My old passport had expired, I'm contemplating trips abroad next year (and to Canada, and don't forget, you need a passport to go there now) so it was time to get a new one.
I couldn't find my old one, so I'd been procrastinating because I knew I'd have to go apply in person. Then I found out that I could now apply in person at my local city hall, instead of the big passport office downtown. That was certainly more convenient, but fortunately I found the old one just in time. After all the horror stories of delays earlier this year, I thought I might be prudent to pay the extra fee for expediting it to get it in a predicted 3-4 weeks, instead of 8-10.
Well, it just arrived -- in less than two weeks, 8 working days after I mailed the application. Nice.
I opened it up to find that instead of the generic inside pages of the old passports, the pages for visas and endorsements and the front pages of the passport now feature drawings and quotes. I braced myself for the tacky, tasteless jingoism that I've come to expect from Bush's minions.
But I'm pleasantly surprised. It's nice. The quotes are appropriate, historical, even diverse; from Lincoln, Washington, Daniel Webster, Martin Luther King, JFK, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Anna Julia Cooper, Ellison Onizuka, and a Native American prayer. No Reagan, no Bush. There's a bit of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. There are pictures of sailing ships, Mount Rushmore, buffalo and grizzly bears, a farmer, a cowboy, a space probe. And a couple of bald eagle heads that now look extremely Colbertesque, but hey.
I didn't see anything wrong with the old minimalist design -- and most other reviews of the new design have been pretty negative. But I'm happy with my new passport. It's been such a long time since I could say something positive about any innovation in the federal government that I thought it was worth giving them credit.