Making America ‘safer’ and culture-less
English poet Les Barker is being hassled over obtaining a visa that will allow him to come back to America and perform yet again. Why? The official word is that Les isn’t culturally unique. As if the cabbage-head processing the paperwork would know. The entire matter smells like ‘political retribution spirit’ to me.
Les, a one-of-a-kind maverick, is a master of the offbeat and has published and recorded such esteemed doggerel as “Dachshunds with Erections Can’t Climb Stairs,” “Up a Creek Without a Poodle,” “Jason and the Arguments,” “Guide Cats for the Blind,” “An Infinite Number of Occasional Tables,” well, you get the idea. He certainly isn’t a fan of either Tony Blair or George Bush.
Here’s a post from folk music DJ Paul Stamler that explains the details. I’m sharing in its sad entirety. It’s no wonder why FEMA and the U.S. government failed and continues to fail the citizens of New Orleans as you’ll see.
“Hi folks:
In yet another act of rank stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security, which now contains the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has (in practical terms) denied a visa to poet/humorist Les Barker for his November tour. Their grounds? Astonishing, if you’re familiar with Les’s work: they stated that he was “not sufficiently culturally unique”.
I am not making this up.
An excerpt from a letter Les sent me: “Homeland Security haven’t said no at this point; what they’ve done is to issue a statement of intent to deny; it went to Godfrey Daniels, one of the venues on the tour and said they were minded to deny me entry because I’m not sufficiently culturally unique. I immediately emailed MIke Space, the promoter, a pile of reviews which specifically addressed the point, all of which had been part of the huge pile I’d sent over to my agent at the very start of the process. So Mike can effectively contest the letter, but as we’ve been told by the man at Traffic Control, the agency who’ve dealt with my visa, it will then take Homeland Security 2 weeks to add the information to my file, a further 2 weeks for someone to open the file again and start looking at it, then however long it takes for someone to arrive at a decision, after which – if the answer’s yes – I have to begin the UK end of the process which might be another couple of weeks, which takes us at best into December. Too late.”
Quicksilver and Andy Irvine have also been denied on the same grounds. More from Les: “I don’t know how much you know of the history of the visa process, but it’s nothing to do with finding out whether you’re a good musician, and certainly nothing to do with security, and everything to do with discouraging you from ever wanting to do it again. It’s an economic measure. Every eighteen months or so, they rearrange the hoops you have to jump through to stop it becoming routine; this is the latest rearrangement of the hoops. There will be an outcry. Things will improve in a while. Then it’ll be time to rearrange the hoops again. I’ve been going through them for 12 years and it’s always been awful, and apparently it was just as awful for years before that.”
And: “The thing that’s enraged me most of all over the years is the Premium Fee. Back in 2001, some months before 9/11, it suddenly started taking the INS over 7 months to process applications. As you can’t apply more than 6 months before the first gig, this was an obvious problem. And how did they solve it? By introducing a system whereby you can pay an extra 1000 dollars and be moved to the front of the queue. You’d be appalled to get that treatment from a corrupt customs officer in say, the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. But in the US it’s official policy.”
I have my own suspicions, which tell me that the effective visa denial may be related to the content of some of Les’s more serious pieces. No — you don’t think — but they wouldn’t do that! They might waterboard somebody (as Cheney has admitted, according to this morning’s news) but they’d never deny entry to a poet because they didn’t like his verses. Would they?
In any case, whether it’s because of Les’s politics or “insufficient cultural uniqueness”, the government of the United States shows its contempt for the the rest of the world when it keeps the world’s artists from performing here. And the rest of the world, increasingly, returns the contempt.
I know what I’ll be playing on this Sunday’s program.
Peace,
Paul Stamler”