A Bronx Cheer for the Patriotic Passport

By PLS

There’s good news, I guess: if I’m stranded for eons on a runway and I’ve run out of all other reading matter, I can read the inspirational quotes inside the new 28-page passport. And then I’ll vomit into the airline’s barf bag.

Another possibility: I’ll have something to keep the mind occupied while standing in line at the airport to be inspected head to toe as if I had serious traitor or terrorist potential. The only people who deserve kudos in a TSA queue are the ordinary Americans who travel. They are incredibly kind to one another as they endure this charade. I’m sure they’ll share my joy at having pretty passports to riffle through. Who cares about respect when you can have propaganda?

A Citizen of the World

A passport used to be a simple, practical document. It identified the traveler. It held visas. It got stamped to show you’d entered and left a country. Very tidy. Back then passports were fairly cheap, and the whole idea was that this little book was your key to far places, an escape from parochialism, an invitation to become a citizen of the world.

Now, evidently, it’s to keep you tied to home, to make you that dullest of creatures: the patriotic clone, the drone who never leaves home mentally even though the next stop on the airplane is thousands of miles away in a place where people speak a different language and celebrate different holidays—and these days no longer respect the United States of America.

Now, what’s more, a passport costs $97 for adults, which begins to feel like real money, so as I consider renewing mine in the near future, I’m glad at last to know why.

How to Concentrate on the Non-Essential

No, it’s not labor costs that are boosting passport fees, not the honest expense of staffing passport offices so that skilled workers can issue those precious little blue books quickly. My colleague PHK has been writing in great detail* of the problems that good honest citizens encounter in trying to pry a passport out of any U.S. passport office in less than a century....

OK. I exaggerate. But not by much. The poor service at the Passport Office really results from intentionally inadequate budgeting and staffing decisions made worse by the effect of new regulations. The increased demand could have been wholly compensated for, had there been any desire to serve citizens well. But the health, safety and convenience of ordinary citizens is not a priority of this Administration.

The Belly of the Beast

In short, it’s like this: the Passport Office is one more victim of the Republican shrink-the-government policy via humongous tax cuts for the rich compounded by an expensive war in Iraq. By starving every function of government except war, Republicans have succeeded in their Big Plan: they’ve made the U.S. government into a third world country that no one respects. They could then use the mess they'd created to propagate the notion that “government (or public) service” is a contradiction in terms at all times and places.

This didn’t have to happen. Incompetence is not necessarily in the nature of the government beast—but a starved beast can’t perform.

Story Books for the Kiddies

So there’s not enough money to hire people to inspect spinach or issue passports, but there’s enough money to listen in on anyone’s phone conversations and to pay some fancy-dancy agency to redesign passports, with illustrations that embody this heart-warming vision of American grandeur: from-sea-to-shining sea. Start in the Chesapeake Bay. End with Honolulu. What a lulu of misdirected cleverness!

And–oh yes!–how much did this hokey redesign cost?

I understand that the illustrations are supposed to be representative of all Americans, too. That’s cowboys and Indians, of course. But not Muslim Americans evidently.

The New Crime: Being Muslim

So as I read about this new passport, which happily I do not have to carry as I go abroad this year, I think about Abe Dabdoub, who “calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.”

I don’t know whether he actually has the jazzy new model passport or the boring old document that quietly did the job that needed to be done, but picture it: the poor guy can’t even fly to Canada, where most of his relatives live, without being treated like a terrorist. The hassle didn’t happen just once. That would be understandable, if the error were be corrected. But over and over again he’s demeaned. That’s a personal tragedy. It’s also, potentially, a problem for all of us. There no way for an honest citizen to get out of the Homeland Security no-fly trap in a single lifetime. I bet Abe Dabdoub wishes he’d chosen citizenship in Canada with the rest of his family. Instead he had visions of an America of the imagination, which is farther from reality than ever. Poor guy.

Congress finally got around to paying reparations to Japanese-Americans for the dislocations they suffered during the Second World War. Maybe we should start thinking of a Reparations Bill for Americans who happen to be Muslims during the so-called War against Terror.

Brown Wrapper Anyone?

The policies of the current administration have created such loathing for the United States that it is no longer pleasant to travel as an American. Some Americans wrap themselves in the Canadian flag when they travel, but I have a better ploy. At times, when people ask where I’m from, I say, “Finlandia.” I’ve got blue eyes, after all, and pale skin. After that no one expects me to speak English. I don’t have to open my mouth and reveal I’m an American.

Once upon a time I proudly flashed a black passport.

Now, forget the pix and even the eagle and give me something in the kind of anonymous brown wrapper that used to conceal pornography and Kotex.

*For PHK on passports: go here and follow the trail back.