Life & Wisdom Quote by Caskie Stinnett

Stinnett’s genius here is that he doesn’t bother with policy critique; he goes straight for the body. The image of a prune skin stuck to the roof of your mouth is petty, intimate, and irritating in a way everyone recognizes. Bureaucracy, in his telling, isn’t the grand villain of dystopian fiction. It’s the nagging, saliva-and-tongue problem you can’t stop thinking about once it starts. That’s the hook: an outsized amount of effort devoted to something fundamentally unworthy.

The second sentence lands the knife. “More enterprise went into the job than could be justified by the results” is a neat inversion of the American gospel of hard work. Enterprise is supposed to be its own moral proof. Stinnett treats it as wasted motion, a kind of civic treadmill where energy is consumed mostly to keep the machine looking busy. The subtext is especially cutting because it implies the system rewards process over outcome: the work expands, the paperwork multiplies, and success becomes indistinguishable from endurance.

As a writer, Stinnett aims less at individual civil servants than at the institutional physics of federal work: layers, approvals, caution, and the strange pride taken in surviving them. The simile also signals a particular mid-century skepticism about government competence and scale, when “the agency” became a punchline in magazines and dinner-party storytelling. It’s satire with teeth because it’s not abstract; it’s sensory, memorable, and a little disgusting - exactly like frustration itself.