Could the U.S. benefit from tourism dollars? Yes. But we won't.

We won't go out of our way to welcome foreign visitors. Why should we? We're doing them a huge favor just to let them set foot on our precious soil. If they don't like landing in the U.S. and being treated as though they've just arrived at Leavenworth to begin serving a sentence for mass murder, well, tough luck. They can just turn around and spend their vacation money somewhere else.

If they don't speak American English, the language of God, they must be retarded because, as we hear constantly, "everyone speaks English." Most police officers will tell you that anyone can understand English if you scream it at them loudly enough, and maybe box them around a little also.

To be worthy of entering the United States, anyone from anywhere on earth should be willing to wait however long it takes to get a visa, even if his or her own country is one that just stamps an American's passport and doesn't bother with a paper visa. Sure, our way weeds out working people who have only four weeks of paid vacation and need to know in advance when they'll be taking it. (Yeah, four weeks. That's the norm in most of the economically advanced nations. Somehow they've found ways to advance economically without squeezing the last drop of blood from their workers!)

Of course, we'd never dream of putting maps with instructions in numerous languages on our subways and in our airports. That would just be helping the terrorists find the shortest route to their targets.

Pity.

I guess we'll just have to live with it. Let those tourism dollars fall into the laps of other countries, who perhaps don't need them nearly as much as we do. That's the price of being oh-so-special. We're a great nation, and we have to pay the cost of acting like a great nation.

Or are we just acting stupid? And petty? And self-defeating?

Keep tuned. I'll have more to say about this soon.