When you dance with the DMV, the DMV doesn't change. The DMV changes you.
I have been changed by the DMV. I now write this sort of thing. It all begins in 1925 with Aldous Huxley's visit to America. He has some rather nasty things to say about the Land of the Brave. America is vast but superficial:
Nothing but wooden shanties and little brick dog kennels, dust heaps and oil-tanks and telegraph poles, and the innumerable motor-cars of the most prosperous country in the world.
America is vivacious but artificial. The Los Angeles dream-factories contain no light, only the sickly glow of the studio light:
"But within the movie studio there shone no sun, only the lamps, whose intense and greenish yellow radiance gives to living men and women the appearance of jaundiced corpse."
It is sincere but crude, sentimental but crass, addicted in a simple, honest, good-natured way to the basest and most trashy content:
"Music!" shouted the Director. "Make it emotional." The band, whose duty it is in every studio to play the actors into an appropriate state of soul, struck up a waltz. The studio was filled with a sea of melodic treacle; our spirits rocked and wallowed on its sticky undulations.
In America the holy is made mundane, the profound a bargain-sale product. Christianity is sold like a showing at the theatre:
It was Saturday's; a whole page was filled with the announcements of rival religious sects, advertising the spiritual wares that they would give away, or sell on the Sabbath. "Dr. Leon Tucker with the Musical Messengers in a Great Bible Conference. 3 Meetings To-morrow. Organ Chimes, Giant Marimbaphone, Vibraphone, Violin, Piano, Accordeon, Banjo, Guitar and other Instruments. Wilshire Baptist Church."
It is a world where anyone can be a respectable individual, even the debased and corrupt. Where you are free from class, but forced to esteem the deplorable. Where all values are open to revaluation, all ways of life open to reinvention:
The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards. Mr. Kalbsfleisch [a so-called 'mortician', really just a smelly little undertaker] shows us how far the process has already gone. How much farther it may go we cannot guess, nor to what consummation it will lead, nor whether there may be reactions and counter-processes.
America, despite distorting morality, is obsessed with it. It is the land of puritanical moralism and debaucherous hypocrisy, one hand slapping the wrist that reaches for the gin, the other pouring the cocktails in the martini bar:
Cocktail time. (We've dealt with the same bootlegger for upwards of two years now. A most reliable man.). Ice rattles in the shaker — a dance of miniature skeletons — and the genuinely reliable liquor is poured out. A boire, a boire! Long live Pantagruel! This is dry America.
America is filled with ideas and energy, but these ideas are deranged and the energy perverse. "Jazz it up, jazz it up. Keep it moving. Step on the gas. Say it with dancing." It is a world where new ideologies are allowed to compete on equal footing with the dance-hall and burlesque show:
The Charleston, the Baptists. Radios and Revivals. Uplift and Gilda Gray. The pipe organ, the n**** with the saxophone, the Giant Marimbaphone. Hymns and the movies and Irving Berlin. Petting Parties and the First Free United Episcopal Methodist Church. Jazz it up! "N. C. Beskin, the Converted Jew, back from a successful tour, will conduct a tabernacle campaign in Glendale. "Why I Became a Christian?" Dressed in Jewish garb. Will exhibit interesting paraphernalia.
A country of beautiful, alluring women, in inconceivable, absurd abundance, yet also empty, lacking the ineffable soul of Old World lovers:
Thousands and thousands of flappers, and almost all incredibly pretty. Plumply ravishing, they give, as T. S. Eliot has phrased it, a "promise of pneumatic bliss." Of pneumatic bliss, but of not much else, to judge by their faces. So curiously uniform, unindividual and blank.
Of boundless energy but mindless direction; creative evolution and base consumption; of the belief that any problem can overcome, any patch of the horizon scraped with a tower, but with no deeper sense of what for or perhaps not?
Change is accepted in America as the first and fundamental fact — and accepted, not as other peoples have accepted it, as an evil to be combated by the organisation of a stable society, by the making of things too strong and solid for time to be able quickly to devour, but as a good, as the foundation and key of practical life.
America, the land of plenty and abundance, blasting the meagre scrawny knock-kneed Brits into submission, but equally the land of stuffing the stuffing, of stripping the dictionaries of the word 'enough', moremoremoremoremoremore!
The waiters sprint about, carrying huge dishes of the richest food. What Gargantuan profusion! Great ten pound chops, square feet of steak, fillets of whale, whole turkeys stewed in cream, mountains of butter. And the barbarous music throbs and caterwauls unceasingly. Between each juicy and satiating course, the flappers and the young men dance, clasped in an amorous wrestle.
And above all, it is the land falsifying values, destroying centuries of Old World progress. You see, democracy in America encourages the American to believe in the greatest Humbug of all Humbugs: the equality of human beings! Kalbsfleisch the American undertaker, possessing neither 'intellectual nor moral qualities', merely the profit-drive, is nevertheless able to claim 'expertise', 'social respect', on the grounds of this equality:
The democratic hypothesis in its extreme and most popular form is that all men are equal and that I am just as good as you are. It is so manifestly untrue that a most elaborate system of humbug has had to be invented in order to render it credible to any normally sane human being.
