Assumed guilty: the challenges of passing through U.S. customs

Home In All Lands: Studying abroad: U.S. politics must learn from U.K.

Although the next presidential election was over four years away, the whisperings about 2016 started on the Sunday political shows in the weeks following President Obama’s reelection in November 2012.
Thankfully, more pressing matters soon turned the attention of the TV folks elsewhere. Last year was, after all, quite agitated from a political perspective: important elements of the Affordable Care Act began to be implemented; the government shut down; and key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act were ruled unconstitutional.
But in the new year, the media has already turned its gaze to the next election drama. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, host David Gregory asked Mitt Romney if he intended to attempt another run for the Oval Office in 2016. Some days earlier, former Florida governor Jeb Bush also hinted at the possibility that he might run for the highest office in the land, following in the footsteps of his father and brother. Several Democrats, too, have expressed an interest in making a move for the White House.

Home In All Lands: Vox populi: defending the world’s most undervalued instrument

If it were an ordinary, artificial instrument, the humble larynx wouldn’t be well loved. It’s a complicated organ, a dense nexus of muscles, cartilage and nerves, flanked by bones. As vocal scientist Ingo Titze notes, were the larynx to be arranged by size against other instruments, “it would be grouped with the piccolo, among the smallest of mechanical music makers.”
The larynx’s unassuming size, however, belies its power as a musical instrument. Some of the greatest pieces of music ever written wouldn’t be half the works they are if the human voice were erased from the score.
Remove the voice, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony becomes a shadow of itself. Without voice, the musical numbers in Bollywood just become garishly colored dance sequences, robbed of any meaning. Remove the voice and Ave Maria is just silence.
Don’t get me wrong, I like John Cage’s 4’33’’—a composition performed in the absence of noise—as much as the next man, but a world without singing is one that I don’t want to imagine and, I suspect, neither do you. And yet, for its importance as an instrument in so many genres of music, the mighty larynx is seldom perceived to be a legitimate music maker.
I cannot begin to count the number of times I have had some permutation of the following conversation, with other musicians and non-musicians alike:
“So tell me, do you play an instrument?” they ask.
“Yes,” I reply “I sing.”
(Laughs) “No, but seriously, do you play an instrument?”
When I ask these people why they don’t think the voice is a legitimate instrument, they point to the fact that everyone has one and we use it more often for speaking than we do for making music. Their ignorance aside, these folks do have a point.
The voice is common: there are, roughly, seven billion larynxes out there and they are primarily used for speaking, not singing. Yet the commonality of the voice and its use for something other than music making shouldn’t discredit its value as an instrument.
Although everyone has the tools at their disposal to sing, it takes years of training and plenty of hard work to build up the vocal strength necessary for singing. In the same way that picking up a 500 kg dumbbell on the first attempt is all but impossible, you can’t expect to sing an aria without first practicing.
Titze says that singers ask the vocal cords to do something “no other string instrument can do: vary the length and tension of the vibrating material simultaneously to change frequency.” And thankfully, all that precise control doesn’t go to waste—just come to the Chamber Choir concerts in the Chapel, this Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m., to find out what voices can truly do!Judging by complexity and range alone, the voice box clearly meets the definition of “instrument.” But I’m not all about merely checking boxes. Technical considerations are great pieces of evidence, but they cannot be the only determining factor. Clearly, something more ethereal is needed.
Again, vocal music is up to the task. If you were to draw up a top 10 list of the best works of music in history, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if some (if not the majority) of pieces included a voice. As the universal instrument, the voice is a unifying experience. While our tastes in music differ and the ways that we produce song differ as a consequence, humans can still be united by our voices. Because it requires no external aids, no knowledge of musical notation and no experience in music whatsoever, the larynx is the perfect equalizing instrument. Yes, some people may be more adept at using the voice than others, but that should not discourage you from trying to master your larynx as well. Go out there and sing!

Home In All Lands

Assumed guilty: the challenges of passing through U.S. customs

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jean-Paul Honegger

Columnist

April 10, 2014

As I write this, I am over 38,000 feet in the sky, 600 miles south of Iceland. In front of me, to the west, the setting sun is turning the sky a light shade of orange. Below me, as far as the eye can see, clouds spread out and hide the sea from view. The meal service has come and gone. Now we are at the part of the flight where the cabin becomes silent as people sleep, hoping to overcome jet lag.

