A Polish View of America

I ran across this interesting bit in the Guardian newspaper. I've bolded the bits which appear to be the cause of his personal animus towards the US:

Krystian Zimerman, the great Polish concert pianist, is usually a man of few words. He doesn't, as a rule, talk to the audience during performances. He says little or nothing in the press between his all-too-rare concert tours - not even about his habit of travelling everywhere with his own Steinway grand piano. He rarely grants them the pleasure of an encore.

So he triggered more than the usual rumble of discomfort when he raised his voice in the closing stages of a recital at Los Angeles' Disney Hall on Sunday night and announced he would no longer perform in the United States in protest against Washington's military policies.

"Get your hands off my country," Zimerman told the stunned crowd in a denunciation of US plans to install a missile defence shield on Polish soil. Some people cheered, others yelled at him to shut up and keep playing. A few dozen walked out, some of them shouting obscenities.

...

At least some of his opprobrium appears to be personal. Shortly after 9/11, his piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York's JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument.

For several years he chose to travel with just the mechanical insides of his own piano and install them - he is a master piano repairer, as well as player - inside a Steinway shell he borrowed from the company in New York. In 2006 he tried to travel with his own piano again, only to have it held up in customs for five days and disrupt his performance schedule.

Who can blame him? The idiocy of the US government is beyond belief. A friend of mine tells me that one of the teachers at his school was driving down to the US when the border agents stopped her, held her car for several days, then "returned" it with things smashed up and parts missing. Apparantly they suspected her of drug running. Of course she wasn't. But the US government doesn't feel it needs to apologize or compensate you when their agents go beserk in this excessive zeal for their "job".