I’m finally a legal inhabitant of America – or at least, as legal as I’m likely to be for the next couple of years. Being now married to an American, I’m going through the process of applying for status as a permanent resident, rather than the visiting worker which I arrived as. The current waiting list for an interview to determine whether I’m eligible is 28 months – and we can’t really blame 9/11 for much of that, it’s just the wheels of American bureaucracy, grinding exceeding slow.

Generously, while your application is being processed, they allow you to work, and also to leave the country – and, perhaps more importantly, come back into it as well. Mind you, you still have to leap through a bunch of hoops in order to work at Starbucks and go to Cancun, though the actual process involves a lot less leaping, than sitting around in waiting rooms with a lot of Mexicans. Bring a book – you rapidly discover that a 10 am appointment, doesn’t actually mean you’re going to get seen at 10 am. It really just means you start waiting at 10 am. Bring a packed lunch, too.

It does give you plenty of time to contemplate the alternatives; it’s clear why so many people choose to bypass all the tedious form-filling, and simply come in, live and work illegally. It helps that the government shows little or no interest in prosecuting the employers, who are delighted to pay below American minimum wage to people, who are delighted to earn less than American minimum wage, since it’s still a lot more than they would get at home. Everybody wins.

Or so the liberal commentators would have you believe – the ones who refer to “undocumented” rather than “illegal” immigrants. Speaking as a documented, legal immigrant, I’m not quite so convinced; given they’ve shown such a flagrant disregard for American laws in coming here, why should we think they’re otherwise going to be law-abiding citizens once they get here? For example, they can’t get driving licences – and rightly so, since if we make it easy for the illegals, what’s the point of having a legal process, which makes it most unlikely they’ll bother with car insurance. If one of them hits you, all you’ll see is likely a tattered pair of Nikes making off at top speed on foot.

It’s a point of particular interest, given the unemployment figures here are at a long-time high. Sure, a lot of the jobs taken by illegal immigrants are not those you or I would want to do, but how can anyone compete with desperate people, from a nation barely beyond a Third World level of development? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: illegal immigrants do the work cheap, thereby ensuring that legal residents (also much more likely to have to pay tax and other deductions) simply can’t afford to take the jobs. And all the while, the government wrings its hands, unwilling to interfere with pure capitalism in action.

Say what you like, at least illegal immigration was never a problem in the Soviet Union…

I’ve been carefully biting my tongue for the past month, careful not to impose my opinion of the war on you, but now that things have calmed down, think I can poke my head over the parapet. There are a few things worth pointing out at this stage.

Just because we won, doesn’t make it right. [This is, of course, using “we” in its broadest sense, as a Brit living in America. It never was my war to begin with] Going by the crowing of “told you so” from conservative commentators, it seems as if might now equals right. The outcome was never really in doubt, but part of me was hoping it would be tough enough to dissuade America from thinking it could ride rough-shod over every regime it dislikes. Or at least long enough for trashcity.com to flog all the yellow ribbons on which we stocked up.

It’s always nice to see a bully get punked – the only problem is, here we had two of them going toe-to-toe. Sure, the world is a better place without Saddam…but did the end justify the means? On the plus side, America’s ability to ignore the UN and take unilateral action should hopefully quiet the conspiracists who reckon the United Nations is being queued up to become a one-world government.

Where are those pesky weapons of mass destruction? This was the main justification for going – that Saddam posed a threat to his neighbours by having these evil devices – but as yet, nothing has been found. Surely our leaders couldn’t have been (gasp!) lying to us, could they? Don’t be stupid. Of course they could. And going by the way the contracts to rebuild Iraq are being handed out, the WMD are looking more and more like an excuse. This season of 24 features a war created for economic purposes. Life imitating art, or what?

Oh, but now Hussein was in bed with Al-Qaeda. So says a document conveniently found in the rubble of Iraq’s intelligence service. This was found by The Sunday Telegraph, part of a group often rumoured to have intelligence links. Also, odd how the US soldiers guarding the place – who presumably would have searched such an important site – managed to miss the document. Pardon my paranoia, but this could hardly smell more of a plant if it tried.