I’ve decided to take this time to discuss something that is preoccupying me as I sit here, high above the waves, aboard LX52 to Boston. Given the news of the past month, I will forgive you for thinking that this is going to be an article about Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. To tell you the truth, that saga isn’t what’s worrying me.

Instead, I am nervous about something that awaits me (and every other person aboard this flight) when I arrive at Boston Logan Airport in a few hours’ time: immigration. Of all the things that are involved with my travels to and from the U.S., nothing makes me more anxious than the five or so minutes I have to spend dealing with an officer of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

As a Swiss citizen, I have travelled considerably and have had to deal with immigration idiosyncrasies in countless countries. My worst experiences upon arrival have invariably been in the U.S. This has always struck me as being somewhat at odds with the image that America portrays to the rest of the world.

As you queue up at Logan Airport to be processed by a CBP officer, you cannot help but notice the saccharine “Welcome to the United States” video, which plays every five minutes on the TV screens in the immigration hall. It shows people of all races and national origins looking up at the camera and smiling, while a peppy tune plays in the background. Every so often, we’re enticed with a flyover of a beautiful landscape out west, a bald eagle, or happy people being served coffee in a diner.

It’s an attempt to distill the essence of American hospitality into a short clip to make arriving foreigners feel more at ease in the country. If only the immigration procedure that follows could match the friendliness that exudes from those TV screens.

As a foreigner, when you are finally called up to the desk, you are “greeted” by a CBP officer. In my case, she may then ask me what the purpose of my visit is, where (and what) I study, as well as a host of other questions that are fairly typical of immigration procedures in countries the world over. In contrast to the rest of the world, CBP officers have the dubious distinction of consistently behaving towards foreigners as if we are either (a) all out to destroy America, (b) intent on spying for our insidious—Communist-Fascist—masters, or (c) planning to defraud the Social Security system.

The fact that CBP officers may look upon foreigners with suspicion is excusable enough—border agents the world over have the same attitude. What is less acceptable is the incongruity of the cheery video welcoming us to America and the attitude adopted by the CBP officers that screams “Get out, you filthy scum, we never want to see you here again.”

I have visited totalitarian dictatorships where the entry procedure was less antagonizing than anything I’ve experienced in the United States. When I visited the same country that Dennis Rodman has been frequenting of late—which I cannot name for legal reasons—the immigration official just took my passport, stuck it into an ID scanner, grunted and then stamped my travel documents. That was it.

In contrast, during a visit to Atlanta (a city which I called home in the 1990s) a few years ago, the immigration officer asked me, dead serious, “Why would you ever want to visit Atlanta?” Talk about bad publicity. And I’m not the only foreigner to have noticed the gruff attitude of the men and women who protect America’s borders.

Last year two European children were detained for many hours for the “crime” of travelling alone to visit their grandmother, who lives stateside. Cyprien, one of the most popular YouTubers in the francophone world, made a video a few years ago about his travels in the United States. He loves many things about this country, as I do. But he was less than enthusiastic about the cold welcome extended to him by the CBP officers when he arrived at JFK Airport, and he made a point mentioning the experience to his viewers. An experience with CBP officers gets any visit to the United States started on a bad note. It also may have a negative impact on the amount of travel to this country; there is little reason to visit a country if you’re going to be welcomed (and treated) like a common criminal upon arrival.

But has the U.S. done anything to resolve this image problem? No. When the head of the Department of Homeland Security met with the leaders of several major travel companies, including American Express and Carlson Wagonlit, the men and women present were unequivocal in expressing that the U.S. immigration system was discouraging clients from choosing to visit or even fly through the country. Not only were the policies hurting their businesses, they said, it would also have a negative impact on the U.S. economy. The meeting (which took place under the Bush administration) ended on a sour note. No such meeting has taken place since President Obama took office.

There is no reason for the people who protect America’s borders to be so caustic in their interactions with the visitors who have decided to come for all that this exceptional country has to offer. When people visit the U.S., they should feel welcomed—from the moment they step up to the immigration counter, right up until the moment their return flight takes off.

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