If Stephen Colbert Designed the New US Passport
I'm pretty sure what he came up with would be spot on when compared to what the U.S. State Department devised for us globe-trotting Americans to carry as they make their way around the world.
I had my first glimpse of the new passport standing in the customs line at the Istanbul airport on my way home from Turkey. Maybe there were 1,000 people in the lines waiting to have their passports stamped. I was next to a group of middle-aged white Americans who were holding out their brand-spanking-new passports and showing each other the garish pages.
They look like what you'd get if you put Epcot Center and a passport into a blender. Each page is more insultingly stereotypical than the one before with lame quotes, stupid pictures of idealized American landscapes, and best of all, a GIANT EAGLE on the page opposite your picture.
The New Republic had an excellent piece on exactly this the other day. Go read it. It's hilarious. Excessively weird, red-state passport, it calls it.
If you don't want to bother, you can still see the new passports here.
I had my first glimpse of the new passport standing in the customs line at the Istanbul airport on my way home from Turkey. Maybe there were 1,000 people in the lines waiting to have their passports stamped. I was next to a group of middle-aged white Americans who were holding out their brand-spanking-new passports and showing each other the garish pages.
They look like what you'd get if you put Epcot Center and a passport into a blender. Each page is more insultingly stereotypical than the one before with lame quotes, stupid pictures of idealized American landscapes, and best of all, a GIANT EAGLE on the page opposite your picture.
The New Republic had an excellent piece on exactly this the other day. Go read it. It's hilarious. Excessively weird, red-state passport, it calls it.
If you don't want to bother, you can still see the new passports here.
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