What's in a Name?
We trust photographs at our own peril
The nation-state makes itself real through record-keeping its population. Birth, marriage and death are the big ones—it is through those records that the state defines and control the “family.” Without a native-born population, traceable through state records, a state loses part of its legitimacy.
These three, fundamental documents all list a person’s date and place of birth. None of them carry a photograph.
Photographic state-issued identifications are based on birth certificates. Drivers licenses, military ID’s, passports—the photos on these legal documents were made legitimate via a document without a photo. The birth certificate is one means of establishing voter eligibility, and to qualify for legal employment in the United States.
One establishes legal, photographic identification in the United States without an existing photographic record, because it simply took too long to make tiny oil paintings of every baby, back in 1789.
We forget the technology for establishing identity through one’s visage is a new one, when it comes to the social need of differentiating one person from another. As Erving Goffman noted, we most commonly do this by name alone. That is, names are usually sufficient to establish identity; especially in smaller social groups, such as a voter precinct.
So when there are calls to “fix” undocumented immigrant voting through the issuance of a national Voter Identification card or similar, new re-registrations, people are not only creating a problem where none exists, they are relying on a means of verifying identity that can be validated solely through comparison to existing, non-photographic records—a voter registration or a birth certificate.
We are seeing the computer-assisted surveillance that has washed over us extended to elections, and that is a most dangerous thing to do. The secret ballot is our best insurance against secret police, because once DNA is required for voter registration, that information will begin to be used against certain genotypes.
The goal of the Heritage Foundation (who found but 1,600 total cases of voter fraud recorded in 42 years of elections—see link above) is to render the state into a disciplinary tool of the owning class. Part of ensuring minority rule is through reducing the size of the majority via voter disenfranchisement (see the Drug War), and voter suppression. One reason for recent attacks on the 14th amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship is not to bring back chattel slavery, but to build a framework for the return of partial personhood and weighted suffrage.
Slavery under corporatism is doing just fine, in private prisons across America. It features all of the labor, and none of the suffrage—the way it used to be!
Say what folks will about the Trump Administrations and America’s “fall” into fascism, we long ago laid the foundation for the private-public partnerships that today turn warehouses into concentration camps to manage nonviolent misdemeanors.
When we monetize the treatment of deviance, we will see those who stand to profit expand the definition of deviance and tout its negative impacts. The nature of the deviance, like all deviance, is a social construction so it may be ginned up from almost anything. Bringing private interests to bear on the treatment of deviance in our society is to act against the General Welfare, by placing the welfare of one social class ahead of, and at the expense of, another.