Musical Chairs

I wanted comfort food this evening, but I didn't want comfort food from my corner of the world - which is feeling a little tight these days - so I'm making Vietnamese beef and carrot stew, from the excellent Corinne Trang's "Authentic Vietnamese Cooking: Food from a Family Table." As Ms. Trang explains, it's a Vietnamese dish based on the classic French boeuf aux carottes.












The ingredients are a litany of tastes one might find satisfying in an Asian stew: five-spice powder, coconut, lemongrass, chilies, ginger, etc. Ms. Trang calls for de-fatting it, but I always enjoy eating the first round of Asian stew just the way it usually is: fatty. It turns rice into a major chow.

I worked up a hunger at New York City's Department of Finance in Jamaica, Queens. I went to appeal a parking ticket. Two things I learned that I'll pass along to the other hardened criminals in the room: if you are standing next to your car, and your car is double-parked, you're double-parked. And can be ticketed by an industrious traffic officer, holding back the relentless tide of decivilizing forces loose in the world today. Two: if you have a valid registration, but it's not stuck to the inside corner of your windshield, you are in violation of not properly displaying a valid registration.

Ka-ching. Another blow against my amoral empire. There are automatic payment kiosks at the Finance Department, which operate like ATMs, though I don't know if you can actually deposit money against future violations. You're lawless - there are bound to be more. And there is a large maze of 'hearing rooms' where you go to appeal, like fluorescently-lit confessionals. You sit across a desk from an unattractive hologram that smells - I mean, a city official - and robotically discuss the terms of your debt to society. You get an instant discount for just having showed up - they knock off some money - but in exchange, you're guilty without argument, and if you argue, they take your discount away and increase the original fine. If you ask to see a judge, they tell you a judge is going to make it even worse.

Ain't life grand. Add a little five-spice to it.

My favorite part of the exchange: the Department will arrange financing with you, if you can't pay the fine in full. But, if you can't pay the fine because you're unemployed, for example, and the $143 fine would be half of what the other government agency - the unemployment bureau - sends you every week, Finance can't finance you because you have to have a job to be eligible for financing. In case you don't pay the financing - they can put a lean on your salary. The other way to pay - if you're unemployed, for example, and don't have the money, period - is to forfeit your vehicle. Easy! You can always search for jobs on-line. Who needs a car?

This exquisite construct brought to mind the bail-out now being pushed through the Great Bowel of bureaucracy - our national government - and my realization on the drive home that if the government works similarly on all levels (I'm confident it does), then trillions of dollars are being made available for what, and who is eligible, and how and why? My lasting image of the Department of Finance was the seating arrangement by which we were made to wait outside the hearing rooms. A line of chairs against one wall, the chair at the top of the line being the chair that the next person being seen occupied. When he or she stood up to go in, the guard in the waiting room made everyone stand up and advance one chair and sit down again, like a game of musical chairs. There were about forty people involved, including mothers with babies and the lame. And it happened about once a minute.










This, I thought, is our great nation - patient, lawless, obedient, trusting, shortchanged of common sense - participating in the government's game of citizenship. Start the music.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.