American Bureaucrats and Explorers

I was recently visiting a small, boring Midwestern college. While touring the campus, I ran into a middle-aged man with dozens of small bags of popcorn and a dull expression on his face. I was pretty bored, so I decided to try my luck at hustling a bag of popcorn from him.

In the most jovial way possible, I say "Hi there. I'm visiting your excellent town, and really enjoying this great university, and it strikes me that the only way I could really improve my experience would be to try some of your excellent local popcorn."

The guy tells me that the popcorn is a reward for people who watch some student's film that the university is featuring. Apparently the film is so boring that they need to bribe people to stay the whole way through.

Unmoved (and, more accurately, annoyed) by my friendly attempts at popcorn acquisition, the guy tells me that I should wait until after the people watching the flick are done.

So, I go and do some other stuff, and come back a while later as people are leaving the theater. No one is interested in the popcorn. The guy has to start marketing it to people. "Try some popcorn!".. He's interrupting conversations. When he finally starts getting takers, he tells people to "take two!". There are literally dozens of popcorn bags there, and he still hasn't offered me one.

It's at this point when I realize that he's actually trying to prevent me from getting any. This guy is experiencing something I can only call "authoritarian spite". He has his worthless little job (probably titled Assistant Events Director or what have you) and he's enjoying the small sense of bureaucratic power/responsibility he gets from denying a person something that they kind of want.

The sad thing is that there are millions of people like this throughout America. They're in a pointless bureaucratic position, and they're unmoved by any appeal to them as an individual.. In fact, they savor the chance to reject individual warmth and decency in favor of their place as a cog in the bureaucracy. The Bureaucrat is an American archetype.

However, America provides another archetype which is a foil to the Bureaucrat. I'm talking about the Explorer. The Explorer is a person who lives by their own rules, seeking out new territory and challenges. An Explorer is a misfit in traditional society, forced either by temperament or circumstance to "build cities on the slopes of Vesuvius."

The Reconstruction Era was the heyday of the Explorer, with folks like Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane out winning the West. American Explorers have left their mark at every point throughout history, though. In the 1930's you could find them among the Okies and Arkies in California. The Explorers in Easy Rider hit the open road in search of the frontier spirit that America had forgotten. Today the American Explorer can be found making millions with an innovative idea, or living life on edge, one adventure to the next. That same spirit, that same drive to explore uncharted frontiers has never left us.

Everyone worth knowing in America is somewhat of an Explorer; everyone worth knowing in America has something of the original pioneer spirit.