Rabat Day 2

To accredit reporters to work here, the Moroccan Communication Ministry requires, among other things, four wallet-sized photos of the reporter, a letter from your boss saying you’re a reporter, a letter from the embassy saying you’re an American, and a copy of the press credentials issued by your home country. As the kind-faced lady working as the ministry’s press liaison listed these items in English and French, that last thing made the pulse of this reporter quicken somewhat. The whole list was beginning feel sort of uptight and bureaucratic and scary and perhaps portending some kind of endless succession of hassles and multiple windows with bored-looking functionaries standing in the way of doing our dream job, demanding all these different pieces of paper the last of which Americans don’t even have. So. This reporter starts explaining this, the lack of government press credentialing in America, and because he’s doing this in his rusty French he’s resorting to the longer Latinate words for stuff, which are usually also French words if you just say them in a French accent. The downside of this is you end up sounding sort of academic and possibly pretentions esp. when you’re talking about “la Constitution” and “Les droits du journalists en general en Amerique” and “la liberté du press” and you end up feeling extra dumb when the extremely nice press lady interrupts you. In French, then in English so you’re sure to get it, she’s like: Homey, chill out. We’ll just leave it out of the file and no one will care. So we’ve got that going for us. Also the lighthouse is very pretty.