Existentialist Bureaucracy

By Crispin Sartwell

All of us at the newly-established Department of Being and Nothingness commend George W. Bush., Tom Ridge - and the mighty spirit of freedom itself - for the Department of Homeland Security. It combines the forces of many huge bureaucracies such as the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the Coast Guard, your county sheriff and indeed you yourself, into one ultra-mega bureaucracy whose goal is Total Information Awareness, literal omniscience. Hear hear! And the Department of Homeland Security continues our momentum toward the consolidation of our great democracy into the responsible hands of John Poindexter.

Consolidation, like unbelievable hugeness itself, is important. In fact, in our pursuit of sheer numbing gigantism, consolidation is our friend. It is all too easy to talk flippantly in time of war of a merger of Florida Board of Elections with the Department of Agriculture, or of Congress with Mammoth Cave National Park and a cave-in. Many have and many will.

But the Department of Being and Nothingness constitutes a mega-agency composed of other agencies, blessed with limitless resources and a single task. Yes, as you know, the Department of Health and Human Services has merged with the Department of Defense into what we like to call a "phalanx," or "legion" - the Department of Being and Nothingness - dedicated to a single goal: killing them, and keeping us alive.

Perhaps for the sake of diversity, the first Secretary of Being and Nothingness could be a heavily strapped Jesse Jackson, ready to lead the whole country in chant: "Keep. Us. Alive."

Our mission is to make ourselves immune to mortality while we kill you. And our agenda is simple. First, universal single-payer health insurance on the model of Sweden. Second, deadly, irresistible force, a total technology of annihilation. We care. And we prosecute with extreme prejudice.

We linger beside you always, and rest assured that you will soon be seeing our billboards. We are able to look death in the face and both avoid and inflict it, like a fellow planting landmines near a middle school.

But we need, or rather require, your support. Really! We do! The Department of Being and Nothingness wants you, like all Americans, to kill them and cure us. We are at war, and public housing is rarely as horrible as it is depicted as being on television.

We need dental insurance for our seniors. It is the right of all Americans to have free access to whatever pharmaceuticals their whim may dictate. Buckle up; it's our law. Helmet laws, gun control: these are health issues. So are our new incendiary anti-personnel devices setting specifically targeted peasants alight through the wonders of global positioning. Our bombs are so smart they need therapy, which in our America, is covered. We believe in large missiles delivering smallpox-laden warheads, and a safety net. You've got to be cruel to be kind, but it hurts so good.

Yes we have many slogans here at the Department of Being and Nothingness, and in fact 83% of our budget is devoted to song-licensing and making American flags billow just right.

We are pouting proactively to ban smoking in cars; later we intend to ban it outdoors everywhere in the fifty states. Don't thank us; it's our job. For your sake, this is where smoking ends. But we promise you this: the Middle East has barely begun to smoke. Saddam is out of time. So out of time this time that he is really almost nearly out of time.

Only Americans should have access to condoms.

We will supervise your values, your diet, your income, your sexual activities, all media depictions of death and of life, and your personal death and life to the smallest detail. Yes we care, but we know. We know because we care.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." True, true, and yet new times require new interpretations.

The primary initiative we will be pursuing in the next fiscal year - our "theme" as it were - is to impose some sensible regulation on the Beyond, which has heretofore been unacceptably anarchic, as Hindus reincarnate willy-nilly while albinized Christians flit hither and thither with harps and atheists just lie there. And though it may hard to distinguish us from them in a case where no one actually has a body and no one looks Arab, we intend to sort the dead and then kill them again.

In our civic religion, hell is heaven, and the afterlife a bureaucracy.