What Election 2008 obscures is obviously more important than Election 2008, as you well know. Scholarship may make molehills out of mountains, & vice versa, & it may also choose to focus on the minutiae which is figuratively the grains of mole that make the mole hill. This is by no means meant to reference the great Battle Of Mole Hill which took the lives of seventeen brewer's aprons back in 1962, nor is this a reference to Molé Hill, a famous sauce maker from Guadalajara whose exploits involving the feeding of the Renegade Black Banditos made him very famous in his neighborhood & led unfortunately to his incarceration & death for making salsa that was just too damn delicious for the local authorities to stand.
I bring this to your attention because, as an avid newspaper clipper, I have watched my shears go rusty (so to speak) from the lack of real information given to even the specialists. As an example: once Rhinoplasty Today! was an important read if you wanted to know how the zombie technicians kept so many terrifyingly old politicians & pundits alive. But now it reads like a how-to manual for the desperate disfigurement of Generation Then. I know this can be helpful as well, but the current generation is involved only implicitly in the War On Sailing. The powers-that-are seem to know someone - I don't dare to believe it's us, friends! - are on to them.
So when the Societal Organization for Archiving, or SOFA, met in early 2008, I was there to observe in my cover identity as an advertising executive & part-time balloon dancer for the Madison Avenue firm of Blow Me & Bother, & although I have already sent a report to SOFA committee, as well as to the Wall Street Journal's matchmaker program, I can report in general that SOFA specialists are in a bind, a tizzy, a snit, a pet & most disturbingly a dither. I have never seen so many people in latex gloves raising angry fists at one another (with the exception of the famous Reagan Major Polyp Surgery of 1988, but that, of course, was a medical & not a partisan disagreement). An horrible example: when one archivist, the great Smithers Doohickey of the University of Filth, attempted to keep the peace with a tender speech & a call for a group hug, he was forced to eat acid-treated copies of what some said were unpublished Samuel Pepys scribbles, fourteen pages total, & forced to wash it down with his own tears. I can say with no doubt that SOFA has lost - well, not a good man - but a trustworthy man. A man who knew how to bag & tag, at any rate!
What is to be done? Isn't conflict the soul of drama? Yes, but whose drama are these usually quiet, unassuming, astonishingly lonesome people acting in? It is certainly not the inherently deliberate & dull drama of Information Science, where the discovery of a heretofore unknown flyleaf has caused blood pressure issues in men in their thirties. No, it is the fact that someone - who? - is involving them in a national conspiracy of which they have no part. They are forced to be extras or walk-ons or (let's face it) caterers by the powerful people - the same people who manipulate "democratic" elections & allow television shows like Jimmy Kimmel's to remain on the air.
I have sent to SOFA a detailed & anonymous list of recommendations for the organization to follow & look forward to reporting the changes made when I attend their next meeting in 2012. As for right now - those of us who require the services of archivists, librarians, data managers, astronauts & strippers - I say to you, tread lightly. They are being manipulated by forces that cannot control, mainly because the forces have no Library of Congress number. Well. Not yet!
