July 6, 2009
A grievance
From Rudolph Delson’s1 Open Letter to Senator Clinton, December 3, 2008:
Above the Texas Montage, with its picture of cowboys and steer, appears a long quote by Lyndon B. Johnson, which concludes:
Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man
Yes! What better emblem than the beef industry for a world ecologically bent to the hopes of American men? Similarly, accompanying the image of a locomotive crossing a hill-country trestle is a quote taken from the inscription on the famous “Golden Spike,” which in 1869 completed America’s first transcontinental railroad:
May God continue the unity of our country as the railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.
Again—yes! In 2008, what better symbol for our national unity than our adamantine national railroad infrastructure?
There is only one pairing of quote and image from which I must dissent. Accompanying the Alaska Montage, with its grizzly and its salmon, is this quote from the “Thanksgiving Address, Mohawk version”:
We send thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are glad they are still here and we hope it will always be so.
I am relieved to hear that the State Department, like the Mohawk nation, aspires to preserve “all the Animal life in the world.” Still, to cite the extirpated grizzly and the decimated salmon as examples of animal species from which humanity ought to learn something? This is dark indeed.
Have you seen2—actually handled, in person—the new U.S. passports? They are outrageous. Appalling. Embarrassing. And, above all, fugly. My passport expires next summer, and I sincerely hope that the design will have been revised before then; otherwise, I may have to stop traveling overseas. People, what can we do to make this happen?
- Rudolph Delson is the author of the novel Maynard and Jennica, as well as of the very fine “An Open Letter to John E. Potter, Postmaster General” (PDF, 127 KB), which I highlighted earlier today on my own blog.
- A ray of hope, or merely another instance of institutional inconsistency? The US State Department appears to no longer include photos of the current passport design on its website. Have they become embarrassed by it? Are they in the midst of revising it to be less horrendous? Or did they just move the page and forget to update their links?
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Oh. Oh. Oh.
Fugliness undreamt of in my worst nightmares.
People.
We must take to the streets.
I’m serious.
If the State Dept. ends up sticking with the current passport design, I recommend they add one of those little audio chips that come in greetings cards. I’m sure they can find one that plays a midi version of God Bless America.
So, when the passport is opened at customs it plays something like this:
http://rosemck1.tripod.com/god-bless-america.mid
It complements the current design and it shows off our American technological prowess and sense of aesthetics, and, hey, every passport checker in the world will be humming God Bless America in their dreams.
Okay, I say we each get to choose our own personal, individual passport design. We’re Americans, right?
So I am going to the greeting card rack over at the Rural King and finding me some inspiration for my own design.
Git ‘er done!
Or maybe I’ll review designs for personalized checks — sunsets, rainbows (not the LGBT kind), puppies, kitties.
Aaargh! And, just as a reminder, if you already do have one of these POS new passports, do yourself a favor and smash the RFID chip, which does absolutely nothing except broadcast your Americanitude to potentially hostile strangers.
Or give it the microwave treatment.
I hate this.
A couple of years ago, I absentmindedly set down my wallet on a stack of something-or-other in the River Forest, Illinois Whole Foods. Minutes later, I returned to the stack; my wallet was gone. In vain did I seek help from the customer service chick. No well-heeled upstanding aging hippie had turned it in.
I was pissed because the wallet was a rather lovely, quite sturdy paper affair a friend had bought for me on a trip to Japan — and because the thief did not have the decency simply to extract my $200 in holiday-weekend cash and leave the wallet and ID behind for me.
So I lost my driver’s license and credit cards et cetera et cetera.
And my passport. Lord knows why I was toting my passport around River Forest, Illinois.
And Lord knows why I did not replace it swiftly. Maybe I had fallen into a funk and thought I would never again travel outside the United States.
But there you have it. And I am really really really angry at the thought of shelling out at least a hundred bucks for a new passport that is in every way an abomination.
The microwave treatment leaves a telltale scorch mark.
Fucking hippies.
Yikes. Thanks for the tip.
I put a $2.00 Made-in-China Casio watch in a microwave once, and it shot pretty sparks before it died.
Fucking thieving hippies.