Typical White Passport

Mack Hall

The typical American can only be deeply offended and hurt by the insensitivity of the State Department in snooping through the passport records only of the rich and famous and weird. This class-based apartheid must end! You and I, gentle reader, must demand that our government demonstrate genuine and relevant inclusiveness and openness to the audacious hopes and needs and aspirations of Jose’ Jamail Bubba Sixpack by snooping through the just plain workin’ folks’ records too.

Sometimes we typical Americans feel like former Boeing employees waiting for the employment office to open and seeing a French-built Airbus of the United States Air Force fly over.

A French-built Airbus of the United States Air Force would not be permitted to fly over France, of course, not even over those thousands of American graves in Normandy, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and hundreds of other places where young Americans met death “at some disputed barricade.”

Passport (not required for visiting France in 1917 and 1944) applications contain such dangerous information as the applicant’s date of birth. Oooooooooooooooooooooooh! We wouldn’t want that to get out, would we?

And then when the typical American arrives in one of those funny little countries burdened by the curse of not being the USA he’s asked really intrusive questions such as “Are you visiting Canada for business or for pleasure, sir? Eh.” Who wants to know? Why? Why does the Canadian secret service (three retired Mounties, Neville, Clive, and Trevor, in a small office just behind The Department of Dog Sleds, or Bureau de Sleds de Pooches) keep a dossier on me?

Someone in Ottawa asked me if I were a Yank and I said “No, thank God, I’m from Texas.” I heard a camera shaped like a puffin click and a tape recorder hidden in a moose whir.

Americans post their exualsay peccadilloes, drug preferences, relationships, and thong pix on MeMeMeMeSpace and MeMeMeMeTube and then complain about privacy issues.

Recently I downloaded and printed my father’s 1941 Army enlistment, a record which is not supposed to be available even to relatives without a real letter and proof of kinship. Should someone apologize to me? Should I apologize to someone? I’m confused here. Whose turn is it to be the outraged victim?

The State Department is investigating three contract employees who were accused of snooping through the passport files of the weird and famous, and will even polygraph them (the employees, not the candidates). But why? The investigators should just look up the employees’ MeMeMeMeSpace ‘blogs; it’ll all be there.

Maybe someone doesn’t want to miss out on all the fun of waterboarding a gum-chewing, Days of Our Lives-watching GS-2 clerk named Heather-Mistee-Bree.

The contract employees were hired last summer to speed up passport applications. Obviously that went well. Perhaps the contract employees were former inspectors of construction cranes in New York.

Two of the three employees involved have been sacked; the only one who was not required to make fresh arrangements for his future works for a placement company owned, according to The Washington Times, by John Brennan, a former CIA agent – who outed him? – who is an advisor to Barack Fitzgerald Obama.

Hmmm. Outrage to order?

Senator Hillary Clinton, who dodged sniper fire to keep the world safe from fresh-baked cookies, was undoubtedly relieved to hear that someone had snooped into her super-secret passport file too. After all, during her tenure as co-President, snooping into secret files was one of her specialties.

In the meantime, I demand that the State Department report to me that someone has been snooping through my electronic passport file, and I demand a written apology. Money would be nice too. I want to be outraged just like the rich folks.

Oh – and God BLESS America.