‘It is always both amusing and unnerving, having made the lengthy airborne crossing towards the United States, to have to fill out the American immigration card that will decide your fate on landing.
The form no longer asks if you have now, or at any time in your life, been a communist, or have known anyone who was or might have been a communist.
But you are still asked to declare whether you have ever been guilty of “crimes of moral turpitude”.
It then goes on, in the same deadpan, eyeball-to-eyeball fashion, to ask whether you are seeking entry into the US “to engage in criminal or immoral activities”.
Finally, the formidable little form asks: “Have you ever been, or are you now involved in, espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide, or persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?”
My eye always goes back to that sad and sinister little word at the beginning of the list: what the hell is “turpitude”, anyway?
One scarcely needs to ask, since it is one of those words in the English language that, despite being so archaic, still invokes by the very sound of it the kind of moral failings that would mark you down on the list of irredeemable personal corruption.
One immediately thinks of child molesters, Satanists, and men who do funny things with sheep on the edges of cliffs in New Zealand.
But the question is so devastatingly direct that it also seems to look into the deepest recesses of your own conscience, probing as far back as misdemeanours of early childhood that even you have quietly forgotten.
“If I say ‘no’ to all of the above, will they somehow know that I have omitted to mention that illegal thing I did with Matsidiso behind the lavatory, even though we were only five?”
So you nevertheless tick off a “no” in all of those meaningful little boxes, and hope that your beating heart doesn’t give you away as you finally stand before the bored inquisitor or inquisitrix in that sterile booth at John F Kennedy airport who will decide whether or not you will be allowed into the Land of the Free.
Many future Americans of doubtful moral turpitude – like both J Edgar Hoover and his future arch-enemy Al Capone – would have passed under the huge armpit of the Statue of Liberty to enter the land where the Cheyenne and the buffalo used to roam in unmolested innocence. None of them, not even the Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, would have dreamed about answering “yes” to the kind of questions that are asked on that niggling immigration form.
It is now, just as it was then, simply a game you play, a stare-you-down formality before you enter the biggest playground in the world, where anything goes in love, war, crime and politics.
The George W Bush-Al Gore debacle has proved that the American political system is, after all, capable of foxing all of the people all of the time, and indulging in a little moral turpitude of its own.
Gore has won the popular vote (albeit by a feeble handful of votes) but Bush has won according to the old-fashioned electoral college system – which was probably put in place by the founding fathers precisely to find a way to stop the popular vote predominating in the unlikely event that women and slaves should get the vote sometime down the road in the unpredictable future.
They say that comparisons are odious, but in this case certain comparisons are irresistible. The Mother of Democracy is now no longer able to wag a finger of admonition in the direction of the chaos of elections in the Third World, since Third World practices have now been exposed as part of the norm in its own elections – and have been for some time.
Vote rigging, dead people voting as if they were live people, and live people voting twice or thrice – the macabre rituals previously thought to be exclusive to places like Haiti, Colombia, KwaZulu-Natal and the Philippines have all been skilfully integrated into the expensive ballyhoo of the American presidential race. And still no one has won.
In the long run, the ultimate winner might well be the American electoral system itself.
The farce of this narrow margin has made the people fed up and wanting change.
Many things have already changed profoundly in America, which is why these anomalies are now coming to light. Race relations is one of those changes.
In the US race still divides people, but the dividing lines are beginning to look increasingly contrived. People are beginning to think and vote as if they were all Americans.
The black vote is being increasingly shared between the Democratic Party, which used to hold the high moral ground in race matters, and the Republicans, who used to think they were assured of it because of the warm and fuzzy memory of Ol’ Massa Abe Lincoln, the man erroneously credited with emancipation of Uncle Tom’s offspring some 150 years ago.
Nothing is sure in American politics these days, as both Bush and Gore have been discovering to their discomfiture. If you can’t be sure of Abe Lincoln and Wall Street, what is there left to be sure of?
The only thing everyone is sure of in America today is that no one is sure who won the presidential election. Down in Florida this week, Bush supporters were carrying placards and chanting “The fat lady’s singing, the fat lady’s singing …” – meaning the show is all over for Gore.
But in the Gore camp, they still weren’t so certain. In America, the home of both democracy and showbiz, you can keep on writing new finales, as long as you can afford to pay the scriptwriters.
The show must go on, even when the audience has thrown the last of its tomatoes and gone home.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza