The DMV as an Allegory of American Decadence

"Just now the public is exercised, and rightly, by the cataract of revelations about the NSA and the FBI hoovering up information about ordinary citizens.  A couple of weeks ago, it was the IRS targeting groups whose political beliefs were at odds with the Democratic gospel of government unlimited.  It wasn’t so long ago that we saw in the movies minatory bureaucrats barking out the demand “Papers, please!” They were the bad guys. They lived in squalid totalitarian societies where the government ran everything. We in American were different. Land of the free, home of the brave. 

Now those bureaucrats yelling  “Papers, please!” are our guys.  “Communism,” said Lenin, who knew about these things, “means keeping track of everything.” How he would have envied our databases and supercomputers, our face-recognition technology and DNA testing!  A society where surveillance is universal, where every move is tracked and docketed, is a society where everyone may be guilty and certainly is a suspect. Black boxes in your car that track where you’ve been and how fast you drove to get there, cameras in taxi cabs that snap your picture every time you take a ride, drones aloft that the FBI uses to keep an eye on us. Where does it end?"     [PJ Media]