Here is a letter from an unauthorized person. He is angry and confused. While driving a rural road in New England recently, he was stopped by a sign which said, “No Unauthorized Persons Permitted Beyond This Point—Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” The rest of his letter follows:
Although I had been seeing this odiously discriminatory sign all my life, it was not until this moment that I realized how sick and tired of it I was.
Where was it written that the authorized persons of the earth had the right to prosecute the unauthorized? What, in the final analysis, was so terrible about being an unauthorized person?
If I had deliberately set out in life to become an unauthorized person and had pursued this ambition through the fens of depravity, there might have been some excuse for excluding me from uninteresting roads, the parking lots of bureaucrats, airport locker rooms and all the other fascinating places to which only authorized persons are admitted.
But I had not deliberately sought my miserable status. It had simply happened to me. As some people are born with turned-up noses and some with silver spoons in their mouths, I was born an unauthorized person. At my birth the doctor came to my father and said, “Congratulations! You are the father of a bouncing seven-pound unauthorized person.”
My parents were delighted. Both of them had been authorized for as long as they could remember and were jaded with years of going anyplace they wanted to go without being prosecuted. For me they dreamed of a different life, and heaven knows I have had one.
Three times convicted of being an unauthorized person, I had escaped prison only through the boon of plea-bargaining, under which prosecutors had agreed to recommend mercy if I pleaded guilty to conspiracy to circumvent the use of zip codes on my outgoing mail.
The fourth time I was not so lucky. At National Airport in Washington, I had barged into the co-pilot’s coffee shop for a doughnut to get me through an early-morning flight to Cleveland and was trapped in a police stakeout. The judge gave me three years for being an unauthorized person with a doughnut, but the prison wouldn’t let me in, as unauthorized persons were not permitted except on visiting days.
I offered to camp outside the walls, but the warden said he would prosecute me if I tried it since unauthorized persons were not permitted to tent within a thousand yards of the barbed wire.
There was nothing to do but go home and face the ignominy of telling everybody I was unqualified for prison. Instead, I decided to see the country. The trip was a disaster. Police everywhere had seen mug shots of me on post office walls and were alerted that I was a dangerous unauthorized person capable of trespass without warning.
They were waiting for me all over Washington where I seemed to be the only unauthorized person in town. They were waiting for me when I tried to see the President, the Congress, the Pentagon and the Supreme Court, as well as my dossiers at the FBI and the CIA.
When I went to New York to see Frank Sinatra, they were waiting for me as I stepped off the elevator in Frank’s hotel. At each stop, they surrounded me while smug, authorized persons en route to see the President, Congress, Pentagon, Supreme Court, CIA men, G-men and Frank smiled the superior smiles of the authorized.
Two can play at this game, I said to myself, and went home, and posted signs on my street which said, “No Authorized Persons Permitted Beyond This Point.”
Authorized men appeared at my house. “Are you authorized to post signs?” they asked.
I asked if they were authorized to ask questions.
They said they’d ask the questions.
I said I wasn’t authorized to answer questions.
They said who was authorized to answer questions on my behalf.
I said I wasn’t authorized to tell them.
They said what was I authorized to do.
I said I wasn’t authorized to do anything.
They had never seen an unauthorized person before. They went for their guns.
The judge is tired of seeing me back in court. He promises to drop the charges if I agree to become authorized, but we are in a stalemated position. I went to the Authorizing Office today. Unauthorized persons are not permitted past the receptionist.
The notion that the all-conquering power of love can prevail over the inexpressible difficulties of marriage with its monstrous weekly bills dates from the era of plenty when the single “breadwinner” could still support unemployable women, children and grandparents, usually without resorting to armed robbery. —Two-Income Zones
A no-nonsense letter from the National Academy of National Academies puts the question crisply: “The 1980’s will be here before you know it. What should America do about it?”
They have asked the right man. If there is one thing I have firm convictions about, it is what this country should do in the 1980’s. The first thing it should do is reduce output of no-nonsense letters, as well as no-nonsense executives and no-nonsense politicians. Look where all this no-nonsense nonsense has got us in the 1970’s. In a nonsensical pickle, that’s where.
I say let’s cut out the no-nonsense in the 1980’s. While we’re at it we should also cut out the habit of letting computers and desks write letters to living human beings.
Just yesterday I had a letter From the Desk of Wilmer Bainbridge urging me to subscribe to a twelve-month course in home insulation. This letter was written by a computer, which apparently serves as amanuensis for Bainbridge’s desk. Why can’t Bainbridge’s desk write its own letters? Why doesn’t Bainbridge’s desk fire Bainbridge and cut expenses?
Better yet, why don’t we fire all three of them in the 1980’s and restore the peace of mind that my grandmother, rest her soul, knew in the halcyon days of William Howard Taft? She lived to a splendid old age, my grandmother, in large part because she never absorbed the shock of receiving a letter written by a machine at the behest of furniture.
—Stranger than Orwell