Day Three

In which I attempt to comply with conditions of my supervision...and the REAL ID Act

The DMV got worse while I was gone.

I was told by my case manager to report out to the DMV at 0600. That’s 6am, that’s like five hours after I finally turned my brain off last night. I asked “can’t I just make an appointment?”

She laughed. So did all her coworkers. “You can try,” one said. They were really cackling now, trying to catch their breath, failing, as I sat in my chair and just kind of assumed I was the butt of a hyperbolic joke.

But I went online, and sure enough, there were zero available appointments across the ENTIRE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA over the next ninety days.

The DMV opens at 7 here, so I figured “6am is overkill, but at least I’ll be first in line.”

Nah.

Try fiftieth.

The couple behind me just moved here from Colorado, where apparently the government hasn’t entirely collapsed yet. The boyfriend, however, printed his proof of address off the internet. Mercifully, the DMV staff at 0700 perform an actual standing count like the kind they do in prison, followed by a long, patronizing monologue (like the kind they do in prison), followed by an inspection of all supplicants’ documents with a degree of pedantry which would make the proud bureaucrats of Arstotzka weep with civic pride. The boyfriend, who clearly has never had any interactions with the criminal justice system, stuttered, stammered, and when the clerk told him to vacate the line, he bit his lip before howling to the skies about his emotions. Some hours later, I guess he persuaded his significant other to forsake the sunk costs fallacy and rejoin him another day.

The first people in line arrived at 0230. The line stretched down the street and around the block, and the last forty or so arrivals (the ones who showed up at 0700), were turned away at 0820 with a giant red sign that reads “SORRY, BUT WE’RE FULL FOR TODAY.” The state spent millions on a queuing system that texts you not when your appointment is ready, but when you are allowed to enter the building and wait in the lobby. I received this text after about five hours, during which I bought a concha bread (the first free-world meal where I was just entirely, consumedly aware of my newfound liberty) watched a Fellini flick and bought a new wardrobe from a very kind elderly gay man at the thrift store next door. It was, in short, a hell of a day.

Incredibly, I still didn’t qualify for the federal lunacy that is the “REAL ID Act”, because the official documents issued to me by the Bureau of Prisons misspelled my home address two different ways on two different official documents, including my actual, much-heralded, release-issue federal photo ID. Incredibly, the clerk took pity on me, and let me use a prescription and the address on file with the DMV as supplemental proof and gave me that stupid fucking star we all need to fly now.

My question is this: what happened that made this most American of institutions, the Department of Motor Vehicles, state-run but completely subservient to the whims of the federal bureaucracy, so completely inefficient, understaffed, and frankly broken? Overnight camp-outs are for Taylor Swift tickets and Black Friday doorbusters, not for learner’s permits. Waiting in line for twelve hours to maybe get what effectively amounts to a travel permit (not to mention, more chillingly, a permit to participate in democracy itself) is the stuff of Warsaw Pact dictatorships, not the Land of the Free.

Since we’re in bizarro-America now where the current administration, much to my chagrin and bewilderment, is now the party of big federal government, shrinking state and municipal autonomy, SOEs and command economy capitalism, where is the federal intervention for a problem that can actually be solved with sheer manpower?

If we’re just deploying the military to solve problems that are the responsibility of state and local government, why not deploy the National Guard to eliminate the DMV backlog, to stopgap staffing shortages in DMV offices? The Bureau of Prisons does this all the time, employing doctors and nurses in the Naval Medical Service Corps to fill mission-critical vacancies at institutions across the country. Virtually every federal prison has a medical staffer on loan from the NMSC. The same is true of the VA.

The REAL ID Act is largely responsible for this dumpster fire. Let’s get the soldiers off our streets and into our DMVs, and perhaps our federal bureaucracies as well: the SSA, the VA, and, sure, the BOP. West Virginia did so with their DOC, as a matter of fact, and the success of that initiative got Billy Marshall the top job at the BOP.

It took me six hours to get a state ID card. Would you spend six hours on a weekday morning waiting in line just to be able to, say, vote? Could you, even, like given your circumstances is such a thing even logistically possible without major accommodations and compromises being made? This is my primary concern about voter ID. There is a time value of money, and a money value of time. Contemplation of tradeoffs which essentially amount to a poll tax are undemocratic and will probably work out exactly as intended.

We can do better than this, can’t we? We might have to do it from the ground up, but we certainly need to try. Because queueing is for Brits and Commies, and five years at the prison commissary plus three rounds of diesel therapy means I’ve had enough of it for a lifetime.

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