Why is the Government So Bad?

Today I’m going to complain about government. Or, as my hero (for today) Ronald Reagan would have said, “gov-ment.”

One of the great things about having a blog is that when something relatively minor sticks in your craw you can unstick it by sharing. I suppose that’s true of social media in general, but I can write about it in some detail here, which of course is nothing but pure entertainment for my readers. (Ok. Thanks for stopping by. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.)

This stuff has been accumulating like plaque build-up on my lower front teeth. The latest example came only yesterday, which is why I write about it today. I was out in St. Ignace for a couple of days — way out on the eastern point of the Upper Peninsula — so on the way back to Watersmeet, on the Wisconsin border, I took a side trip to fish the Fox River. The Fox is the river Ernest Hemingway really fished in 1919 when he returned from WWI and wrote “Big Two Hearted River,” which was loose fiction built around the experience. Like Hemingway I fished that river. Unlike Hemingway, I caught no fish.

Anyway, when I was done not catching any fish I noticed that I was only 20 minutes from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, so I thought, what the heck, why not see the sight. At the entrance I found a perfectly nice ranger, a woman about my age, sitting behind the counter. I had surveyed my entrance fee options. I could have gotten in free had my wife been with me, since she has purchased the lifetime senior pass. But I was alone and therefore also out of luck. That left me with a choice between the senior annual pass and the seven day pass, both priced at $20.

It made sense to go with the senior annual, so that’s what I asked for. “I can’t sell you that,” said the nice ranger. I laughed. “Yeah, I know, I look like a kid. But I’m 64. Here, I can prove it.” I reached for my drivers license. “No, that’s not it,” said the ranger. “I don’t have any.”

As I mentioned, the ranger was nice. So I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was, How can you not have any? These aren’t blue berries. These aren’t even the kind of things that might be stuck on a barge that can’t get through the Suez Canal. A senior annual National Parks pass is not made up of component parts, some of which are made in a country going through a coup right now. This cannot possibly be one of those supply chain issues. It’s a piece of paper and something you type into a computer. But whatever the damn reason was it wasn’t her fault so I bought the $20 seven day pass. Since Pictured Rocks is a couple hundred miles away from Watersmeet, I will not return in a week. It was $20 for the privilege of driving through the park. Had I not been so conscientious I could have just made the drive without a permit and no one would have been the wiser.

So, that’s example number one.

Example two is my Wisconsin State Trails pass. I ride the Badger State Trail from Madison to Paoli a lot and I am nothing if not a solid citizen. I want to pay the $25 annual fee to support the trails even though I know that my chances of being stopped and asked for my pass are pretty slim. It has happened once in all my years of riding the trail. That was a red letter day. I produced my pass for the DNR guy with the enthusiasm of a dim third-grader who finally knows the right answer. He glanced at it perfunctorily and waved me on. What a let down. I wanted him to examine it like the Gestapo checking my papers as I tried to cross into Switzerland. “I see zeese papers are in order. You may proceed, Herr Dinkelgruber.” As if that’s my real name. He eyes me suspiciously, thinking that it’s probably an expert forgery and I may be one the Allied prisoners from the daring escape from Stalag 13. Instead, all I got was just a “yeah fine, thanks.”

But the DNR makes it really hard to do the right thing. For one thing, for no reason I can think of, you can’t buy a trail pass online while you can do just about anything else that way. And for another thing, the first two times I checked this season they were out of the envelopes they’re supposed to have for this purpose at the kiosk along the trail. You’d think they’d have one of those QR codes that would allow you to do it through that new fangled wireless computer Internet thing we’ve all heard so much about. Nope. When you finally happen to be there when the envelope supply is in order, you have to have the exact amount of cash (cash!) with you and then you stick it in the envelope and stuff it into the metal box. A few weeks later you get a hand-written envelope in the mail from Blue Mounds State Park with your annual pass. Welcome to 1959.

Example three is the National Forest Service’s firewood permit. In Watersmeet I have thousands of acres of national forest in which, as a citizen, I may take firewood. I can cut up any tree that’s dead and on the ground. But I’m supposed to have an annual permit — again at $25. Except you can no longer buy one at the Forest Service office in Watersmeet. I know this because there is a sign on the door that says, “Firewood Permits No Longer Sold At This Location.” Nothing about the locations at which firewood permits may be sold. And, of course, you can’t buy one online.

So, here are three examples where a good citizen wants to do the right thing by his government and by the natural resources of this great nation of ours. And my government is doing everything possible to make me feel like a chump for trying.

This is all trivial stuff but if I feel this way — a guy who made a pretty good living working in government — how do other Americans feel about it? This kind of crummy customer service forms an impression. My God, if these guys can’t even find a way to sell a simple permit how are they running the Pentagon?

And don’t even get me started on the Post Office.

Sometimes small ball is the best kind of game a politician can play. Bill Clinton did it after his grand plans to remake health care crashed and burned. Joe Biden is doing it now with “junk fees.”

This isn’t the fault of the front line employees. Somebody at the top — Sec. Deb Haaland at the Interior Department and DNR Sec. Adam Payne and the guys who appointed them, Biden and Gov. Tony Evers — are responsible. They’re not making simple, decent customer service a priority. And these simple, daily interactions between a citizen and his government — the DNR, the Forest Service, the DMV, the Post Office, the IRS — are the way most of us form impressions about the competency of the public sector. And that impression is bad and getting worse.