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BGonline.org Forums
No bashing, but ...
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: No bashing, but ... (Rich Munitz)
Date: Sunday, 26 July 2009, at 5:54 a.m.
Hi Richard:
I am jumping in here (instead of at the bottom of the queue) because it is close to Achim's original post.
Achim: I hear you!
I fly around Asia all the time. When I first started travel to the Orient I was in and out of Korea constantly. Picture this: twenty-five miles from the capital is massed a million-man army, one of the largest armies in the world. That army belongs to a hostile power with whom you are technically still at war. All propaganda aside, the folks across the border really are fanatics devoted to conquering you. They have in the past sent commandos through secret tunnel to attack the president's mansion. Four years ago they blew up a temple in Rangoon that just missed killing your visiting president, but got most of his cabinet. Just this year they have smuggled a bomb aboard a KAL flight and blown it up off the coast of Thailand. It may not hurt to mention that you (South Korea) have a right-wing dictatorship run by an ex-general who took over in a coup and then massacred somewhere between 200 (government count) and 2000 (rights organizations' count) protesters.
But my hat's off to you: with all the security imposed on flyers the experience is far more efficient and less degrading than the cluster fuck perpetrated on us today at US airports!
Europe, wipe that smug smile off your face, 'cause you ain't much better!
And Achim is right about something else: we go out of our way to make visitors feel unwelcome. I don't know if he has softened on this, but take Kenji. Kenji is one of the great things to happen to world backgammon. (And why you all haven't been to the Japan Open yet, I have no idea. If you can afford to go to MC, you can afford to go to Japan, so do yourself a favor.) Kenji ran tournaments where the prizes were trips to other venues, like MC, and the Nordic. And one prize used to be Vegas. But Kenji doesn't want to come to the US anymore, because our procedures (and the changes took years to effect after 9/11) are now so onerous.
You see Richard, it isn't just the security, much as that sucks. It's the immigration line for visitors that you've never been through. When I enter Japan or Singapore or Thailand the officers may or may not be friendly, but they are at least polite. But from what Laila and Kenji and others (and now Achim) have told me, that is far from the case when the fly into our fair shores. If you want work with Customs and Immigration it helps to list "surly and incompetent" on your resume.
Once upon a time that lady with the torch meant something, that here was a land that was different from all others on earth. Now the lady that greets our visitors is probably packing a gun, and has a guard dog on a leash.
Best,
Jake
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