Dear editors,
What utter non-sense! You have the audacity to post, “There’s nothing left to conserve,” on a bulletin board in the university library? This hulk of a building, straining under the weight of a million volumes of the world’s most precious resources? If this ivory tower were to burn, it would only be less tragic than the burning of the Library of Alexandria because there are many such ivory towers dotting our beautiful American landscape. The jewels of these United States are its world-leading universities. There. Something left to conserve.
Lest I wax too poetic about the universities, I hasten to add they are being turned over to the most ungrateful crop of hooligans, wandering God’s green earth in Birkenstocks. Maybe it’s from your popular professors, the ones who tickle your ears to avoid being called curmudgeons, that you got the aforementioned audacity. But look no further than the soil of our land for true stock worth conserving. I’m not talking about the National Park System, which started out as Teddy Roosevelt’s conservative idea but has since been turned over to tree-huggers. I’m talking about physical resources. From sea to shining sea, there is natural abundance. I bet you like eating food. Our crops are bountiful, ready to be harvested and planted the next year, but they require management. Conservation, even, you louts.
And the parchments behind glass in Washington, DC, which have stood for almost a quarter millennium as a testament to the wisdom of our founding fathers, heaven forbid they get rolled up and put in the circular file. Locke had it right; we have a duty to keep his ideas rolling, the ideals of life, liberty, and property. But I’m not a fan of ending that phrase as “the pursuit of happiness.” Because if you claim you’re pursuing happiness by posting non-sense, then you’ll claim that posting non-sense is your God-given right. Look what that guiding star of “happiness” has gotten you: such deep depression that you think we have nothing left to conserve. Well, I’ve got one nerve left, and you’re getting on it.
You must have a fancy computer, otherwise your flyer wouldn’t have these fancy fonts or the little Harper Review logo on it. Are those things worth conserving? I sure don’t think so: I think typewriters bring the printing press to the common man—a good thing worth conserving—but connecting them with a bunch of wires in a worldwide web just ties everyone in knots. I bet the University loads up those computers in a “lab” for you to use for free. You don’t have to go wash dishes at Medici like we did to buy yourself a typewriter, ribbon, and paper. Get a job, you hippies.
Look, whether it’s the institutions, the geography, or the intellectual history—it’s all still here, and it needs saving. But the people who agree with your statement and you people who wrote that statement are of one cloth. You don’t really care about the things that no longer are, you just care about complaining. Why should the rest of us conserve anything for you? I’ll be pleased if you get nothing of mine when I’m dead and gone. Expect nothing from my will. Do not ring my bell. Get off my lawn.
Reactionarily,
Daniel Fabrycky
Image: Unknown photographer, Joseph Regenstein Library, photographic print, undated (University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center).