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Dispatches from the culture war front

Imagine a country where the government decides what you can read or watch or listen to. Imagine a society that is so insular, so full of itself that it is sure that the only worthwhile ideas are its own. Iran? China? Saudi Arabia? Probably. Also the United States:

Money and goods, though, flow more rapidly into the United States than ideas and culture. As the country exports both Hollywood movies and occupying armies, it seems to be gradually closing its ears to foreign voices.

"What it takes out of our culture is understanding and humility and tolerance and perspective on the world," Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent Pictures, of the growing difficulty of selling foreign films. "What we're missing is not only the full range of emotion but also of storytelling."

Distributors say that foreign-language films have a harder time each year getting space on American screens. A recent study showed that European films produced only 1.6% of the 2002 U.S. box office take at a time when American films were garnering almost 90% of audiences in parts of Europe.

Of the literary books published in the U.S., fewer than 3% are translations — a proportion no better than in the Arab world. Leading lights, most recently Northwestern University Press, have cut back substantially; even Nobel Prize winners such as José Saramago and Imre Kertész remain obscure here.

And international performance groups are finding their U.S. appearances blocked by strict immigration and visa restrictions that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Stories about postponement of foreign theater, dance and world-music group performances have become as common as laments about the shortage of translators for Middle Eastern intelligence work, and more than 50 tours have been canceled outright. (A Berlin-based chamber group, the Artemis Quartet, had its U.S. tour canceled because the cellist, who had shoplifted a pair of tweezers 11 years before, had his visa denied, according to the New York Times.)

New regulations require that a performer petition for entry within six months before a concert, to be followed by lengthy background checks and trips to the U.S. Embassy (which can be far away ) to both interview and pick up the visas in person.

In countries such as Iran, Russia or Cuba (which was not able to send any of its 12 nominees to the Latin Grammy Awards last September, and whose 76-year-old guitarist Ibrahim Ferrer was not able to appear at the Grammys this month), the procedure often takes longer. .

"There's no question that the Homeland Security Act has limited, if not killed off, the ability to tour artists from the ever-growing list of restricted countries," says David Sefton, director of the UCLA Live performance series, which last fall postponed an appearance by a group of Belgian schoolchildren called üBONG because of visa difficulties and, in January, Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco De Lucia. "Under the thinly transparent veil of national security, an awful lot of the ability to work with foreign artists has been closed down."

So, our government is hard at work defending us from children and Spaniards. I know I feel safer. I’m grateful that I wont have to stress over getting tickets to Ibrahim Ferrer’s next tour, since their will be none. And thankfully, I wont have to worry about his next CD being re-mixed and destroyed by an American label. What a glorious and simple country this is becoming!

Writers often grumble about the criminal things editors do to their prose. The federal government has recently weighed in on the same issue — literally.

It has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy.

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" is allowed.

The Treasury letters concerned Iran. But the logic, experts said, would seem to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which most trade is banned without a government license.