Officeholders in America Are Also Plebeians

Before school started last August, a friend of mine had handed in her application for teaching Chinese to the Teacher Certificate Office at her place. As is routine, the application would go through examination and approval by California’s Teacher Certificate Committee in just a few days upon submission, and the result would come out after another two to three months. Four months after the application was filed, however, my friend still had no response, so she went to her school’s office to check. People in the office warmly helped her with an expansive search, finding out that instead of being sent over to the state, the application was still covered in the pile of documents on a clerk’s desk.

Americans call this kind of clerk a “bureaucrat,” not because they are entitled to any official position, but because they work in a bureau’s office. The low efficiency in governmental bureaucratic institutions is invariably held up to Americans’ ridicule. A joke goes that America has an indoor game, named “bureaucracy.” The game has only one rule: Don’t move. The first person to move loses the game. Research lists ordinary people’s takes on inept bureaucrats: “poor work performance,” “overpaid,” “lazy,” “rigid,” “unimaginative,” “lacking individuality,” “depersonalized,” and “work means long hours of coffee and rest.” In a nutshell, [they’re seen as] a bunch of imbeciles that do nothing but filing.

Americans hate bureaucracy. This has to do with their tradition of disliking a big government. Americans would rather deal with their business on their own. They prefer to live in a society of self-reliance and self-help, rather than being dependent on government. Most Americans believe that bureaucracy is generated from a big government and that bureaucracy is the most depersonalized way of doing work. This perception has a lot of truth to it, but it also has biases. Actually, a big government is not necessarily a problem. If a government is big, things can be done; if each thing can be implemented, it’s not a bad thing. The problem lies in that a big government could make plenty of promises, but fail to catch up more often than not. Thus, it becomes a powerful monster that does few things.

Bureaucratically moving papers around, following steps and doing business as usual shouldn’t be judged as something completely bad. Compared with a quick, efficient manner, it is not a good choice. Nonetheless, when authorities are able to ignore procedures, turn a blind eye to rules and abuse their power, it is a relatively better choice.

On the officeholder’s part, sticking to official procedures and following rules can be seen as a just way of doing business based on the standard of “relatively better.” For instance, in order to revamp their apartment restroom, residents in California need to file an application to the residence’s administration. To change home-used boilers, they need to get approved certification from a security management office. Residents may complain about the complexity of procedures. However, the rules and regulations apply to all residents without discrimination. No one can remodel his or her apartment at a neighbors’ expense simply because he or she has special social connections.

Last year, I went to visit a friend back in China. Upon my arrival, he was in his room, rather upset. My inquiry disclosed that the resident’s committee in his neighborhood had set up a public garbage station under his wall without his consent. In the U.S., each family stores and places its own junk, which is collected regularly by a garbage company. No one would agree when all the neighbors dump their garbage under his or her own wall, since people tend to be much more perfunctory when they dump their junk at another person’s place. For sure, without authorization, it’s impossible that any public officeholder could allow one to benefit oneself at others’ expense. In America, procedures for public affairs are complicated mostly because people don’t want to give civil officers too many rights of disposition. In the meantime, they demand that they take individual responsibility for each decision they make.

American bureaucracy may lack a good reputation for efficiency, but instances where power is abused to milk private benefits are rare. Slow procedures don’t necessarily result from clerks’ being arrogant, petulant and trying to pick on people, nor from any intention to seek personal gains in the process. When making contacts with bureaucratic institutions, people even feel quite impressed by their working clerks, rather than find them nasty. The Washington Post once pulled a public opinion poll on federal officeholders. The result indicated that among the public that dealt in business with the government, 71 percent of them were either satisfied or quite content with the officeholders that they had met in person or had business relations with. Only 4 percent were quite upset, and the remaining 14 percent were just a little unsatisfied with the federal workers they met.

In America, bureaucrats to the people are not governing officials to the plebeians. Bureaucrats are only office workers going to work at different institutions. American people don’t like mysterious bureaucratic institutions, but they don’t find any uneven differences between themselves and those civil officeholders either. In their perception of the bureaucrats, they don’t hold any enmity, to say the least.