It's not very often that Livingston reminds me of Prague. After all, it's hard to find parallels between a 7,500-resident Montana mountain town and one of Europe's great capitals. It's less like comparing apples and oranges than diamonds and daffodils. Both occur in nature, and beyond that, they're not much alike. I should also be clear that I like both diamonds and daffodils, and one city does not represent one, etc. It's just a simile.
But today, in the Park County Clerk and Recorder's Office, I had the clearest flashback yet to Prague, and it wasn't even to someplace good. Although I was technically in Livingston, and everyone was speaking English, it was as if they were channeling the best bureaucrats at the Foreigner's Police at Olsanka. All I wanted to do--a phrase with which I started many a story while living in the Czech Republic--was turn in our voter registration cards. We hadn't yet changed our registration from my parents' house in Great Falls and wanted to make sure we get to vote in the upcoming primary. Sounds simple enough. Chip and I had filled out the cards last night while turning over every tiny detail of our life to a mortgage broker, so all I should have had to do was drop them off.
Not so fast.
It started because the cards I had picked up (from the library, I think) were missing the upper proclamation portion that attested to our age and gave our driver's license numbers and so forth. The woman at the counter informed me of the missing portion, brought me two cards, and handed me a pen to fill them out. I called Chip at work to get his driver's license number, and then I told the counter lady that I needed to run out to get my license.
Not so fast.
"You'll need to present both of those licenses," another woman in the office said.
I blanched. "But my husband is at work."
"It doesn't matter. You need to present his license."
Just then I noticed that the original form was a folding mailer.
"Um, couldn't I mail this in without your seeing our licenses?" I asked.
"Of course," she answered. "But you're not mailing it, are you?"
She had me there. I was standing right there, and clearly I had not mailed myself.
"Don't you think it's a little odd that it would be OK for you to accept this without seeing a license in the mail but you can't when I'm here?"
She did not think it was a bit odd.
Muttering something about being deprived of my ability to do my goddamn civic duty, I headed to the post office to buy a stamp, put both in an envelope, and sent them off.
I remember the day that Chip and my obstetrician spent after Connery was born trying to get the Czech national insurance company to accept a month-old HIV test from me as a guarantee that Connery was AIDS-free because the hospital decided to close the lab early the afternoon that my results were supposed to be in. I remember the time the Foreigner's Police promised Connery's residency permit would be done on April 30 so that we could go to Vienna the next day and then they closed the whole office mysteriously and we had to get an emergency replacement passport from the U.S. Embassy. I remember the millions of little inconsistencies and here-today-gone-tomorrow rules that bedeviled our daily lives.
It says something that I haven't had an experience like this in the U.S. until now, more than 18 months after we've been back. Still, it galls. I'm a persistent and interested political observer. I'm not going to let stupid bureaucracy stand in my way of voting, but someone else who may not be as committed could be turned off by something like this. We need fewer obstacles for voter registration, not more. I hope the lady behind the counter channeling the bored, passive-aggressive Czech bureaucrat today believes that as well.