Conspiracy Week: THE IMMIGRANT MENACE

I’m not only seeing Nick Cave in concert tonight, yesterday at 11am I saw the performance art piece involving fake horses that he’s got going a couple times a day at Grand Central.

The crowd loved it.  They probably would have been much more sad if the fake horses re-enacted the song “The Carny” (“And the dwarves were given the task of digging the ditch and laying the nag’s carcass in the ground... we can’t afford to carry dead weight,” etc.).  They might have been somewhat happier, though, if the horses were “prancing in the field” as in “Till the End of the World” – without the bomb that blows up the narrator’s ex-girlfriend at the beginning of the song.  That’s no way to cope with relationship issues.  (Ah: two different Nick Caves.)

Speaking of relationship issues, there’s a gay couple out there (probably watching this week’s Supreme Court news with great interest) who are married and whose child was facilitated by an egg donation from the woman with whom I’m seeing Cave tonight.  But it’s not the gays or the fetuses or the alternative rock fans I’m worried about today – it’s the immigrants. 

While Australian Nick Cave seems to be able to make it in and out of the U.S. without too much hassle, the same is not true for hapless Australian video artist Pogo, as he politely explains here, suffering like many people the world over whose plans have been wrecked by the U.S.’s byzantine travel and immigration rules (h/t proud comso-tarian Tom Palmer).  But we have met the enemy, and, no, they are not the Australians.  We wish the Australians well.

Not only is libertarian-ish Rand Paul lately realizing how crazy the rules resulting from our visitor-phobia are, he seems to have persuaded the often-bullheaded Sean Hannity on the issue, enough to get the latter calling Ann Coulter “annoying” for her intransigence on the topic.  This is important progress.

In the meantime, though, even as I typed this blog entry, I received a mass-e-mail from La MaMa theatre and the Irish Arts Center apologizing to their customers because “visa issues” have forced the cancelation of an intended performance called ponydance (perhaps involving fake ponies much like Cave #2’s fake horses, but certainly involving real Irish people).

If you tend either (A) to dislike big government or (B) to like the free blending of cultures (and I bet you agree with at least one of those things), imagine the possibilities of a world literally without borders.  I’m confident humanity would find an infinitude of things to do with the opportunity besides plotting terrorism and going on welfare.  If territorial governments as we know them dissolved in the process, so be it.

P.S. Meanwhile, the American Spectator tells us what Tom Lehrer’s been up to for fifty years (h/t Rick Sincere).