You May Also Like
What are we to make of the promised new American passport? And what was wrong, one might ask, with the old one? Though nearly half of all U.S. citizens seem never to have held, or even applied for a passport, the border crossers among us hold on to ours as a prize—one that is deeply treasured and symbolic of something profoundly positive in the national character. Bearing an alarmingly stark, almost Avedonian portrait of the holder—as the great Erma Bombeck remarked, “When you look like your passport picture, it’s time to go home”—it also offered a simple, eloquent old-fashioned advisement to the world: “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance.” A plain and peaceable statement—a request, not a threat, and urging, as veterans of the interminable immigration lines at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle fervently desire, merely an end to needless delay.
An American passport has, for generations, been not just a peaceable visa but a kind of holy grail—a thing valued above all other official documents. Nabokov, the most elegant of refugees, writes of the “miserable” Nansen passport—a makeshift document issued to “stateless persons” between the First and Second World Wars—that made him feel like a criminal, until he obtained an American one, in 1945. The Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel carried his U.S. passport with him everywhere he went, so essential was it to the restoration of his soul. (The hideous experience of being stateless, without papers or a home, was so deeply incised on his psyche that, he said, he clutched his heart whenever he passed through even the most benign of customs offices.) So, seeing the passport as one more item melted in the crucible of self-aggrandizement and nationalism that constitutes the world image of the Trump Administration is alarming, no matter how small the ultimate effects may prove to be.
The changes, which are expected to take effect in 2028, were introduced by the current inhabitant of the role of Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in a bizarre presentation on September 29th, which mixed elements of an Apple product launch with those of a high-school-civics pageant. On the cover of the new passport, Rubio announced, the words “United States of America” will be larger and “exactly where they belong: first, right on top.” The Great Seal, featuring a bald eagle will also be bigger and “more gold.” The passport pages themselves will contain scenes from American history: the Wright Brothers making their glider fly at Kitty Hawk, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and even the March on Washington. Yet the passport will also have—and one had to hear this twice before one could believe it once—a “flip-book” effect, so that an eagle will appear to fly over those scenes. Rubio mentioned that, in airports, American-passport holders will be able to amuse themselves with the flip-book effect—“It’s either this or some Game Boy for your kids,” he said—while, presumably, the citizens of other, lesser nations in some shivering 5 A.M. customs line will look over with envy at the ease with which Americans are entertained.
Who thought up the flip-book effect? Surely the infantile nature of it seems designed to appeal to one figure and one figure alone, which leads to an ambiguity left open during Rubio’s presentation. As everyone knows, the State Department recently issued a limited-edition passport for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which features a belligerent-looking Donald Trump on the inside cover. (The image resembles another historic first, a Presidential mug shot, which was taken when Trump surrendered to authorities in a Fulton County jail, on charges connected to the short-lived but well-founded Georgia case against his attempted interference in the 2020 vote count.) This “Patriot Passport”—the name itself recalls the rhetoric of authoritarian tyrannies—is available only by special appointment at the Washington Passport Agency, though, if you have the bad luck to need to request an emergency passport there, you get one automatically.
