The Oral History of a Defunded Library
We need to open the library back up. I’m tired of explaining country flags to Mr. Handin. He still thinks the flag of Switzerland is the plus sign for LGBTQIA+.
The following is a fictional story written in the style of an oral history, a format which requires the interviewing of several witnesses. The testimonies of the witnesses have been compiled together to create a narrative with the original interviewer’s questions exempted from the record. While a sort of cohesion has been created by sorting sections of testimony by topic, there is still a level of conflict and disorder, resulting from the raw emotional state of the witnesses and the freedom of the witnesses to say what they want during interview (regardless of original topic or line of questioning). Keep in mind that there is bias from the fictional interviewer present in their choice of witnesses, labeling of witnesses, and redaction of testimony deemed irrelevant to the topic. Keep an eye out for little details that may suggest there is more going on behind the scenes than what has been presented.
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): Raymond County Library will certainly be missed by children, parents, and readers of all ages, but it never had to go in the first place. I mean, I say it all the time on stream, but there would be a lot fewer problems politically if conservatives knew what words meant. For instance, defund means defund. It doesn’t mean keep funding the same, don’t increase taxes, or don’t increase funding. More than 60% of voters had no idea that Raymond County Library would have to be shut down when they voted no on the millage increase that would’ve funded the library. Regardless of their ignorance, it’s not like the voters all had good intentions anyway.
Janet Anderson (Librarian): We received a lot of calls about a young adult book called The Not-so Lonely Tales of Ana Argo. Parents complained, they called us disgusting groomers, and demanded we ban the book. What was the problem? Well, Ana Argo is an asexual character, and asexuality is part of the LGBTQIA+, so the parents thought their children were being taught to be gay. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Asexuality is the absence of sexual attraction. I don’t know about you, but what could be less pornographic than a character who will literally never have sex? What could be less gay than having no sex at all? It just didn’t make sense. Even our other LGBTQIA+ books for teens have zero sex in them. With these sensitive subjects, most authors choose to refer to things by simple attraction. Sometimes boys like other boys. Sometimes girls like other girls. No one is trying to teach your children the top ten ways to prepare for anal sex. These are just cute little books. If I had told you three months ago that the politicization of sexuality would lead to our library being shut down, you would call me a crazy liberal. You’d yell slippery slope. Well, sometimes the slope really is slippery.
Sandy Crane (Conservative/Protestor): You guys can cry all you want about your library, but I live in reality. Books are propaganda tools. We saw it when the left tried to use To Kill a Mockingbird to inflict white guilt on the children of our schools. They want us all to be pussified liberal cucks who let grown adults buttfuck kids, but I won’t stand for it. Kids are not born gay. They are taught these perversions by the left. If we didn’t shut down the library, the world population would die out in two generations because all the kids would be fuckin’ gay. Gay people can’t have kids. It’s common sense. The liberals want to end the world by perverting the children.
Pat Marsh (Conservative Talk Show Host): These parents don’t know what’s going on with their kids. On my show the other day, I read C is for Consent to show my audience what they’re doing to kids. That book is a board book, the kind they make for toddlers. These sick liberals are sexualizing interactions with toddlers now. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Sit back and watch the world descend into degeneracy?
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): C is for Consent sounds problematic, but the whole book is just about teaching kids that they don’t have to hug or kiss friends/relatives when they don’t want to. It’s that simple. Just bodily consent. Nothing about sex. Pat Marsh is an idiot and a grifter who likes to tell scary bedtime stories about liberals to conservative adults.
Lawrence “Larry” Albert (Concerned Parent): I didn’t have a problem with the library, I had a problem with the books. I didn’t think it was that serious at first, but Pat Marsh kept talking about all the gay books for kids, and my daughter Ellen was reading one of them.
Ellen Albert (Child of Lawrence and Marie Albert): Yeah, I was reading The Not-so Lonely Tales of Ana Argo. My parents took it away when I was halfway through, so I just found a PDF online. The way my dad reacted, I thought I was gonna hear about how they make babies, but Ana Argo just gets pizza with her friends. It’s actually kind of boring. But I did learn that some people don’t want boyfriends. Um, that was cool. I guess.
