Pecking Order of Crappiness

With all this traveling that I have not been doing, I've had ample time to consider the whole business of visa applications and immigration procedures.

About a year ago, I'd had a conversation at work with a local colleague who'd been turned away from Brazil because she didn't have the requisite tourist visa. As it turned out, however, Malaysians don't need a visa to visit Brazil. "Can you imagine? We need a visa but Malaysians don't," my colleague had huffed before abruptly remembering that I was not part of 'we' and could go to Brazil any time I damn-well pleased.

In any case, I hadn't taken offence (partially because I'd been rather surprised myself) because my colleague had merely articulated what everyone thinks but doesn't dare say: countries that are crappier than yours shouldn't require you to have a visa to visit them.

Look, I'm sorry. Even in this era of airborne terrorism, economic freeloading and all that shit, there comes a time when you're being grilled about the purpose of your visit by an immigration officer while a grubby customs officer paws through your things with suspicion and avarice. And after you're lectured for the fifth time about not overstaying, you want to throw your hands out around you, as though to embrace your surroundings - the airport made of wood, the single runway the entire sorry nation calls 'international' and the zinc roofing overhead. And you want to yell, "Look at this shit. Seriously? Seriously?!"

Conversely, every visit I've made to the US has been one fraught with tension and cold-eyed officers scrutinising the space between the whorls of my fingerprints. And I'd been fine with that, because I knew that the country had more to offer me than I had to offer it. I had every incentive to overstay, and they had every incentive to believe that I would, if only to escape a country that doesn't know how to buy functioning submarines. If they aren't going to welcome me with Shake Stack and a Peanut Butter Concrete Shake, so be it, because I know my place.

And here's the theory I'd like to advance for the field of travel, based on the principle of knowing your place on what idiot PR people have begun calling 'the global stage'. There should be what I will call the Pecking Order of Crappiness (POC). Naturally, countries will be ranked according to how crappy they are. If you come from a country ranking above your destination country's, you don't need a visa to visit, barring certain political exceptions like if both countries are at war or if some sort of embargo is ongoing. Of course, if special visa waiver arrangements have been made between one country and another that's crappier than it, it still stands, regardless. The whole idea is to make traveling less difficult, not more.

And naturally, the ranking itself comes with its own set of complications - such as the criteria being used. There should be a weighted basket of factors, of course - the Human Development Index, your ranking on The Economist's Quality of Life list, GDP per capita, etc. Someone with an overly large brain will figure out the details.

Some things will count against you on the Pecking Order of Crappiness. Such as what proportion of your nation's toilets do not have doors - I'm looking at you, Certain Oversized Country With Very Loud People.

I allow that it won't be perfect, but it will roughly work. Like with how some women are ugly and others are hot, how crappy a country is can be objective on many counts. Maybe between Denmark and Finland, it'll be a tough call. Between America and Zimbabwe, however, who the hell are you kidding? That's like Heidi Klum versus Roseanne Barr. There might be some diplomatic fallout, but that can be fixed - by putting doors on your toilets, for example.

So maybe the rankings can be refined a little bit, with a banding system. So you can group together those blue-eyed, blond Scandinavian countries who always seem delirious with happiness on global indices, what with their free schooling, progressive legal system and humane treatment of madmen who go on shooting sprees. Within a band, everyone can travel to everyone else's country without this visa nonsense, and then collectively look down on the band below theirs. (That's what you're already doing at work every appraisal season so don't you dare look appalled.)

The rankings will be fluid, too. It will be influenced - among other things - by the actions of individual civilians. So, if too many of your citizens have been trying to board planes with explosives in their shoes, your country drops a notch. And the government can distribute bulletins with the name and photograph of the asshole who is the reason you, an innocent traveler, has to trek to a consulate to get a picture taken of yourself that has to be exactly 3.42 inches by 3.42 inches, with an off-white background and exactly 2.6 mm of neck showing.

I think that failed plane bombers will find that if that if they can't kill themselves in the air, a lot of people on the ground and in embassy waiting rooms will be willing to do it for them.

The free market could also work here, by involving something like TripAdvisor. Basically, the aggregated data from a site that collects travellers' feedback could be used as a weighted factor on the Pecking Order of Crappiness. The more people like a certain country, the higher bargaining power the country has in terms of who can enter without a visa. But if your beaches are shit and ragged children try to sell you wooden figurines or their little sister in every alley, you fall in the rankings. In a way, it also automatically regulates demand, so that the most popular destinations are most able to control overcrowding, while more people will be free to go to lower-ranked countries and buy their wooden figurines and little sisters.

In any case, I kind of hope this never happens. It'll be very hard to take the shirt-rending and national soul-searching sparked off by not being number one at something for the first time in forever.