J. EDGAR HOOVER SAYS THE FUNNIEST THINGS
After weeks and months of painstaking research - which fortunately you can do in a couple of hours on the net now - I have finally decided on the greatest, the most representative, the most important quotation of the Twentieth Century. It's a short statement, but somehow it's redolent of an entire age. It comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the lips of J. Edgar Hoover:
"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
Isn't it perfect though? That sentence shines a searchlight into the most fundamental of all modern conflicts, that between personal freedom and social control. The forces of social control and bureaucracy - personified by the founder father of the FBI - actually yearning that a private act, something he himself describes as intimacy, should become a public problem. Just so that he might be allowed to stop it. How monstrously human.
Which encapsulates the essential problem with bureaucracy: not that it lacks humanity, but that it is all too human, run by real people with all their biases and attachments*. It has in effect an ego of its own, naturally in conflict with the ego of the individual. Protected by its anonymous, collective nature, that ego feels free to indulge some of the less attractive human impulses. It can fear the strange, attack the unfamiliar and oppress the minority without censure, for it has no face. A bureaucracy is in other words just a mob - a mob sitting down.
So ever since reading this quote, I've wanted to get arrested by the FBI for obstructing interstate commerce with an act of oral-genital intimacy. There must be a way.
This all makes me think of the recent anti-globalisation protests in Dublin - not to mention the rest of the world. The strangely mob-like behaviour of those who were supposed to be keeping the peace, Guards removing their identification - how symbolic can you get? It leads me to another great quote:
"This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Dangerous passions of pride, hatred and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless Calvaries. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority."
Martin Luther King said that, shortly before someone shot him. Anonymously.