Marie “May” Albert (Concerned Parent): Larry was yelling all about this book Ellen got from the library. He took it away from her because it was going to make her gay, so we agreed to burn it. Can you believe that the library made us pay $45 to replace that evil book? If you ask me, we did them a favor by getting rid of it. No wonder they got defunded.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): I recommended that book to Ellen Albert. People keep coming after me and my job, but the teacher shortage means the school can’t afford to lose any of us. I mean, where else are they going to find someone capable of teaching sixth grade homeroom and science? No one else in Raymond County has a degree for middle school education. In fact, some of the teachers don’t even have a license to teach. Most everything else is easy to learn and easy to teach, but science? Get real.
Mr. Handin (Conservative, Teacher): I wish they would get rid of Ms. Garrison. I can’t keep reporting her anonymously. She is so annoying. Did I tell you she was teaching the kids about vaccines and telling them they’re safe? Okay, bootlicker. What’s next? Child gender mutilation? I mean, she’s going to get these kids killed. Everyone knows that the lizard genes activate on November 4, 2024.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): Mr. Handin has got to go. He thinks he’s an intellectual, but he never went to college. He doesn’t even know what an antibody is. He just listens to Pat Marsh. It’s no wonder they only let him teach math to those with developmental disabilities. No offense, but it’s the only nonpolitical thing he knows. Correction: he doesn’t know anything objectively true about politics, but everything is political to him.
Sandy Crane (Conservative/Protestor): Kids don’t want to read books. The library is useless to them. Everything they need is on the internet. But the left knows the kids are susceptible to books written by degenerates and demons. You can put parental locks on your kid’s iPads to protect them, but you can’t stop them from reading a book from the library.
Ellen Albert (Child of Lawrence and Marie Albert): I still like books. I’m just glad my parents don’t know you can read books on the internet.
Janet Anderson (Librarian): There were so many protestors outside the library in the last few weeks we were open that it was hard to maintain the silence that the library is known for. The Board had a meeting about the LGBTQIA+ YA books, and they decided to stand their ground. After all the “good guys” have never banned books. And bad books have never been threatened with a ban. Why don’t the parents go after paperback romance novels instead. I’ve had enough of those. Oh wait, they can’t do that because the housewives still need a turn on when their husbands can’t make them cum. I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. I just don’t think these people knew how much my job meant to me.
Pat Marsh (Conservative Talk Show Host): I’ve been accused by the left of being against access of information. I am information. I tell people the truth. I turn boys into men. I’m not like those sissies who read their gay books. I’m for the common sense American intellectual. Information starts with doing your own research. Research starts with me. People trust me to keep tabs on the gay agenda. People trust me to tell them about teachers forcing drag shows into the classroom. This is what is happening in America.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): I don’t know where they keep finding drag shows that are being shown to children. I don’t support it either. It’s just this weird thing Pat Marsh and the other conservatives like to talk about, but I don’t know where it’s happened.
Sandy Crane (Conservative/Protestor): I know where these groomers hold their drag shows: the library.
Janet Anderson (Librarian): No, Raymond County Library has never held events with drag queens. We don’t have that anywhere on our event calendar. We have never had drag queens read to children. You might check with the local university about their events, but you’ll probably find that their drag events are performed for people age 18 or older. We’re just as confused as Pat Marsh.
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): I’ve argued with a lot of conservatives on stream about LGBTQ issues. They always talk about children at drag shows. I always ask them about child beauty pageants. We then agree that both are wrong, but when I ask them when they last saw a drag show for children or a child beauty pageant in their town, they can’t recall. No one can. They pop up to be controversial then disappear forever. The drag shows, not the conservatives. The conservatives stick around.
Mr. Handin (Conservative, Teacher): I voted no on the millage for the library. I’m not gonna raise taxes just so they can promote lies. I mean, all their history books are so political. So much talk of white privilege. Look, I’m white. I never got any special privileges. You think I’d be a teacher if I was privileged? Sure, these kids need to know the truth, but the pay is not a privilege. Where’s the millage for teacher pay? Huh?
Ellen Albert (Child of Lawrence and Marie Albert): I do miss the library. It was nice and quiet, unlike my house. When my dad gets home, he blasts Pat Marsh on the TV and sits on the couch with my older brothers, completely silent. They’re proud because they think it’s the grown-up thing to do. Grownups really like facts. They don’t care about how I feel about the library. They don’t care about feelings, except when they do. I think my dad feels a lotta stuff. He says gay people make his stomach feel sick. I asked him why. He says it’s how God wants us to feel.
