From: cgdemarc@ai.mit.edu (Carl de Marcken)
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 95 14:52:32 EDT
To: all-ai
Subject: Girl Scout Benefit, Friday, 5:30, 7AI


Foreign graduate student Oded Maron is about be interviewed by the INS for
US citizenship; he has been sick this last week and needs a North American
passport before Canada will let him see a doctor.  As the natives among us
know, being an American is not an easy thing to be.  Increasingly we find
that even after a lifetime of being Americans, many Americans are not.

Personally, I do not doubt Oded's qualifications.  He can be bitter and is
congenitally cynical.  He watches television.  He collects Pez dispensers
and eats fast food.  Someday he will be fat and spit chewing tobacco at
Toyotas built in Mexico.

But the INS is not so generous.  They will grill him up and down.  Here are
the sorts of questions they will ask:

(1) An American man (Americans are men, by and large) is driving his Ford
    flatbed down a small road at night.  He has had three Michelobs, brewed
    unbeknownst to him in Puerto Rico.  Said American, hunting rifle on his
    lap, spies a deer.  Opening day was last weekend.  The deer is union
    and is wearing a flag.  In the other lane, soon to intercede between
    said American and the deer is a domestic-built 2-wheel-drive sporty pink
    rice "pickup", driven by a Nicaraguan farm worker.  On the pickup
    "truck" is a Nixon/Atwater bumper sticker.  What does the American do?

(2) Why should America be filled with foreigners like you?  That just
    doesn't make sense.  It wouldn't hardly be America, then, would it?

(3) Oded, the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities has asked
    you to appear before them, and notes that as an Israeli-born theorist,
    you will be taking a job away from a hard-working American that could
    prove P=PSPACE just as well as anyone, and who damn well didn't run to
    Canada during the war.  Furthermore, they note that the convergence
    lemma in your last paper was lifted directly from one of Lincoln's
    early technical reports at Gettysburg.  What web site do you refer them
    to?

The Good INS Agent gives one question, the Bad INS Agent gives another.
After such an afternoon, Oded will want refreshment.  Let's all join him at
this week's

               G I R L   S C O U T   B E N E F I T

on the seventh floor, and welcome this new upholder of truth and justice
and the American way.