The American businessman has FALSIFIED MORALITY. "The service rendered by a mortician or a realtor has come to be regarded as the equivalent of the service rendered by an artist of a man of science." It is a revolt of the sodden masses:
"In every part of the world and at all times the vast majority of human beings has consisted of Babbitts and peasants. They are indispensable; the necessary work must be done. But never, except at the present time, and nowhere but in America, have the necessary millions believed themselves the equals of the unnecessary few."
It is a land without fear because abundance is so vast and pervasive that what does one have to fear? That one will only have one glass of cream to wash one's steak down rather than two? One moon rather than three? It is a land of unabashed confidence in its ability to produce:
In America [the fear of falling into the impoverished working class] hardly exists; there is no reason why any one should fail to earn good wages. Nor is the fall from the status of the clerk to that, shall we say, of the factory hand discreditable, as it would be in the older countries, where the prejudice against manual labour as something fundamentally degrading and unrespectable still lingers. The middle classes are therefore largely relieved of their terror of losing caste. Liberated from fear, the Americans live with confidence, and therefore with enhanced vitality.
I listed all of these quotes because I like them, because they put our own anxieties into perspective, and for the hidden affection of Huxley's sneers.
You see, my 8 hour round trip to the 4200 Capitola Road DMV office, and more broadly, my two weeks in the Lighthaven 'Compound', have stirred similar feelings in my heart. I am doomed to repeat the observations of a thousand Brits as they come to America to see how their 'cousins' are getting along.
Artificiality! Meal replacement sludge, fake grass, substitute-butter, tangerine water with 0% sugar, 'MealSquares', pseudo-ramen in a cup. Vegan butter, vegan cheese, which looks and tastes like plasticine. It's like the Americans discovered Simulacra Level 3 and decided it was a target rather than a threat.
Superficiality! Nothing is old. Nothing lasts. An ugly building in Europe is a raw scar because it has probably replaced something centuries old. In America who gives a shit? We'll wipe it away again soon. And the people? Equally fungible, no different from the Architect-Diagram model people who render in and out of sterile sandboxes of the City of London or Frankfurt. Just everywhere.
Gluttony! Why is seed oil such a pervasive meme? Because it does feel like something is in the American water. Everything is saturated. My appetite is out of whack, confused by the alien richness of American fare. You buy bread and it is packed with something strange. I am sated so quickly. No more no more please! I feel like throwing up! My belly filled with Oil, my libido goes out of whack in counterphase. I sleep deeply and richly.
Energy! "I like America, unlike Canadians it feels like there is a purpose." What is the purpose? Who cares! Fill-in the blanks later. Nothing works… who cares? In America public transport is an enemy you vanquish rather than a symbol of civilizational dysfunction. So I begin my travelogue proper. Filled with American Energy and Seed Oil, I fill out around 50 arcane captchas and 4000 SMS dual-factor authentications. Now I am ready to voyage to the DMV. I take a bus to the subway station (5 minutes), then the BART (1 hour), then another bus (58 minutes), then another bus (50 minutes), then another bus (27 minutes). No sweat.
During this endurance run of public transit, I have been preparing for the Californian driving theory test. Because I am very conscientious I decide to cram assiduously. I revise 1300 ANKI cards in two hours. Easy. Definitely a good use of time.
At around card 1200 I arrive in Capitola. Time for a burrito. Alcohol is a performance-enhancing drug when it comes to dealing with bureaucrats so I drink a few beers whilst I wait for my order. It descends. A bad bunny gut busting seeded Pre-DMV bad boy burrito. How is it to be eaten? That is for you, the customer-who-is-always-right, to decide.
Inconceivably I then walk to the DMV. An ancient institution by American terms. Somehow the proof of address I cooked up is accepted and, after a long series of stamps, signatures, digital 'OKAY's, and receipt ripping, I am ready to be tested. Part 1: the vision test. My eyes are red and itchy from all the ANKI cards and Captchas, and to make matters worse, one of the DMV employees has a remarkable butt. I struggle through somehow.
Then the theory test. All of my training was for this moment. My body is ready. The introductory videos shows an evil fat man who cheated on the test by using his phone. Don't be like him. I look around. Judging by the listless, Neanderthal drools of my fellow examinees I start to realise I may have overprepared. The test commences and Take on Me plays from an unknown source. I feel good. I got this! After 5 minutes I come to realise this test is unfailable.
Success. I get my learner's drivers permit. To celebrate I decide to go to the beach; another short – but very unamerican – walk away. I go for a little swim in the tepid (but presumably by Californian standards 'FREEZING') waters, and skim a few rocks. Soon some children have joined me in skimming stones. I drift off to do some sunbathing. Quickly bored of this non-task I place some rocks on a log and set it off to sea. It is a battleship I shall attempt to sink with medium-sized rocks. Young boys and old men are transfixed by my strange game.
HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? A busybody believes I am throwing stones at a seal. I correct him "This is no seal, it is a log." Oh, sorry I thought it was a seal. I respect his passionate and spontaneous defence of nature, even if mistaken.
I commence my journey home. The buses are now filled with students and I get some undiluted Americania. "Like, I want a nepo job in case the job market doesn't work out. Bro. Like, could your dad get us something?" The two Indian-American girls go back and forth. "Yeah I got you bro." "Thanks dude..." "...but his company is totally fucking lame." A pause. "I don't know why I said that. It's a good company." "I just want to be my own person."
I have a theory that exported products feel more natural in their home countries. BMWs on German roads. Sushi restaurants on Japanese street-fronts. Helvetica Sans on Swiss train schedules. If Germany exports cars, and the Swiss fonts, then what does America export? Psychosis. It just feels more natural here.
BLM, Israelimania, anti-car, ACAB, gun-control, media fracturing, car manufacturing, seed oils. All of this memetic bric a brac washes up on the shores of Europe like weird Alien tech. Some call our adoption of these uniquely American obsessions cargo-cults. I think it is more like shrapnel from American memetic ordinance. Bannon the bomb-thrower and Epstein the 'master bomb-maker' decide to 'explode' some alt-rights truths. Europe is hit and goes cuckoo as well.
Because America is the world-leading exporter of psychosis, when America cracks the whole world goes insane. Scottish TV is filled with deranged American news, and the Labour Conference has hundreds of "BUILD BABY BUILD" hats despite having no idea who Bryan Caplan is or what the YIMBY movement is about. They just got hit with another memetic bomb and now traditional labour union members are wearing bright red BBB hats. In London I meet Botswanans getting Israerlipilled from Charlie Kirk Evangelism, in California I speak to an Austrian who wants to RETVRN to ancient rome dressed in American flags.
As I walk around Capitola and Soqual I start to wonder if America can be fixed. What would 'fixing' America even look like? I walk past these antique stores and I am struck by the true scale of America. In this small pocket of the US economy, here are average American women with megalomaniacal plans of expanding their antique emporiums. Hundreds of entrepreneurs beavering away, distorting, altering, re-inventing the values of America. It is the land of absolute 'activity bias.'
My return voyage is a catastrophe. One of the buses leaves five minutes early. Can they even do that? I stand on the wrong side of the street for another but, powered on Burrito, am able to run after it and overtake it before the next stop. The bus men often let me go on for free when they see I have been bamboozled by their broken debit card readers. A man shouts at some police ambiently loitering "You can just tell a guy what to do MAN!" I almost miss the next bus because I have been distracted by another set of remarkable women doing some sort of traditional Mexican dance in the middle of the street.
There is definitely something in the water. Originally, I was going to write that the old America is dead and has been replaced, as Scott Alexander claims, by a Demon by the name of 'Universal Culture.' But that isn't right. American culture is still distinctively American. Universalism with American characteristics. It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, you too can drink the water here. Texicans, Indian tech CEOs, Wasians. America doesn't want to equalise the world with a 'universal culture', it wants to EAT the world.
It is unsurprising America outcompetes all the other Anglophone countries on the internet. As Google Translate dissolves these barriers everyone is going to drink the same water. I always feel like I'm being asked And you would like fries with that? Moremoremoremoremore! Back in Europe it feels like we bottle the energies of modernity. Cloning? No way. Genetic editing? Definitely not! Huge factories? Uncomfortable. One Swiss guy here said he walks down the street there and sees NPCs. He wants to explode and attack them: do something dammit! Do something! Meanwhile, in Californian, You hear this loud sucking noise. A few seconds later all the smartest, most-driven, cracked people around the world come flying in.
Scots who want to 'get out' go to London. Scots who want to Be Someone go to America, where they promptly go insane. Staying in your home country is increasingly resembling staying in your hometown. If you aren't in San Francisco, Washington DC, or New York (maybe also Beijing and London), what are you even doing?? Permanent underclass bro? Really? You'd better MAX OUT otherwise you'll CRASH OUT bro.
What I fear is that America is sort of metabolising itself. How many American structures actually run on a more European kind of culture? What happens to social trust in conditions of limitless churn? Is America a more powerful organism, or is it growing weaker, overwhelmed by 'Historical Nihilism' and defrayed DNA.It's too much. It's too much. And yet all so appealing. Huxley despised America, but he also emigrated to California and lived for the rest of his life. Unlike Huxley I am half-American. Does that mean I will be more susceptible to its magnetic pull, or will I be inoculated?
From beginning to end, it will take me 1 week to get my Californian driving license. In the UK it can take over 6 months. This is not a very significant fact in of itself; nonetheless, life does seem to fly by here. The days last minutes and the weeks contain months. The variety and intensity is so overwhelming. Endless cool-looking dudes on the streets. Chess hustlers lining the streets, supermarkets the size of cathedrals. Spectacularly beautiful campuses filled with spectacularly beautiful students. A completely absurd country. completely absurd. Sigh, America.