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): If you wanted my conspiracy theory, I’d tell you that conservatives like Pat Marsh want to make people dumber. Dumb people are easily persuaded to subscribe to his grift train. Dumb people will never question what he says, and Pat Marsh will never have to do research to satisfy questions. He can just talk about his feelings about gay people and promote his sky daddy. Taking out the library is just the best way to create Pat Marsh subscribers.
Pat Marsh (Conservative Talk Show Host): The library is a necessary sacrifice for tradition. Libraries are obsolete. If I want a book, I’ll buy it. Kids can’t buy books, but they can check them out of libraries. We’re returning control to the parents. We’re establishing a necessary chain of command. If we don’t get rid of easy access, how will we protect children? We won’t. This is why we as parents fought to make YouTube kid friendly. Of course, I had to change platforms because of this and charge subscription fees to watch my content, but it’s all for the greater good.
Janet Anderson (Librarian): It’s possible the death of the library was inevitable. TikTok kids were already saying they wanted a Netflix for books. Subscription-based streaming services could take on books. Why not? Why not turn everything into a subscription you have to pay for. It’s not like HBO Max had their “burning of the library at Alexandria” moment with animated shows or anything. It’s not like Netflix cancels their good shows because they progress too slowly. I think if we ever do Library 2: Electric Boogaloo, we should separate books by offensiveness. We’ll make a library for offensive books and a library for innocuous books. The library for offensive books will function like the porn shop or the strip club, and we’ll shame people for going into it. Eventually all the books will be in the offensive library. How could we make the mistake of not doing this before? How could we not censor the knowledge? I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. A lot of things seemed farfetched until I realized how slippery the slopes really are. I didn’t realize that my job was offensive to conservatives. I thought the conservatives never got offended.
Lawrence “Larry” Albert (Concerned Parent): In the future, I would like for more Christian values to be present in society. Except for movies like Fast and Furious; that stuff is just cool. I think the kids have too much access to the bad stuff. Who is going to protect them? Like Pat Marsh says, there are just too many liberal perversions. We used to be a real country. If they never got rid of Trump, none of this bullshit would’ve happened. Trump protected us from the gay books. He kept the gas prices low, and we never had to worry about pedophiles, like the Democrats in the White House, sniffing children’s hair and stuff.
Mr. Handin (Conservative, Teacher): If you ask me, Ms. Garrison is one day away from putting some flag in her room. When she does, I’m going to get the parents to contact the Board and get her fired.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): We need to open the library back up. I’m tired of explaining country flags to Mr. Handin. He still thinks the flag of Switzerland is the plus sign for LGBTQIA+. He will not budge because he doesn’t believe Switzerland exists. This man is a teacher y’all. We need to fix this teacher shortage soon.
Marie “May” Albert (Concerned Parent): I’m a little worried about what Ellen is being taught in school. Larry told me that Ellen’s homeroom teacher seemed gay. But so far, we haven’t had Ellen say anything shocking about school. I just wonder where these things end. If it isn’t gay books, it’s gay teachers or teachers who want to teach critical race theory. It’s like the world isn’t safe for our conservative children. I knew we should’ve enrolled in that private Christian school. It's just so ridiculous that public schools don’t have Christ at their center. I remember when the liberals tried to ban Bibles and prayer from schools. That was strike one. Now there’s all these perversions, and it just makes me want to faint.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): I have never taught anything distinctly liberal or conservative. It’s funny how I can be neutral in the classroom, but no one else can. No one ever complains when kids grow up religiously uneducated because all that was ever reinforced was Christianity. I don’t think the parents of Raymond County want their children to be educated at all. I’m just the free daycare.
Pat Marsh (Conservative Talk Show Host): The next episode of the podcast is going to be on whether teacher’s private social media pages should be a fireable offense. Spoiler alert: they should be. How can we expect these brainwashers to stay neutral if they aren’t even neutral in their private lives?
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): I do consider myself to be an activist. I’m sorry it’s so controversial that I want people like me to have equal rights. Several parents have tried to follow my Instagram, and I refuse to accept their requests. I have to play defense at all times because my way of life is offensive to conservatives. It’s just so exhausting. I might as well work at Walmart. That’s what Mrs. Isaac did. She always brags about how she doesn’t get harassed by parents at her new job, and she gets paid more. At this point, I just feel like I’m playing a losing game. The parents don’t realize what they’re doing to us. You know, if you don’t want your kids seeing certain content, don’t let them view it. I’m tired of beneficial public establishments being held hostage just because you’re a bad parent. The library wasn’t just about books. It wasn’t just about you. Sometimes a place is just good because it exists for free and allows people to have new opportunities. When your kids go off to college, they’re going to see how much of an asshole you were. I hope you’re ready for no contact.
