the beak. We must never forget how inextricably entwined Iraq is to Sept. 11 and the war on terror.
Maybe we can put a giant 40-foot tall Marine at the center of the library. Marines are cool; they get these awesome swords and sexy little hats. Let’s add a recruiting station into one of the wings.
At SMU, supporting our troops is paramount – even though we have no ROTC program of our own and we require America’s future finest to drive out to Arlington to do ROTC with UNT. Who cares? We love America and that’s why that library is ours.
The recruiting station will be open 24 hours a day. Mustangs can, at any time, sign up for our armed forces and go fight for America in case finals get to be too much. Hopefully we can get some of those pesky historians and political Satanists to enlist and get the hell out of our hair.
Yeah, sure they know a lot about what used to happen, but let’s see them predict a roadside IED tomorrow. America faces a threat completely different from anything ever seen in the nation’s history. Brown people are attacking our freedom faster than we can strip it away ourselves.
As an advertising student, I know how to draw a crowd. The library will need something of value. I propose a discount gas station so we can fill up our tanks on the liquid freedom of petrol, proceeds from which will go to fight terror and support our capitalist allies in Saudi Arabia and back home at Halliburton headquarters.
Also, let’s have a coal-fire plant in the back so that our campus will never be without electricity.
Another thing we need to do is teach those dumb liberals how to use a gun. Let’s throw down a 400-meter shooting range and skeet-shooting section. We can hold monthly concealed-handgun courses as a wellness option and start a women’s skeet-shooting team. After all, guns are awesome.
We could even have a “History of firearms” course. We could grab Judge David Jackson from his store in Snider Plaza to teach students the history of these tools of human achievement. Maybe then you wouldn’t have so many liberals calling for blood the next time Dick Cheney pops someone in the face. After all, it’s not the gun’s fault our Vice President drank four beers before noon and then loaded in some shells and pointed it at another human being while his finger pulled the trigger.
Another important thing is popular culture. In order to keep up on the local social scene, we need a movie theater, a bowling alley, a bar with a mechanical bull and a strip club in the basement to make this the kind of place Mustangs can relax. People accuse us of living in a bubble, so let’s freakin’ make one. We also need pool tables, because if there’s one thing our President used in college, it’s the 8-ball.
America, the hotbed of world culture, has changed a lot in the last seven years. Therefore, I think all of these changes are simply a part of our changing dynamic. Fifty years ago, the library was a necessary part of the knowledge database. Nowadays, we have Google, television and radio. The books have moved to online data and in order to make these kinds of buildings useful, they have to change with the times.
Believe me, I’d like a giant building full of 9/11 commission findings and presidential notes as much as the next guy. But I also want a building that’s worth the millions of dollars we’re expected to dump into it. We’ve got Dedman, we’ve got Perkins, and we’ve got that other library that nobody uses because it’s full of stupid special collections. DeGolyer is only useful for the CMIT and its hallowed season six of “The Sopranos.”
Tuition costs enough supporting a football team nobody watches, a TV station nobody likes and a radio station that’s only worth listening to for the one hour Brent “C Boy” Walker blasts The Fuzz for us online with only enough bandwidth for 40 people. They don’t even play it in Umphrey Lee or the Student Center. Before the fat cats on the school board waste some more of my money, I’d like to get something in return. Screw libraries, let’s see the George Bush Presidential Learning and Lifetime Development, a place for Mustangs to live, learn and party all at once.
Maybe then I’d be proud of it. After all, when Dubya himself did come to campus, we put him in the gym.
