The United States Will Have an Official Library of Stupid: Thoughts About the Upcoming Presidential Library
When George W Bush graduated from president school to become an artist, a lot of us in the library community joked that his official library would be full of all the Crayola doodles of Chaney and dicks. For the current administration, there's less jokes because of all the horrifying and stupid and horrifyingly stupid things the man does on a near constant basis. Thinking about that presidential library, what it will house and where it will be and what it will be a monument to, gives me a sick feeling.
What the presidential library of Donaldson "Donald" Jebediah Trump will contain will be nothing less than gaudy and spectacular. As we all know, a spectacle is nothing more than a con. More often than not, when something is visually striking it hides a dark emptiness behind all the glitz and glamour. Gold plated shit is still shit. While I would enjoy walking around all the bribes and crimes of Nixon, at least they would be labeled as such (and boycotted). With Trump's Qatar jet and pieces of the Mexican Wall, I would feel like I had been cheated. Cool, a plane full of McDonald's farts only one president used and proof that the wall never was real because it is in a museum and not, you know, on the Mexico border.
That idea of useless things in wrong places brings us to the location of the library. Land has been offered in Florida near the Stupid White House, where this librarian hopes it will be placed so when the climate disaster really ramps up it will be flattened by hurricane winds and carried out to sea. “Look at my works…” and all that. That's pretty much the only place they can place it. Anything the man has put in Vegas or Atlantic City has been rejected or closed. That tower in New York City is going to be renamed Musk-Dick if the current feud goes further. Hell, at this rate no matter where they put it, the presidential library will be ransacked by the outland people when society collapses because food prices have risen almost twenty-five percent in four years.
Speaking of those outland people, who will visit this library? Who needs to go to a place to see this man's years of bullshit? Nobody will care about this as a repository for knowledge. What knowledge? The stuff he will steal yet again and keep in the library bathroom? His tweets and posts? Copies of Art of the Deal, the thirty-year-old book about how to fail at business? Digressing a bit, but the people who will come to see all this are either the curious or the stupid. Once the man leaves power, his family are going to be opening up everything like a gift shop because the rest of them feel stupid. The name is just in him, and recognition beyond that will fail as soon as he is out of the lime light. The only ones left to cheer at this monument will be those who love him but will not be able to afford the trip or those that hate him but cannot afford the gasoline to burn it down.
At the end of the day, this "library" will be little more than a place where people say, "oh yeah, that guy existed." At least when other rich people we say that about died, we had things to smile about. Rockefeller left a center where Prometheus looks down at ice skaters. Carnegie left hundreds of libraries, many still in operation and quiet lovely to be in. And Trump will leave some trash wall pieces on a border, a plane that nobody cares about, and crayola drawings of all the dicks.