The Anti-Library of George W. Bush

by David Faris

The architects of George W. Bush's legacy face a daunting challenge in the years ahead: How to build a presidential library for a man who — Karl Rove's absurd claims of Bush's bookishness notwithstanding — doesn't seem to read?

Never having visited a presidential library — the execrable James Buchanan was the only president ever born in Pennsylvania and he still has no library — I have always wondered what goes on in these places. Does Bill Clinton cruise into his library to check out books and use the free Internet to surf for porn? Does anyone have a membership card in the Nixon Library, and what are the late fees like? Is there a special section for Jimmy Carter's books in the Jimmy Carter presidential library?

Bush's library looms as an even larger mystery. It is not just that Bush isn't much of a reader — this is like saying Eliot Spitzer isn't much of a family man.

The larger problem is what exactly Bush will do with the library, slated for construction in Dallas and estimated to cost as much as half a billion dollars. It's like buying a $500 million slide projector for Andrea Bocelli.

Of course, I can do a Google with the best of them, and apparently the libraries are meant to be museums of a sort, as Borat might say, for make benefit of glorious ex-president's historical legacy — but would anyone want to build or visit the Museum of George W. Bush?

The only possible way to approach this vexing problem is to build what Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed an "anti-library" — rooms filled with lacquered bookshelves of unread books. In his treatise on the unpredictability of human affairs, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that "a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool."

And no one on in America needs a research tool more than the current president. Fortunately, the universe of books unopened by President Bush is what they call a "target-rich environment."

The library could be organized according to the greatest cognitive deficits of the nation's 43rd president, which in no particular order are economics, diplomacy and syntax.

Imagine a special nook devoted to books like The Elements of Style, and an entire wing for the works that have dissected the failures of Bush's presidency, like Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine.

Bush would also benefit from reading the kind of scholarly work that outlines the forces that are currently relegating the United States to the ranks of second-rate powers. Start off with Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and then see if Bush understands how he has hastened our historical reckoning.

A new Bush biography has the president admitting that he spent a lot of time crying during his presidency. That makes about 300 million of us, bucko. The question is what the president is going to do to make amends after he leaves office.

Various forces hope in vain for Bush's prosecution, which is about as likely as Rod Blagojevich's 2016 presidential run. It's not that Bush doesn't deserve a prosecution — he and his advisers brazenly disregarded the constitution at many different junctures, from wiretapping to torture. The lot of them belong in prison.

Seeing The Smirk frog-marched out of his Crawford ranch would certainly be satisfying. But the ultimate purgatory for George W. Bush would be confining him to his anti-library, reading one by one the books that might have persuaded him to choose a less disastrous course for the country he was entrusted to lead.

Is there a more appropriate punishment for America's most ignorant president than eternal consignment to a lavish prison of letters bearing his name?

David Faris is a frequent City Paper contributor. Brian Howard's Editor's Letter will return next week or when his flu subsides.