Immigration policy should discriminate
Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as “clever.” I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand “clever” means smart. For Americans, cleverness implies a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be “clever.” Let’s move on to “culture” – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon, that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined as “what a people admire and what they deplore.
