fun with the DMV

Some not-really-related stuff had me thinking about the DMV. I've had pretty substantial dealings with the DMV in three states now, and while it's not my favourite way to spend a morning, it's always been much better than the general reputation would lead you to believe. The employees have always been pretty helpful and reasonable - certainly far above the average in the wide world of customer service. The processes are about as efficient as could be hoped for. The only real trouble is the wait time, which is just a consequence of having too few employees, due to the mania for small government and all. Same thing with the post office, which incidentally is not publicly funded and is so good at what it does that even private companies already in the package delivery business don't bother trying to compete with it directly.

I'd far rather deal with either than make a complex support call to most tech companies any day.

I've always assumed that the intense conservative animus towards these things was just a cheap talking point, but I'm wondering now if it isn't about power relationships. We're all equal at the DMV or the post office, and (sadly) there isn't much recourse if it isn't going the way you want. Money and power don't make much difference, and with the folks behind the counter having things like unions and a middle-class salary, you can't feel nearly as much superiority to and dominance over them as you can at Target. I think that sort of freaks conservatives out.

Making Jeremiah Wright look understated

Conservatives really go to amazing lengths looking for 'reverse racism'. Quite a lot of them - including friends of mine, and I think they're totally sincere - go looking for tea leaves to read every time a nonwhite person is arrested, hunting for ways they're being treated too well. This is especially true if terrorism is also involved, so this week's excitement was that reporters didn't immediately publish hearsay versions of the name of the suspect in the attempted plane-bombing.

"(X) finds it very telling that "reporters" initially discouraged sources from giving the name of the suspect. I guess that type of information is only considered a "scoop" when it's an amish farmer or american male gun enthusiast. nothing to see here, move along..."

I know my brain doesn't work quite the same way as theirs, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the notion is here. Phase 1: delay releasing a suspect's name for a couple of hours in a highly sensitive situation. Phase 3: profit!

ok maybe two months is too long

This blogging thing is harder to get round to than I previously imagined.

I just finished "The Family", which was the sort of pretty good book that makes you wish for a better one. It offered another perspective on something I've been thinking for a long time: corruption, among modern conservatives, has been considerably displaced by a sort of perfect confluence of interests. If you really, truly, religiously believe that what's good for Walmart is good for America, the money they give you isn't quite a bribe. Sharlet writes of an early Christian-right politician,

"Langlie didn't so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn't opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn't want to have to break the law to serve them..."

The philosophical (if you can call it that) merger of business interests, Christianity, and liking war a lot is the defining characteristic of modern conservatism, and it's a very strange mix indeed...