Where’s Saddam? And what now? Looks like we’ve had as much success finding him, as we have with Osama Bin-Laden. One suspects he’ll be quietly forgotten about, unless he does something dumb like check into the Ritz under his own name. He’s served his purpose. The acid test of this New New World Order will be how America deals with North Korea which, like Iraq, is a country ruled by a brutal dictator who supposedly has weapons of mass destruction. But – and this may be important – he is not sitting on 14 billion barrels of oil.

Interesting times, indeed…

Jack Valenti is at it again. He reckons digital piracy is the biggest single threat faced by the film industry. The man never ceases to amaze me – if he’s not lobbying for an increase in copyright duration that is both entirely unjustifiable and unnecessary (except to the movie studios’ bottom lines), he’s railing against the terrors of the Internet. Has the man no clue at all? Let’s look at some facts here, shall we? Last year, in North America alone, the box-office take was a record $9.5 billion dollars. That was more than ten percent up on 2001, and marked the biggest increase since 1957. Hardly symptomatic of an industry at death’s door.

Valenti also invoked comparisons with the music industry, which are extremely wild of the mark. If you download a song off the Internet and listen to it on your computer, it’ll sound just the same as if you bought the CD – this is the major appeal. Does anyone really think that seeing, say, The Matrix Reloaded at the cinema will be identical to watching a grainy copy on your computer screen? Hardly. Figures show that half the cinema audience are between 12-29 – exactly the same people most likely to have broadband access and be engaging in all this supposed piracy.

Okay, but what about the impact on sales to the home market, which make up a sizable chunk of returns these days? True, except there are still a whole plethora of differences. In our house, we have three TVs and four computers – the biggest TV is roughly ten times the area of the biggest computer screen, and has a much better sound-system. Until computer downloads come with THX sound, commentaries, featurettes and so forth, there is simply no competition.

I will happily admit to having watched downloaded movies. I can also say, with a perfectly clear conscience, that not one less cinema ticket or DVD has been bought as a result. We regularly acquire films ahead of their Hollywood release too – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for one – and if anything, that simply made us more eager to go and see it at the cinema. We’ll certainly still be in line for Shaolin Soccer whenever it comes out, though no doubt Miramax will be raping it with a bad dub and funky rap soundtrack.

The Internet poses no more of a threat than television, or even borrowing someone else’s copy of a film – which Valenti would probably also like to ban, since it reduces the return. Taken to its logical conclusion, he would like to insist that we pay every time we watch a DVD, and the amount would be determined by how many people are in the room. Dammit, every single person should have to buy their own personal copy!

Ludicrous? Absolutely. But Valenti needs to realise that technological locks will not be the answer he hopes, since there are a lot of people out there who regard encryption as a personal challenge. The music industry has shown just how well lawsuits work i.e. not at all (I suspect lawyers’ fees are equally responsible for the drop in profits as Napster and its offspring!), and if the film industry wants to avoid going the same way, it should embrace technology.

Video could have meant the death-knell of cinema – instead, it proved to be its resurrection, providing a whole new stream of funding. If Valenti wants to look at the real biggest threat, he should look at the cost of making movies, which jumped by almost a quarter last year, to just shy of $59 million. That kind of inflation, in a relatively fixed market, simply cannot be sustained. Paying Adam Sandler $25 million per movie is far more dangerous than anything I could do with a cable modem.

And tonight on pay-per-view, $14.95 can get you The Spirit of Diana – a seance in which a “trans-channeler” will attempt to contact the dead princess and find out if she was really pregnant, whether she still loved Charles, that kind of thing. While Diana was the subject of our very first editorial, back in 1997, we suspect that the end-product, while being undeniably tacky, will likely fail to plumb the depths far enough to merit shelling out. But it is yet another example of the untrammelled rise of reality TV.

