Passports

With my U.S. passport set to expire, I recently applied to get a new one. I also decided I might as well get my first Canadian passport at the same time. As if a single North American government were responsible for servicing passport requests, my new passports both arrived on the same day! These documents, laying unopened on the table, look like the same drab, functional passport that I’ve come to know since I first acquired one, but open them up and—wowee!—these are some different countries/cultures. The U.S. passport is mythology, propaganda, history and sentimentality rolled up into one official and technically advanced travel document. Canada’s passport is functional, practical and without pretension. While one declares its national mythologies at the top of its lungs, the other is little more than an whisper.

Should I do a page by page comparison? I think not, for there is nothing to compare. The U.S. passport is incomparable. It’s full of eagles and wheat and buffalo and the great quotes of great Americans. Canada’s opens with a brief message wherein the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada (the current occupant of said position happens to be my current Member of Parliament) requests--in the name of Her Majesty the Queen--safe passage for the bearer of the document, then there’s a couple of pages of info including the page with the bearer's picture, followed by 19 pages of nothing. More accurately, each page of nothing bears rows of small, faint maple leafs and one large one in the centre. No lofty quotes, no images of Inukshuks, no caribou or voyageurs or images of the snow- capped Rockies.

The U.S passport on the other hand…well, one hardly knows where to begin. When I read the U.S. passport I can’t help but think here’s a country that has drunk its own Kool-Aid. I mean, does anyone believe this* is America anymore? Not only is this an America that no longer exists, it’s an America that NEVER existed. It’s a series of images, iconography and juxtapositons that are so relentlessly idyllic I find it dizzying, if not outright exhausting.

After flipping through the U.S.passport, I feel plumb tuckered-out and ready to rest my weary head on the bosom of the great nation in all its wild, rural splendor. Then, after my nap, I’ll be so refreshed I’ll head on out for that frontier that’s been waiting for me. I’m gonna pack my bags, catch a ride on that steamboat chugging down the Mississipi, step off at the town where the steam train is heading west and, yesiree, find those cowboys driving the longhorn cattle just down a country mile from where the farmer is plowing up the soil with his two oxen. With a country like the one in the passport, why would you ever want to leave it or need a travel document to make the leaving possible?

And, in fact, it seems like Americans don’t want to leave it, which must explain why so few of them have the passport in the first place. Compared to Canada and Europe, the U.S passport suffers from a distinct lack of citizens who think it's necessary. Yes, the irony of ironies is that someone somewhere in the U.S. Federal government went to great lengths to create a passport that hollers Here’s What America IS…but few Americans have the ability to hear it. Wouldn’t you know it, a considerably higher percentage of Canadians have passports but there’s nothing particularly worth hearing in it! Lost opportunities all around.

*APPENDIX--The specifics of the U.S. passport are as follows, in order (some of the quotations are not complete):

--Inside the front cover, people who seem to be on an old battle ship watching the flag over Fort Sumter; above it is a verse from the National Anthem that appears to be in the handwriting of Francis Scott Key (why do I know his name?)
--Opposite that page is that quote by Abe Lincoln—Government of the people, by the people--above the official seal of the U.S.
--Turn the page and one finds one’s picture and personal information in a front of a backdrop of the large head of a bald eagle, a sheaf of wheat, and a billowing U.S. flag. The opening words of the U.S constitution top it off.
Then the pages in the following order:
--A landscape of saguro cactus as backdrop to ones personal data and passport information
--A towering mountain range behind a lake. Above it, a quote from Daniel Webster: the principle of free government adheres to the American soil. It is imbedded in it, immovable as its mountains.
--The liberty bell in front of a corner of the Declaration of Independence, beneath Independence Hall, and a quote from George Washington topping it all off:
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.
--A tall ship under full sail moving past a light house, beneath the statement from the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident…
--A glacial mountain range behind a plain with two buffalo grazing and a quote from Martin Luther King: We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776 and God grant that America will be true to her dream.
--Mount Rushmore beneath JFK’s famous quote, we shall pay any price, bear any burden…
--A steamboat on the Mississippi beneath Teddy Roosevelt's words, This is a new nation, based on a mighty continent, of boundless possibilities.
--A sheaf of wheat in front of a farm scene where a farmer plows the land with a team of oxen and the words of Dwight Eisenhower: Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
--Some cowboys driving a herd of long horn cattle with the mountains behind them and Lyndon Johnson's words: For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground…
--A steam train in the foreground that had traveled over a wooden trestle bridge with hills in the background and the words on the Golden Spike, May God continue the unity of our country...
--A bear eating a fish with mountain in the background and totem pole in the foreground and the words from a Mohawk address on Thanksgiving: We send thanks to all the animal life in the world...
--The statue of liberty with a stone table showing July 4th, 1776 and a quote from Anna Julia Cooper, The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect…
--A palm tree above and a mountainous (Hawain?) island in the distance and a quote by Ellison S. Onizuka: Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds…
--A view of the earth from behind the moon and a spaceship above