The death of MF Doom: Just let people live where they want

The ongoing demonization of immigrants around the world drives me crazy, and I am constantly disappointed by political parties that profess to be on the side of justice and compassion, but still use immigration as an obvious scapegoat to appease all the moronic bigots in society.

I am ridiculously pro-immigration, the people who move into a new community bring vibrancy and life to the places they join. The school my kids go to is full of families from dozens of different nations, and I adore their exposure to all new traditions and histories and cultures and ways of thinking about the world.

But if I had to choose one small example of how fucked up the entire global immigration system is, it's in the sad death of MF Doom.

Doom was a terrific artist, his beats were epic and his wordplay was sublime. There was depth to his music, an intelligence and humanity lurking beneath that stark metal mask. His work with Czarface was legit my single favourite album of the past decade. 

And you had this guy who did wonderful music, and his words were poetry, and he died far away from home, kicked out of America by the dullest of bureaucracies.

What kind of a society is that, when you can just dispose of artistic genius like it is nothing? Doom's history of nationhood was complicated, but every life is complicated, all pounded into submission by the brute force of the system, and there was no recourse for Doom to get back to his family, his friends, the world he grew up in. 

When societies treat their greatest artists like this, those societies are worth nothing. And all this happened to Doom before the current shitshow that is the ICE nightmare gripping the US, and there will inevitably be more great minds and great people currently being forced to leave the place they love, because John Q Fucknuckle doesn't like how many brown people are working in his fast food joints.

Borders are just lines on paper, that fuckwits use to justify their own feelings of superiority and cruelty. Because if you can't see the value of keeping poets like MF Doom in your nation, you are no nation of worth at all.