This may sound somewhat strange to an American audience but I honestly feel rather naked if I don’t have a valid passport in my possession.
Perhaps it’s a result of growing up in the Cold War where it wasn’t hard to find films where the dangerous KGB agents would be demanding your identity papers and you’re praying to any gods that will listen and look kindly upon you that they’re in order.
Ваши документы, пожалуйста!
“Your documents, please!” in Russian
Or maybe it’s the few times I’ve been fortunate to travel outside of our borders into that big beautiful place called the rest of the world where not only is the passport in your hand is a document you guard with your life because in certain places, it may well rise from mere inconvenience at the consulate to get an emergency replacement to costing your life if you don’t have one in less savoury places.
Even if you don’t travel internationally, the passport is a fantastically useful document that every American should move heaven and earth to get and keep current.
Are you dealing with an entity that has an overzealous and absurdly aggressive collections department but is still requiring you to show photo ID to fill a prescription? The passport certainly satisfies that requirement and doesn’t have your address directly imprinted on it so you can maintain at least some measure of privacy. Gee, I wonder who I might be thinking of for this example… 🙁
Flying anytime soon? The passport by it’s very nature is a REAL ID compliant form of identification and why I have always preferred flying domestically on it rather than the driver’s licence.
How about filling out the I-9 form that is used to document that you’ve got leave to work in this country? The passport satisfies both columns in one document!
A passport is also useful as a form of ID if you’re having a document notarized but this is one instance where only the actual passport book will do and not the passport card because the passport card does not have a signature on it that can be validated by the notary against the signature they’re presented with on the notarial certificate.
It’s against this backgrop that for the fifth time in my life, I found myself having to renew my passport but I think this is the first time I’ve ever done it online.
And if this experience is anything to go by, I think I’ll be doing it online as long as they will let me do so!
The process is actually pretty straightforward where you fill in an online form that’s pretty much identical to the paper one we’re used to when we had to apply/renew the passport at the post office or at the county recorder/register of deeds. Then you upload a digital image that conforms to the State Department’s very stringent standards, pay the renewal fee and then you wait for your new passport to be delivered.
If you’re renewing a passport that’s still valid or recently expired, the website advises that this process will take four to six weeks for normal processing and you probably won’t have to let them have your valuable documents (birth certificate, et al) for a couple of months and hope that the postal system doesn’t lose them or have them stolen before they’re returned to you (though in fairness, there is a way you can make a claim for them to reimburse you for having to replace documents they lose which I don’t remember being the case the last time I did this ten years ago).
Honestly, the hardest part of this process was actually taking the digital photo because you’re not allowed to use Photoshop to edit it or lift your image from the background and paste it on a white background and call it a day.
No, I had to put the D810 on a tripod in the foyer and use my remote trigger on a cable attached to the camera that was just short of the optimal length that would allow me to stand up completely at attention without having to drop my right shoulder slightly.
Then it was a bunch of back and forth from a few exposures in front of the camera to the screen on the back of it to see if I was at the proper distance so that my head would be centred properly and my shoulders mostly lined up with the bottom of the frame.
Sadly, in order to get the proper exposure because the lighting in the entrance isn’t the greatest…this meant I had to do something that I very rarely do and use the flash. And use it for multiple exposures until I finally the picture I was going to submit with the application and hope for the best.
And hope for the migraine headache the flash induced would be a much shorter one than is usual… 🙁
Application typed in, photo uploaded and passed their initial verification checks and submitted on 22 Apr and then it’s time to hurry up and wait.
I really was expecting it to take them the full 4-6 weeks to do whatever it is Foggy Bottom does to a passport application so imagine my surprise when the new passport book arrived on 08 May and the passport card on 11 May via the regular post.
That’s actually about as fast as expedited processing which has 2-3 week production time estimate without the extra $60 the Department of State wants for that service. If I had an international trip closer to the time I’m renewing the passport, I might well consider it but if you time your renewal right, you can make quite a saving on the fees and still get your new passport fairly quickly (at least for now until the next government shutdown or scary policy change that makes everyone want to have the one document that lets them leave and eventually return!).
The reliance on the postal service honestly was the part I was most concerned about as the carriers servicing my route have pretty much ranged from incompetent to merely indifferent and most of them seem offended by the fact that I live on a cul-de-sac so there’s only so much space for the rubbish bins they routinely ram with their delivery vans (which is why mine is rarely out there on the firing line and it gets retrieved before they make their rounds).
They were supposed to provide a tracking number for the passport book but that never arrived nor did the Priority Mail package it was in show up Informed Delivery which was surprising to say the least. I was able to see the passport card’s envelope in Informed Delivery which was sent First Class.
