Junod takes his daughter to a waterpark every year for the lines. There, people wait wet and undressed, in camaraderie, with their scars and their tattoos exposed. “They’re a vision not just of democracy in action but democracy unveiled,” Junod writes of the lines, “a glimpse of what the last line is going to look like, when all is revealed, and we’re waiting for our interview with Saint Peter.” Buying a ticket that allows cutting, he observes, amounts to paying to degrade other people’s experience. If some people don’t stand in line at all, then other people have to stand in line longer.
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