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Gatekeepers are authority figures who seek to limit the choices of others. Gatekeepers are good at justifying their actions through circular reasoning.-Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity
Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
On the local level, I tended to do what most poets, writers, artists, and professors dared not: test the waters of democracy and thereby risking the loss of teaching opportunities, invitations, publishing possibilities, and ostracizing, not to mention subscriptions to the magazine I edited. Over the years, the subjects of my experiments had mostly been poets, writers, editors, publishers, cultural-council bureaucrats, teachers, professors, and librarians. In general, they had proven closed to freedom of expression and vigorous debate, cornerstones of democracy. Even PEN New England, which boasted as its prime purpose "defending freedom of expression," had proven closed regarding the defense of my freedom of expression in New England.
As publisher of a small-press 501 c3 nonprofit magazine, devoted to literature, democracy, and dissidence, I had been knocking on the doors of public libraries over the past decade in an attempt to build a subscriber base. To date, I managed to obtain only 16 libraries, including only a handful of public ones (Concord, Lincoln, Newton, Iowa, Lincoln Parish, Arlington, and Gleason). The rest consisted of university libraries like Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins, Brown, Buffalo, and Wisconsin. One might compare that paltry number of institutional subscribers to the over 500 possessed by Agni or Poetry Magazine.
In general, my knocking on doors, that is my experimentation, had shown that public libraries (and university libraries as well) tended, perhaps contrary to public belief, not to be bastions of free speech and free expression at all. One of them even issued a no-trespass warrant against me without due process several years ago, though I had not disturbed patrons, used four-l etter words, talked about sex, or made threats. What I'd done was simply persist in my attempt to get it to subscribe.
More recently, I was sitting in the public library that my tax dollars helped fund in Barnstable, Massachusetts, Sturgis Library, one of the oldest in America. There, I overheard a brief discussion: "They're putting in good windows!...