His name sounds Middle Eastern, he speaks truth to power, some of his associates are scorned or suspect. My jaw dropped when I read Hoder’s post, but should I really be surprised to see the U.S. Border Patrol refusing reentrance to a Canadian who had been in New York City for one month and had made the mistake of taking a quick trip to Toronto? Can I really be surprised, in a country that has politicians letting young Americans die in a foolish war while shaking their fists because a discount store won’t put up signs saying “Merry Christmas,” that a border agent would ask Hoder, a well-respected blogger and public intellectual, “Why did I go to Iran, what are my feelings about Bush administration, why I separated from my wife, what did I think about Iranian politics, etc.”? The agent used Google to find Hoder’s blog and after seeing what he had to say about the United States and Iran, he told Hoder “these things are not quite appropriate to be on your blog when you are at the border.”
We’ve killed almost as many American troops in Iraq as died in the 1812 War. We can’t prevent terrorism, we can’t even help our own during natural disasters, and our solution to the global warming crisis is to depilate old-growth forests, but we seem fairly competent at evicting North Americans from North America.
If Tiny Tim were here today, he’d have to change his last words in The Christmas Carol to “God help us, every one.”
Posted on this day, other years:
- Chocolate Pecan Pie - 2006
- We Are Worth It, Too! - 2004
- ALA and Cuba: More Bad Press - 2003
I can do one better, about the Border Patrol. A colleague, the Library Director in a nearby town, is/was a Canadian citizen. She was here on a NAFTA visa, and had been for about ten years. She married a naturalized American citizen and applied for citizenship. No problem, right? She went back for a long weekend to visit her family outside Toronto, and then was refused re-entry to the US. Why? Well, it seems that no one had told her that if you leave the country when you have applied for a change in your status, you are “deemed to have abandoned your application.” So there she was, in Toronto with three days worth of clothes, and her husband in Hungary! It took her over 2 MONTHS to get back to work. And this was someone with a job, and who does not have a Middle Eastern name or look. It amazes me.