I spent a certain amount of time today in the bowels of the County Clerk's Office, trying to get a marriage license (I eventually succeeded, due entirely to the patience of my lovely fiancée). Everyone I met was perfectly pleasant--well-intentioned, cheerful, and quite completely incompetent. I realized, as the perfectly pleasant be-spectacled lady pecked about the keyboard of her typewriter, that there is only one solution to bureaucracy: fire. And lots of it.

If one follows the grinding gears in the appointed manner, one finds that the innumerable accretions of error to one's recorded identity slow the working, and finally cause it to grind to a complete stop, as one explains that, yes, one was born in London, and yes, one realizes that that fair city is outside the United States, and yes, one is an American citizen, witness one's driver's license which, yes, has the wrong address on it but one did not wish to cause the DMV more trouble than necessary...and so on.

In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, great warriors contend against each other on the battlefield. But it is the civil administrators, finally, who have the greatest impact. Zhang Fei and Guan Yu throw down enemy generals by the handful, but only when Zhuge Liang, the magician, Taoist, and great organizer, does Liu Bei gain the upper hand. In a failed bureaucracy, with no such genius guiding it, how can one respond? One's only recourse is violence.

So, fonctionnaires, expect to be bound to a tree and beaten with willow branches unless you acknowledge my identity!