Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.
- Brooks Atkinson
Dear George,
Of the many advancements civilization has made throughout history, perhaps none is as important as the internalization of oppression. Gone are the instruments of oppression; in are the instruments of seduction. A key to this transition has been the emergence of a strong bureaucracy--that shapeless, featureless mass of gray jelly that is so essential to rationalizing the mad fantasies of policy and making them palatable. It is the bureaucracy, as an extension of the corporatist state that gives the masses the impression that they are free when they are not.
These gentle people speak with the comforting twang of a county extension agent. Yet, they are cut from the same cloth as their German brethren without whom the Holocaust never would have been such a smashing success. Heaven forbid that we would ever do such a thing! Not because the corporatist state is more moral, it is simply more sophisticated. Why put up with the messiness of a dead body when it’s much more sanitary to annihilate a soul.
Where citizenship once meant a sometimes-raucous participation in public life, it now means good behavior. Where rebellion was once brutally oppressed, it is now absorbed into the civic body. These days, we silence a rebel by making him a celebrity and sending him round the talk-show circuit.
The goal of a bureaucracy is to bury the masses beneath so many layers of rules and regulations that a whisper of anxiety dogs their every act: the gentle fear that their act may have violated a regulation, and they know neither which regulation they violated nor the penalty for not adhering to it.
A bureaucracy achieves this goal by regulating possibility, not probability. For example, one of the approaches to Newark-Liberty Airport passes over a suburban New Jersey neighborhood. Now it is possible that a landing gear from a 747 could fall off and crown one of the residents of this neighborhood, though it is hardly probable. But the good bureaucrat will regulate the possibility and require that all the citizens of that neighborhood wear bicycle safety helmets when they leave the house. And he will sell this regulation as being absolutely essential for saving lives. I mean who would want to be responsible for a small child being smushed by a falling landing gear. Of course, the truth is that a life is never saved; it is only extended for a number of years.
Just a brief aside, here: when a government names an airport after liberty, you can be pretty sure that liberty is dead.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:33:16 PM 
|
