Keep Your Papers In Order. Don’t Wander Off The Reservation
We had to make the dreaded trip to the D.M.V. yesterday. I don’t recall how many times I’ve had to do this during my adult life but I do know that even though it’s always been a pain in the ass, it’s clear to me that it’s getting a lot worse.
It was take a number and sit with a room full of people (my head count came in around 30), all clutching their various documents…birth certificates, pay-stubs, leases, power bills…waiting to have their personal details perused by one of two authoritarian figures of foul continence.
A lot of folks were very grateful, effusive when they finally finished the process. A kind of minor league Stockholm Syndrome that left me puzzled and irritated.
It’s not just about your privilege to drive either. You go through the rat maze because you must keep your papers in order Comrade. If you don’t have a birth certificate, you can’t get a photo ID…if you don’t have a photo ID, you can’t get a copy of your birth certificate.
The people on the other side of the desk don’t have empathy, they see your kind hundreds of times a day. You need them, they don’t need you because you need that document or you won’t be able to function in what has become of society.
As a younger man, a white man…outsider, I spent a month at the Pine Ridge reservation. I didn’t know any of the history…well, I say that but, of course I’d heard about hundreds of treaties being broken and Wounded Knee but not that Pine Ridge and the reservations that followed were originally considered prisoner of war facilities and that Hitler’s concentration camps were partially designed after the reservation model.
I heard Chris Hedges talking about Pine Ridge a few days back…
They make self sufficiency impossible and create this kind of culture of dependence which destroys dignity, self-worth, community with all of the attendant problems…
…I think the reservation model is in fact one we’ve spent a lot of time reporting on and looking at for precisely that reason; when you reduce people to a level of desperation, it becomes far easier to control them.
Like I said, I have actually spent time there and, in my naive youth, I still came away with impressions of lost souls, bitter men under a specter of power they had no way of escaping.
I saw a good deal of desperate people at the D.M.V. yesterday…it’s looking more like the res…..
You may think that’s far-fetched. Might do you good to look in to what Hedges has to say.
Comments
4 Responses to “Keep Your Papers In Order. Don’t Wander Off The Reservation”
Leave a Reply
-
Pribek At Zazzle
The post to blame: Most Peculiar Mama (Don't Eat Your Cat)
It wasn’t just the lack of empathy from them, it was the aggressive apathy that was getting to me. I guess I’d be an asshole too if my entire career centered around a totally meaningless bunch of paper shuffling.
The last time I was at the DMV, Texas Department of Public Safety, I took the test after only two hours sleep… I failed the test.
I never spent time on the Reservation, but State of the World? … :
… Now there is a worsening concept. Blaming the current occupation of the American landscape on the Executive Branch of the leaders of the free world… is a heavy idea.
Do I still have children who can be conscripted to the army of the people, by the people, for the people? Yes, all six of them.
Contravening to hold people without habeas corpus seems to be the new wave of valid military action. We the criminals of citizenship… which is what you are talking about in the DMV anecdote… we are accused of not being citizens, we are blamed for the terrorism, and if it floods… well, we are blamed for that too. It’s our fault that the levees broke.
We stand in line to be insulted by untrained underlings, yes-men, who are on the same intelligence quotient as Karl Rove. “What indeed has happened to the ‘ruling class?’” asks the speaker.
Triggers, that’s what. The ruling elite is in a global land grab. Seventy hour work weeks for their workers. *[side note: as a wage earner I work 113.5 hours a week, every week]* Robber barons are sacrificing you and me to make sure we have our ‘affairs in order’ so we can pay homage to the ‘zombie banks!’
Looking out my window, I see our pretty house sitting on a pretty knoll, not a house on the prairie, but still a relic to the ‘great American dream.’ But I see also the blight that I witnessed in Chicago back in the 80′s … disintegration of the empire of the homeland.
So much so, that thugs are the teen idols of our time… tattooed, glued and screwed. Three time losers who are doing time for rolling a cigarette machine, strike three!
Here we sit in the middle, with middle affairs, on middle America,… with voices muted by mediocrity. Even though we have the Internet that allows us to bitch and moan the current ‘eve of destruction,’ of our middle machinations, we seem powerless to make a diff.
The US Constitution, did it mention the Middle? The Magna Carta did, in its convoluted way, many years ago. This law, this system, this clausterfuk, was written in the testament of time. We are all kings, compared to the starving 2 billion citizens of earth… *[including persons being held worldwide, and in America, without a chance to get out]* but our kingship’s are not self sufficient and we are surrounded by Robin Hoods… poor bastids that we are.
Look at the models of Kings in our time, Saudi Princes who Dubya held hands with and gave lots of kisses to… then invaded Iraq through his Bush, jr, Admin, and looted the Iraqi museums. Got your papers in order? Good question, Pribek.
And the DMV is the great equalizer.
Know what Padrick? I usually quantize this stuff is thusly: hmm…you have to let some geeb read through your private contracts (lease/power bills) in order to obtain a photo ID…what would we the old man think about this? What would HIS dad say? But, now…it’s gone further. For instance, how would late ’80s era Pat Darnell and Jack Pribek react to such an invasion of privacy at the DMV? Probably, if we did now what we’d have done then we’d land in jail.
Sooooooooo…………it’s conditioning my friend, that’s all. For what are we being conditioned? That seems to be the center of debate rather than, the refusal to be conditioned.
I’m sick of it personally.