For those Americans desperately seeking some sign that this era won’t go on forever, it’s worth noting that the George W. Bush Presidential Library marches forward.

The promise that one day the incumbent president will be a former president, a status marked by a large pile of concrete with his name on it and scholarly seminars with titles like “Reconsidering Rumsfeld,” is reassuring.

Last week, voters in University Park, Texas, agreed to sell to Southern Methodist University, the projected home for the library, a small piece of park land to become part of the library complex.

This is supposed to complete the real estate part of the deal; presumably, all that’s now needed is the final approval of Vice President Cheney.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of raising the money. The George W. Bush Presidential Library (and museum and policy center) is now budgeted at $500 million; the Clinton library, widely derided as the ultimate in baby-boomer self-indulgence, cost $200 million. (Of course, there are people who think it would indeed take a lot of money to connect the words “George W. Bush” and “library.”)

Over the remaining months of the Bush administration, the library project will benefit, as the Clinton edifice did, from the law that contributions to presidential libraries need not be publicly revealed.

Still, there are complications. More than 100 SMU professors have objected to the idea of connecting the library to the university. Aside from the predictable political objections, faculty are also concerned about ties between the policy center – dedicated to advancing the principles of the George W. Bush administration – and the university, and that nobody has ever asked them about the idea.

“There’s been a lack of transparency from the beginning,” complained journalism professor Tony Pederson.

Still, aside from disgruntled faculty – which is, after all, a redundancy – there is another issue to the George W. Bush library. Presidential libraries provide not only an administration’s last chance at putting its own spin on history, but a place for historians to go through an administration’s papers.

The question about the George W. Bush library is – and there’s no way to keep this from sounding like an obvious joke – what will there be to read?

On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush issued Executive Order 13233, placing massive new limits on the release of presidential documents. Overturning both the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and an executive order by Ronald Reagan that made documents available after a fixed time, Bush’s order allows presidents and former presidents to keep any documents secret for a long period, allows presidents’ family members and others to keep the public from viewing documents, and for the first time allows former vice presidents to keep documents secret.

(You probably thought the part about the George W. Bush library needing Dick Cheney’s approval was a joke.)

So we’re facing the prospect of a $500 million library without much to read.

But after watching the administration, we can count on it having lots of people saying “Shh.”

This March, to try to make the library more interesting – and help Americans know what’s going on in their government – the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to overturn the Bush executive order. A similar bill, by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has been introduced in the Senate.

When the House bill passed, the administration threatened a veto. But it passed the House by a veto-proof 333-93, and Congress can always attach it to something the White House wants, like a faith-based intelligence policy.

But so far, the saga of the president’s library features massive spending, public park land taken over for development, politicizing of information and a previously unimagined level of secrecy about public policy.

Already, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum is achieving the ultimate goal of presidential libraries: It’s expressing the entire Bush administration in a building.