# "Controversial" Brit "Memoirist" Denied Entry For Past "Crimes" **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 20, 2008, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086 "2008-03-20T16:24:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Plastic\_Ninja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f07891/32.png) [@Little\_Plastic\_Ninja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Plastic_Ninja)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/21 "2008-03-21T16:18:27Z")
From the article, again: > [@](#): > > But in an e-mail to the newspaper she explained that \*\*under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, \*\*“travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.” Bolding mine. When I first went to Canada, I checked and doublechecked to make sure there was no reason I could be kept out. I was surprised to see that people convicted of DUI might well be left at the border. Luckily I’ve never been DUI, but I know people who have. Does Canada’s rule make them a tyrannical authoritarian state? (It’s possible. I remember Toronto as having separate litter and recycling bins in the subways, _and there was litter in the litter bins and recyclables in the recycling bins_.) It’s a rule that can be enforced selectively, but I’m with the others: selective rules become very select-y indeed. I can envision the scene now: psychidelic Oscar Wilde shouting to his lackeys: “Don’t let them find the kilo of coke in my knickers! O-ho-ho!” ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/22 "2008-03-21T16:22:18Z")
Huerta88, I’ve read numerous press accounts and not one of them gives any details that support your version of the story. We may yet learn that it happened, but every article I’ve seen contains some variation of Sebastian Horsley’s being detained after his fingerprint was scanned. He was wearing a top hat, long velvet coat, velvet scarf, and a three-piece suit. “Dandy” clothing to be sure, but so what. Until we have even a particle of evidence that he caused customs to single him out, I can’t buy your story. I hate to back the guy up, but being an attention whore is not yet illegal, especially when there’s no evidence he was attention whoring. Not dressing in shorts and flip-flops isn’t attention whoring just yet. It would be nice to get customs’ side of the incident too, before any fingers are pointed. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/23 "2008-03-21T17:10:33Z")
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase] Huerta88, I’ve read numerous press accounts and not one of them gives any details that support your version of the story. We may yet learn that it happened, but every article I’ve seen contains some variation of Sebastian Horsley’s being detained after his fingerprint was scanned. [/QUOTE] **EM** , you are correct that I am connecting a number of dots that the press didn’t. But only because one of the problems in the Frey case, et al., was that no one ever did a BS test: “Just how likely is it that someone who’s never found his meager criminal record a bar to entry would suddenly be singled out for involuntary deportation, without provoking it in some way, on the very eve of his first book tour in a country where he’s hitherto unknown?” Even if his “deportation” were truly random and unprovoked or (even less likely – only IMHO, admittedly) was “politically motivated” because he is just Such A Rebel and the Booker Prize Committee Members who moonlight as fascist border guards were Out To Suppress His Message – there’s no denying he’s a terminal Attention Whore based on the fabricated memoirs, the crucifixion, and the **self-proclaimed** “dandyism.” No, none of that’s a crime – my protest was more that the credulous media need not and should not provide him with the oxygen that Attention Whores need (viz., Attention). ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/24 "2008-03-21T17:17:11Z")
[QUOTE=Zebra] denying a person because you don’t like them or their book and you think are attention whores is not ‘ok’. [/QUOTE] I’ve admitted I have nothing but (incredibly strong, IMHO) circumstantial evidence and experience-based surmise for the fact that this “deportation” had **something** to do with his intent to provoke just such a scene, and that he is far from unhappy about it. Your turn: admit that you have no evidence for the notion that any single representative of the U.S. government has ever read (let alone was motivated by “not liking”) his book. Because his whorish publishers’ press release strongly implied that it was his outspoken writing that did him in and led to his persecution – which is simply ludicrous. Bureaucrats don’t read books these days, if they ever did. Or if I misunderstood you and you meant that **I** wanted him excluded because I “don’t like his book” – quite incorrect. My Very Best Scenario for how this would have shaken out (other than that no sane publisher should have gone back to the well of very thin gruel that is fabricated-addiction-memoir) is that the INS guys overlooked whatever “flamboyant” staginess he was evincing and (if his papers were otherwise in order, and all his record indicated was a long-ago possession bust), waved him into the country (as has apparently happened many times before). I have no fear or discontent with one more Attention Whore being in the U.S., and if they’d just refrained from playing into what I am pretty sure was a ploy for publicity, he’d be what he deserves to be – an anonymous Attention Whore sitting in front of a table in an empty B. Dalton in Petaluma. No harm, no foul. ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/25 "2008-03-21T18:41:35Z")
No I ment you don’t like him/his book. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2008, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/26 "2008-03-21T18:51:46Z")
[QUOTE=Zebra] No I ment you don’t like him/his book. [/QUOTE] I see, sorry. Yes to the first. To the second, more like “I don’t care and I wish the media had not taken five seconds of time out of my life that I can never get back to make me think that something of literary or social importance had happened, when it hadn’t.” No that I want him excluded, censored, etc. My whole point is, he’s hardly worthy of that. Yes that I am grousing at large about a very stupid gullible media that aids and abets publicity mongers. I class this right up there with “OMG, you’ll never guess what Britney did at the MTV awards last night!!!” Yes I could. Got down on all fours and barked like a dog. Swallowed sixteen goldfish. Huffed spray paint. “Kissed” Madonna. They’d all be equally predictable, all equally contrived, and hence, none newsworthy. I know, I know, no one’s making me read it, except that when this AW behavior gets rewarded, it tends to encourage more of the same (and, it can’t be a good thing for journalism that part of the N.Y.T. front page was wasted on this non-story, just as it can’t be a good thing for literature that publishers apparently haven’t learned a thing from Frey et al., but are instead devoting scarce shelf space and PR money to this meritless clown, necessarily to the exclusion of other, better authors whom I, or probably you, or most of us, would prefer to read). Attention (David Hume called it “sympathy”) is a commodity, like any other, and he who makes a claim on my attention or sympathy on a bogus basis is, from a social contract perspective, guilty in at least small degree of a misdemeanor larceny. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2008, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/27 "2008-03-22T05:12:05Z")
I’m a Brit and I’ve never heard of the bloke,his book or even his being stopped from entering the U.S. until I read the O.P. I’ll bet he’s glad of the free publicity. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2008, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086/28 "2008-03-22T22:44:17Z")
[QUOTE=Lust4Life] I’m a Brit and I’ve never heard of the bloke,his book or even his being stopped from entering the U.S. until I read the O.P. I’ll bet he’s glad of the free publicity. [/QUOTE] To the extent that’s ironical, I’ll acknowledge in principle your point that the best cure for attention whoring is to deny it attention, and give you a tip o’ the hat touche for the fact that my thread doesn’t exactly follow that precept. But I’m not feeling too bad, as anything that’s made the front page of the N.Y.T. is already about as exposed as it could be (and, I doubt I’ve earned this fool any incremental book sales among the SDMB readership). I felt fairly safe indulging in a bit of quasi-RO at the willingness to be duped on the part of the MSM (whose attention and publicity-bestowing matters more, I sadly admit, than my own postings here). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/controversial-brit-memoirist-denied-entry-for-past-crimes/442086.md?page=1)