When the masks fall
Seared in my memory is no secret mission to Cambodia, but instead one early winter morning in Paris where I oh so briefly witnessed a crack in the thin veneer that separates man from animal.
Back then I was preparing for the "Concours" (competitive examinations) that might allow me to study in a French "Grande École" (elite school), and had realized my nazional ID card had expired when I was 18, and without it, I would not be able to partake until the next year. And so, warned that you had to arrive early, I was one of the first arrived shortly after 7 in the morning in front of the Paris XIXth arrondissement town hall. However the offices would only open at 8, and by the time 8 arrived, literally hundreds of other people were waiting in the cold. Inside, the employees, arriving slowly starting at around 7:30, were warm and cozy, and looked without compassion at the shapeless mass of men and women accumulating outside the entrance. They could have let us in and let us wait in line peacefully inside in the big heated hallways. But no, citizens exist to serve and obey the bureaucratic order, and not the other way around. We were better freezing our asses off outside.
Meanwhile, we in the winter cold were realizing that even if only half of us were waiting for the service that processed our cattle identification certificates, the last person in line would have to come back another day, for the office could probably not handle everyone. That would mean one more morning waiting in the cold, with just as little odds of getting in. One more day lost to work (and its pay), school, care for the kids, or whichever activity we had joy (or redeemable value) in doing. For some of us, one more day without papers was also risking to miss a deadline and lose money, fail an exam, be arrested, be denied some important benefit of government robbery, etc. The poorer amongst us could probably not easily afford such loss.
And so when the time came, and the janitor with no haste whatsoever eventually opened the door, there was this huge rush amongst the people waiting, to get to the front of the line for the identity card office, or at least to be amongst those who would be processed that same day. I was young, not too badly placed (having arrived early), and ran the fastest I could. But still by the time I arrived, people were battling for those dispensers of numbered tickets that would determine the processing order; in a few seconds, the dispensers were broken off their stand, grabbed, and their victors, after serving themselves, had started serving others.
Myself, I was a bit pissed that having arrived amongst the first ten, I had a much later ticket and would have to wait there all morning. But more than that, I was fascinated by the people around me, the animal hate in their gaze, the readiness to fight, the jealousy of not having a better place, the universal enmity of all against all. Life in the zero sum game. I was wondering how low in the animal reign I would have dived myself had I arrived a bit later and had gotten no good ticket at all, had the line been for life-critical food and medicine instead of a piece of bureaucratic paper. In such a case, there would no doubt have been injuries and maybe even deaths. Instead there were only minor injuries from people falling during the initial rush, or being a bit violent while vying for the dispensers, and bruised dignities at the insults proffered.
After everyone had his number, you could see each of their eyes changing. One by one, they would switch back from animal to human, from enemy to friend. Shame would appear on our faces as we would realize what had happened. Shame for ourselves. Shame for each other. So that is what it is to be human.
Yet looking deeper in the eyes of the culprit, you could see them begging not so much for forgiveness, but for complicity in keeping our degradation secret. "Sure, I was swine, but so were you to some extent. Don't tell anyone about me, I won't tell anyone about you." And they were prospectively hating you for being their better if you were (but how could they know, since they were paying no attention to you while fighting for a ticket). Whatever separated Parisians from the wretched creatures I sometimes saw on TV or read about from books, wasn't a progress in human nature.
A few minutes later, some sanctimonious townhall employees came with policemen, and sent everyone back home. They closed the office, that only reopened it a day or two later with policemen guarding the line. All that for nothing. What a waste. What a lesson.
These employees are such wonderful civil masters. Just like SS guards in concentration camps, they would cause the degradation of other people then feel superior in their contempt for those people. What a delicious feeling that must be, to be so high above masses of people you would otherwise have to individually consider your equal or your better. Delicious too for them to have an extra vacation day. Life in the public administration is sweet for the power hungry and the sanctimoniously lazy, which is probably why that's the kind of people you find working there.
My dad went to that office there for me the next week. After only five months of bureaucratic battles, thanks to special treatment from the bureaurats when they realized that despite his being born in Tunisia from a father born in Tonkin, my dad wasn't a wog but an honest-to-Godvernment good white Gallic citizen, he would eventually obtain papers that prove my French Nazionality, and with them got me the prized Nazional ID card, just one or two weeks before the written examinations started. Glory be to the French Bureaucracy!
When a few years later I went to that same office and inquired about how I could revoke my French Nazionality, the disbelieving employees told me they wouldn't do it unless I had another equally recognized Nazionality. But the whole point was to not be the subject of any government, and instead to be free. And so I realized that I don't need paper marks here and there to be destroyed or created to be free. The French Government denies that I am a sovereign individual, I deny that it has any sovereignty either. That makes us even. French Bureaucrats claim that they control me for my own good. I deny that they have any actual control or legitimacy; but since they back their claims with guns (whether visible in plain sight or carried for them by a goon in uniform hidden until they call him), I show them some paper that has little meaning to me and a lot to them, and they don't hurt me or bother me more than any of their other victims.