A Visit to the Human Resources Administration
Today I learned that in the USA, people below a certain income can get ‘money’ that they can only spend on food. They don’t get actual real money. They get some kind of currency and then the state, this supposedly land-of-the-free state, decides what they can spend it on. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the contradictions here. Politicians in the USA are always inveighing against bad European socialism, because it doesn’t respect freedom. But let me tell you that in the Netherlands, there’s no such thing as ‘food stamps’. You just get money. And you can spend it how you see fit, as befits your status as an adult human being.
In the USA, the poor are not adult human beings. Their poverty shows that they are morally weak and cannot be trusted to make their own decisions in life. Outside, somebody is preaching the prosperity gospel. Above it all hovers the gold-plated spirit of Donald Trump.
Nathanael West, in 1934, mercilessly lampooned all this American Dream shit in A Cool Million, but somehow it still survives.
A Visit to the Human Resources Administration is more focused on the implementation problems of the social programme; on the hoops it makes people jump through, the problems it creates, the ways it doesn’t actually help the vulnerable. It uses the device of an alien to bring out the absurdity of the situation. This is a well-known recipe familiar from works such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. (There it’s not extraterrestrial aliens, but the idea is the same.) It is familiar because it works, and it works here.
The game is not groundbreaking; it doesn’t reach the humorous absurdity of the bureaucracy in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, nor the existential dread of a Kafka story. But it’s written by someone who knows the actual situation, and that makes it useful and interesting as a kind of documentary evidence. Plus: we can never complain when we are called to pay attention to those whose life is made difficult. A competent piece with a good message.