And then a few days after the arrival, I finally got a text message that indicated the passport book had been delivered so I guess they must have had some IT problems at the US Postal Service coincidentally at the time my passport book was in transit.
All in all, the status updates and tracking could be dramatically improved without a whole lot of effort on their part.
That wasn’t the only scary moment.
Right after I’d submitted my application which was accepted at the processing centre the next day (though I wouldn’t learn of that for a week), I stumbled across a news story that reported that the current administration was planning on changing the artwork in the current passport to one where President Trump would be superimposed upon the Declaration of Independence with his distinctive angular signature in his favourite colour for a limited edition run of passports to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.
In so doing, he’ll be the first head of state in history to put their picture into a passport.
No emperor or king or petty warlord/dictator has ever done this to an identity document that was designed to be an apolitical mechanism for facilitating identification and international travel and recording entering/exiting the country and any visas granting leave to stay.
Not even Kim Jong Un of North Korea who Trump worships and is actually a bona-fide dictator with absolute control over his country’s government and a cast-iron rule over his population that Trump has not yet achieved here hasn’t gone so far as to put his image into the few passports issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) where the usual translation of “people’s republic” has traditionally referred to a Communist dictatorship.
Kim Jong Un has plastered his face all over Pyongyang and erected statues to himself and his predecessors in many places which sounds awfully familiar but the DPRK passport is still an Un free document.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m all in favour of patriotic images and other scenes being depicted in the background of the passport pages (there’s a picture on the inside back cover of one of the Voyager probes passing by the moon on it’s way to interstellar space which is totally way cool for this nerd interested in astronomy and astrophysics).
The passport should celebrate the best things about the country we call home and provide that tangible reminder when we’re out and about in the world.
But it’s not only hard to try to reconcile that when the current President has enacted so many policies meant to exclude people from other countries to legally visit America and use the ICE and CBP goon squads to harass, punish, and even occasionally deport actual American citizens in his zeal to rid this country of anyone who is originally from somewhere else but living and working in this country legally.
Anyone that’s not completely bought into the not even thinly disguised white nationalism cloaked in an appalling variation on Christianity that bears little to no resemblance to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ apparently need not apply.
That he’d brazenly brand himself in the passport in an unprecedented move for a living President as he’s put his name and/or image on everything else in Washington he possibly can as he’s done pretty much throughout his business dealings is hardly surprising.
He sees himself as Dear Leader or Big Brother or some amalgamation of both and reacts most favourably to fervent sycophantic adoration as if he’s some sort of god-emperor.
That pathological narcissism has literally been his brand since day one.
But I’m sorry…the idea that the current President would be glowering at me from a passport whose expiry is well past the sell by date of his second term is self-aggrandizement on a scale that even I had a hard time believing and I was absolutely horrified that this was even a remote possibility for the passport I’d just renewed.
Fortunately, I did read past the headline and first paragraph to discover that it’s only a limited edition run and as of now only available for an in-person appointment to apply for or renew a passport in the Washington DC office though it’s unclear what steps someone would have to do to choose the regular passport design as the Trump one is supposed to be the default choice and I can’t imagine that the employees would be encouraged to actively recommend a normal passport.
Even more surprising was that there’s apparently no extra fee to have him living in your passport which is very much not on brand but I guess they figured the schedule of fees set by Congress in 22 U.S.C. 214 for consular services and codified in 22 CFR § 22.1 was one even they couldn’t ignore.
Whew!
And yes, I did check the passport book to see that my new identity document of choice wasn’t one of those “special” ones. 🙂
There are only expected to be 25,000 or so of these passports produced against the 183 million active and valid passports that are currently in circulation so in the grand scheme of things, the likelihood one would even receive one of these passports without jumping through a few hoops is nil so I have to question whether it’s truly an initiative to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence or something a bit more nefarious.
I have no doubt that the administration’s real intention behind this “limited edition” passport design is to induce rage with the hopes of diverting the public’s attention from other news they’d rather we’d forget such as the dreadful state of the economy thanks to a war that truly was not necessary, the ongoing saga of coverup concerning the Epstein files, and the continual attempts to subvert and suppress legal votes in the upcoming midterm elections that seems like it may well be the last and best chance of thwarting a trend of our government toward authoritarianism and the eroding of our democratic traditions.
I do not intend to allow them to evade what little accountability we can bring to bear on their illegal and immoral acts and I sincerely hope that you do not allow them to get away with it either.
So at least for the next ten years, I’m happy to have a valid passport at hand even if I never step foot out of the United States again. It’s rather nice not feeling naked, after all… 🙂