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Subversive Reading

By MARGARET TALBOT

 From a certain perspective, there is something thrilling about the recent 
face-off between Attorney General John Ashcroft and the librarians. The 
American Library Association and many of its members, indignant about a 
provision of the U.S.A. Patriot Act that could oblige them to cooperate 
with federal agents by turning over the records of what some library 
patrons have checked out, have managed to unleash the most rigorous 
re-examination of the entire Patriot Act since its passage in October 
2001. 
It wasn't long after the librarians started kicking up a fuss that Don 
Young, an extremely conservative Republican congressman from Alaska, said 
during a radio interview that the passage of the Patriot Act, for which 
he'd voted, was ''stupid.''

But for book lovers, Ashcroft versus the librarians is something else -- 
one of those spectacles that manage, like book bannings in suburban 
schools 
or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to glamorize reading and make it seem 
to be, as it sometimes and in some places actually is, a high-stakes 
activity. Suddenly, your unprepossessing branch library -- a low-slung 
60's 
building, perhaps, and not in the greatest repair -- looms as an epic 
battleground of ideas. I love my local library, with its notice board 
shingled with leaflets for every possible community activity, its shelving 
carts teeming with random piles of books I'd never discover on my own, 
even 
its faithful cadre of old men with rattling coughs reading back issues of 
Popular Mechanics. I am not used to thinking of it, however, as a place of 
vivid political drama. Truth be told, it's a bit of a sad case, recently 
forced, by budget cuts, to close on Fridays.

Now, though, it is possible to see even my local library as a locus of 
power -- the power, for instance, to disrupt the smooth enforcement of a 
piece of national legislation. Attorney General Ashcroft, it seems clear, 
regards the librarians as peskier opponents than the A.C.L.U., which 
conservatives have long felt free to sneer about. Librarians, by contrast, 
are sort of like nurses and firefighters: they're among those friendly 
''community helpers'' on our children's worksheets. So, while mocking the 
librarians' opposition as hysterical, Ashcroft has also made a point of 
saying that they have been ''misled,'' presumably by the infinitely 
cunning 
free-speech lobby. It's clear, too, that some librarians are enjoying 
their 
newfound membership in the resistance. Some have reported that they are 
purposely shredding borrowing records. Others are reminding patrons that 
if 
they return books on time, their records are purged automatically, which 
must strike library workers as a lovely synchronicity of civil libertarian 
and housekeeping goals. Still others are considering how to refuse to 
cooperate if they are actually approached by the government. Meanwhile, an 
article that ran on a listserve for ''feisty librarians'' crowed, ''The 
old 
stereotype of librarians as meek maidens whose only passion is for the 
Dewey Decimal System'' is now ''being shattered for good, replaced by a 
new 
image of librarians as feisty fighters for freedom.''

The fact of the matter is, it isn't entirely clear how much of a threat 
the 
Patriot Act -- and specifically Section 215, the one librarians have 
called 
attention to -- really poses to our personal freedoms. Partly it's not 
clear because for months the government maintained such secrecy around its 
implementation. But earlier this month, when the Justice Department 
finally 
responded to pressure by revealing how many times it had actually used the 
provision to wrest information from librarians, the number turned out to 
be 
zero. Section 215 does not actually mention libraries; it only expands the 
number of sources a federal agent can demand information of in the course 
of an international terrorist investigation, from hotels, airlines, 
storage-locker or car-rental businesses to anyone in possession of 
''tangible things'' of presumed relevance, like ''books, records, papers, 
documents and other items.'' And a federal judge has to O.K. the request. 
Moreover, as a Congressional Research Service report pointed out, 
''Although the library community stoutly defends the importance of 
library-patron confidentiality, federal law has yet to recognize its 
privileged status.'' Already librarians must cooperate with federal grand 
jury subpoenas and search warrants. And sometimes, suspicions raised by 
librarians have been of material assistance in an investigation: a 
librarian in Delray Beach, Fla., reported the activities of some patrons 
who turned out to be linked to the 9/11 conspiracy.

I'm not sure that most people share the notion of librarians as confidants 
or of the relationship between librarians and patrons as one of privileged 
communications, akin to the doctor-patient relationship. I remember as a 
13-year-old checking out Anais Nin's diary from my North Hollywood 
library, 
and the librarian asking if my parents knew I was reading it. Then before 
I 
could answer, she seemed to change her mind, smiled complicitly and handed 
me the book, first slipping it to the bottom of the stack, where it was 
effectively concealed by ''Little Women'' or ''Lorna Doone.'' I suppose it 
was a moment of confidences, except that there were other people in line, 
and it was, well, a public library. Are my library borrowing records more 
sacred by definition than my medical records or even my hotel records? 
Only 
if we're being sentimental about it.

And yet, there is a way in which what the librarians have been protesting 
is symbolically important, even if most of us wouldn't, as a practical 
matter, much care whether our borrowing records, with their overdue Dr. 
Seuss books, were made public. There is a way in which reading is a 
stand-in, and a reading list a short-hand, for a life of the mind, an 
interior life, that librarians rightly feel ought not to be violated. It's 
not so much the reading itself they sense needs protecting, but what makes 
us want to read.

Margaret Talbot is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at 
the New America Foundation.