As long-time fans of Jerry Springer (and, if the truth be told, occasional viewers of Judge Judy), it perhaps doesn’t seem right for us to rip into shows which are their cousins. But to me, there is a large gulf between watching Klansmen use their dying breaths to curse a relation who had the temerity to go out with (gasp!) a black man, and American Idol. This really shouldn’t need any further clarification.

We watch television for much the same reason we go to the movies, to escape from normal life, and this includes normal people. If we wanted to listen to people sing (with an alarming tendency to slide up and down the scale – hey, people, pick a note and stick with it), we’d head out to the nearest karaoke bar. And there, as the evening wore on, we could also witness Joe Millionaire and The Batchelorette, as people desperately try to impress those of the opposite sex.

It is, obviously, a cheap alternative to quality – you know, anything involving scripts and actors. Put a few people through a microscopic version of hell, be it living in the Amazon jungle or suffering the sarcastic remarks of the judges, with a tempting (usually financial) prize at the end and film their reactions. Simple, inexpensive and, it seems, a better chance of success than a regular drama.

It is especially galling when a great show like 24, which is genuinely pushing the boundaries, is pre-empted in the schedules for three weeks – and just when a nuclear bomb has been set off, too – to make way for some poor excuse for pseudo-entertainment, featuring people whom you would actively avoid if you worked in the same office. However, no matter how Chris and I may look at each and roll our eyes, the success of these shows suggests (in addition to proving that we must be from a different species) that we’re going to see more of them in future.

It’s tempting to supply a conspiratorial theory here, and quote the Roman author Juvenal: “The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things – bread and circuses!” Here we are, teetering on the edge of a war which will likely see another 100,000 Iraqi soldiers getting bulldozed into trenches, and people seem more concerned with the climax of American Idol. Coincidence? I think not. Perhaps that’s what Al-Qaeda needs – anyone up for Life with Osama? After all, it can hardly be any worse than The Anna Nicole Smith Show or The Osbournes, can it?

Not sure whether the space-shuttle disaster will quite make it into the pantheon of “where were you when…” moments. But for the record, I was wheezing my lungs out on the treadmill when Chris told me to turn on the news (hey, going outside and doing strenuous exercise here is asking for trouble – it hit 30C on Friday, and that was still January…).

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, it was something of a shock, though my first thought, knowing the first Israeli astronaut was on board, was not of mechanical failure. I would just like to claim copyright on the idea of it really being a terrorist attack, which gets hushed up so that someone like Steven Seagal can hunt down those responsible.

It may seem cruel to say this, but it probably does good every now and then to remind people of what a dangerous thing space travel actually is. The shuttle was travelling at over Mach 18, 200,000 feet up – about twenty times faster and five times higher than a commercial airliner – yet if it had landed safely, would doubtless have been relegated to 30 seconds at the end of the evening news.

There is nothing new or exciting about the shuttle or its missions – the International Space Station is nice, but to the average member of the public, it’s indistinguishable from the Skylab of the 1970’s, so is hardly anything to get worked up about. Or, indeed, open the wallets for, and as a result, NASA’s budget has been static or cut in recent years. 2002 saw it at $14.5 billion, which sounds like a lot until you realise it’s less than one-twentieth of what was spent on defence by America the same year.

This is why NASA is still using the shuttle – a vehicle which made its inaugural flight in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency – and why no replacement is even off the drawing board, leaving the shuttle with another twenty years in service. By the end of that, it’ll be 40 years old; can you imagine how loud the military would be screaming if their chief aircraft were built in the 1960’s? And the likely long interruption to shuttle flights (2 1/2 years after the Challenger disaster) will only make things worse.

What is needed is some project that will capture the hearts and minds of people – not just in America, but around the world, and once again make spaceflight a non-trivial event. Something which can combine technology and resources from many countries, and unite people, so that they can look up at the sky with hope rather than in fear. I can think of no more fitting memorial for the seven lost astronauts than that.