Forms! Forms! Forms!: A bureaucracy's answer to trouble — or to anything

National Review, March 25, 2002 by Theodore Dalrymple

The shockwaves of September 11 have finally reached the British prison in which I have worked as a doctor for the last twelve years. The authorities have woken from their habitual slumbers and asked me for proof of my identity, to demonstrate that I am who I say I am. Had it not been for the attack on the World Trade Center, I doubt that I should ever have been asked.

For the purposes of the official identification process, a passport is equal to one electricity bill and a bank statement. A birth certificate would also be good, though of course there is no reason why the name on any of these documents should correspond to the true identity of an evilly-disposed person. It doesn't matter, though, because the whole business isn't really about security at all, except in the sense of security of employment: It is about covering a well-known -- indeed, the best-known -- part of the bureaucratic anatomy.

While they were at it, the authorities took the opportunity to check that I was medically qualified. My ministrations over the years do not appear to have satisfied them beyond reasonable doubt on this score; nor does the fact that I hold a position in the neighboring hospital.

Of course, I find this mildly insulting and irritating. But I can see the point: Bogus doctors have in fact succeeded in practicing for many years without detection or exposure. Alas, in their attempts to establish that I am not an impostor, the authorities, while asking for several documents, omitted to ask for those very ones that would prove I possessed the qualifications I claimed for myself. Thus, with an aim that is infallible, do British bureaucrats miss their target, however easily hit it might be.

And then, inevitably, there was the security form. The authorities, it seems, have been alerted to the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is fast making converts in British jails, especially among black street criminals: The would-be shoe-bomber of the flight from Paris to Miami was an alumnus of a British jail. The spread of fundamentalist Islam among such a population is clearly alarming. Obviously, some official response is required.

So I was asked to tick a series of yes/no boxes: Have I ever been involved in terrorism? Have I ever been involved in sabotage? Have I ever been involved in actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial, or violent means?

On reading these questions, I was prey to a fantasy of almost hallucinatory intensity. I saw Osama bin Laden's lanky form handing out questionnaires to his followers on an Afghan mountainside, asking them such yes/no questions as, "Have you ever been employed by the CIA or MI6? Have you ever voted in a democratic election? Have you ever been a member of any movement that promoted liberal democracy or equality for women?"

Naturally, bin Laden's security form would carry a rather sterner warning about the consequences of not answering these questions truthfully than its British equivalent: death by stoning as against dismissal from the service. But in all other respects, it would be a mirror image of it.

Lest Americans imagine that this kind of idiocy is confined to the British, I should perhaps point out that visitors to the United States are asked to declare on their arrival form, by the simple expedient of ticking a box, that they have not engaged in genocide. In the corridors of power, presumably, genocidal maniacs are conceived in the matter of truth to be like George Washington: They cannot tell a lie. There, they draw the line.

It was once explained to me that this box-ticking procedure was carried out so that, in the event that the person filling in such a form had told a lie, immediate and summary action could be taken against him. But this surely cannot be the case: Even a bureaucrat can't truly believe that telling a lie about having participated in genocide is worse than actually having participated in it. It would be interesting to know how many people are refused entry to the United States annually because they owned up to genocide.

No, the fact is that bureaucrats are inclined to believe that to every problem there is an equal and opposite form, whose completion by enough people will solve it: or if not solve it, at least prove that they, the bureaucrats, have done everything in their power about the problem, and are therefore doing their jobs properly.

I can well imagine the civil servants in Britain busily engaged for several months on devising the security form I have just described, having pre- breakfast committee meetings about it, thrashing out its finer points, arguing over the wording, imagining that they are laboring very hard in the interests of the nation's security. Even the color of the paper on which the form was to be printed had to be decided upon: in this case, something between salmon-pink and apricot, a warm Mediterranean color to lull the unwary terrorist or saboteur into thinking that his bureaucratic enemy is friendly and well disposed towards him. Immersion in such detail allows people to lose sight of the absurdity of the whole enterprise.