Marie “May” Albert (Concerned Parent): Some of my older friends have talked about their kids going off to college and becoming liberals. There are just so many liberal colleges that force your kids to take culture and gender classes. It honestly scares me. I can’t imagine my child leaving home and coming back brainwashed.
Janet Anderson (Librarian): I think they’ll bring us back one day. They just don’t know what they’re missing yet. The teens will miss our gaming center. Some of the adults will miss our books and movies. People with young kids will miss summer events. People just don’t know what they had until it’s gone. It’s like the prohibition of alcohol. Everyone thought it was for the betterment of society until they could feel what a life without alcohol was like. They’ll get tired of buying their books and renting their movies. They’ll get tired of the summer heat. It’s easy to say you don’t need something when you have it. That’s the point of all this. Mass panic. Mass hysteria. The uneducated trying to dethrone the benefits of the educated. Don’t worry about me. The library was just a job to me, but it was a service to you.
Lawrence “Larry” Albert (Concerned Parent): You know, when I was a kid, doing research in libraries was all we had. Couldn’t google nothing. It was a lot of work. Now no one has to work so hard on this research stuff.
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): When conservatives and the general media talk about standardized test scores going down even further years from now, I wonder who they’ll blame. Certainly not themselves for obliterating open access to information. I mean, how are kids going to complete scholarly research projects? You do know that libraries pay so people have access to online databases, right? The scholarly information isn’t just free. But that’s fine. We’ll let high school students cite websites from Google, which are meant for third graders. Can’t wait to read my son’s hero project on Teddy Roosevelt. I’m sure his teachers will just let him cite Wikipedia and coolpresidentfacts.com. That won’t be bland and boring at all. Of course, I could buy him historical biographies from Barnes and Noble for $60 apiece even though he only needs them for four weeks.
Ms. Garrison (LGBTQ Activist, Teacher): I’m afraid the science fair might be a little dull this next year. We’ve already had problems with kids using TikTok for ideas. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for the family whose kitchen smelled like vinegar because their child tried to make a wooden hammer rubbery. I don’t need to lecture you about not believing everything on the internet, but most of us can agree that the general information pool on the internet is just bad. That’s why we have adults like Mr. Handin who don’t know anything beyond common sense. I mean, on his first day, Mr. Handin broke the microwave in the teacher’s lounge by microwaving his sandwich in aluminum foil. Raymond County is actively against learning. The parents don’t want me to teach, and they don’t want a library. But somehow, it’s my fault when their kid fails basic grammar because they refuse to learn pronoun usage for religious reasons. Or when they campaign against me teaching microevolution in science. Raymond County is just an embarrassment at this point. The parents are dumb. The kids are dumb. There’s almost no helping them.
Sandy Crane (Conservative/Protestor): The real problem is the fact that the liberals want to chop off the penises and breasts of healthy teenagers. My niece had a project on hormones for her science class, so we all protested against it. They’re trying to teach kids about puberty blockers, and I’m not having any of it. Everyone knows hormones are a dog whistle for trans degenerates. They have nothing to do with science or the body. But I know just saying that is going to get me canceled. All these liberals are so soft you literally can’t say the truth anymore. America is literally becoming 1984.
Charles M. Manderson (Internet Historian/Polemicist): It’s kind of funny that conservatives like to reference 1984 when talking about censorship. But 1984 isn’t really about censorship at all. It’s about using language to change people’s perception of reality. It’s about using words ironically to distract from the real meaning of things. When they say groomer, they don’t mean a child predator raising a child to accept sexual situations beyond their maturity. They mean a teacher referencing something left wing that they don’t like. By conflating the LGBTQ with child predation, they can make their enemies seem scarier to people they are trying to force to agree with them. By conflating the library with grooming, they can make information seem foreign, evil, and dangerous. People like Pat Marsh know exactly what they are doing. They know it can make them money, and they don’t care about the harms they do with their rhetoric. Next, Pat Marsh will tell you that public school lunch is communism, so we should let the children starve. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or if it’s in context. It just matters that people are scared enough to handicap themselves with their own votes.