Take My Privacy, Please

By Joel Stein

I beckoned my girlfriend to bed, using my patented finger curl-wink-raised eyebrow-"Hey, seriously, would you please come over here for just a second?" thing that no woman has been able to resist. I held her close, removed this little piece of chicken from my teeth that had been bugging me all day and opened our Census envelope. All week I had longed for this moment when we could declare our love to the State, God and any compilers of statistical information. This was a declaration that, unlike marriage, could not be voided for at least 10 years. This was indeed a far greater commitment than mere marriage. Unfortunately, my girlfriend didn't buy any of this either.

Although I usually regard three minutes as more than enough time to bond, filling out our form was a huge letdown. All the Census Bureau cared about was gender and race, like some humanities grad student. Plus, our form kept insulting us by insinuating that we lived in a mobile home. It never gave us a chance to refute that and tell about our 450-sq.-ft. studio apartment.

George W. Bush and Trent Lott have said they wouldn't fill out the long form because it invades their privacy. Well, I long for the long form. For I and most Americans I know feel cheated of our inalienable right to talk about ourselves. I wanted to write about how much I can bench-press, what I can cook and all the celebrities I've met. I wanted to give away our pet names for each other and exaggerate how many times a day we have sex. Although I think I just made up for that one.

So I got hold of a long form (if it's patriotic to fill out one, I figure it's doubly patriotic to fill out two) and now know why people are mad. All the Census people care about is how much money you make, like the USA Today Life section. The other questions are so dumb, they must have been penned by a writer so talentless that he gets work only once a decade. A writer who may, I suspect, live in a mobile home and be a tad defensive about it.

Each question was more disappointing than the last. The one about receiving "Social Security or Railroad Retirement" confused me. Telling about my apartment's flush-toilet capacity has clearly lost some of the bragging rights it held in the original 1790 Census. And that "How many bedrooms do you have?" question really rubbed it in my face.

We're not a private people. Even though the Web does a far more insidious job of collecting information than the Census, we love answering those Web polls about sports and which Gore girl is hottest. And though we like the media even less than the government, we answer exit polls and tell TV reporters our opinion about Elian Gonzalez even if we clearly don't have one.

It's too late to hang on to privacy. You can delete those Internet browser cookies that trace you, hide your Social Security numbers and unlist your phone number, but it's more efficient just to toss your junk mail. The notion that anyone will ever find you interesting enough to look up your personal Census data or read your e-mails is so egotistical that I know you're dying to answer personal questions. I can bench-press 180 lbs.