It’s now clear we face a choice between two Donald Trumps for the rest of the campaign: the off-the-cuff loudmouth who occasionally strings enough words together to convey something meaningfully demented; or the teleprompter-tamed zombie who sounds like a party-piece impersonation of Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone.
It was the latter incarnation that presented Trump’s new immigration policy of “extreme vetting”. You can never tell if Teleprompter Trump believes what he’s saying – he has the demeanour of a drugged-up show-trial defendant – but his plan for an immigrant screening test for “those who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles” would be but the latest addition to America’s inglorious history of ideological exclusion. Efforts to deny non-right-thinking foreigners access to American soil goes as far back as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but the banning of immigrants harbouring a specific ideology dates to the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, which for good measure also excluded people with epilepsy.
As a preventive measure, the act wasn’t terribly effective. History doesn’t record how many epilepsy sufferers slipped through the net, but between 1903 and 1914 only 15 anarchists were denied entry to the US. The 1918 Immigration Act broadened the definition of anarchism with the hope of deporting more foreign troublemakers, but by then the idea of blaming anarchists for everything that was wrong with America was beginning to seem a little old hat.
Communism was the fashionable ideology of exclusion by the time the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was introduced to protect the American way of life from evil forces such as Doris Lessing, who was refused a visa after she joined the Communist party. McCarran-Walter, cited in a Trump press release footnote as a cold war precedent for exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, also prevented homosexuals from entering the US, a restriction that wasn’t officially scrapped until 1990.
Times have certainly changed – Trump specifically mentioned radical Islam’s “oppression of gays” to illustrate the need for extreme vetting – but if tolerance of alternative lifestyles is part of his proposed entrance exam, one wonders how many of his own supporters would pass the test.
Fortune favours the inert
Over many years certain benefits have accrued to me simply by virtue of my doing nothing. I am, for example, financially better off today because I was once too lazy to act on the sound advice of a mortgage adviser. I could hardly characterise this approach to life as a philosophy, but I’m never more pleased than on those occasions when fortune chooses to reward my sloth.
This week I find reason to congratulate myself for a concerted failure to engage in, or even investigate, the concept of mindfulness. According to a new study from the universities of Edinburgh and Gothenburg, the practice is no more calming or wellbeing-inducing than lying around watching old TV documentaries. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered such a resounding justification of my lifestyle.
The study divided 139 students into two groups. Half took an online mindfulness course, and half watched re-runs of the BBC series Ancient Worlds. There were no significant differences between the two sets in sleeping, eating habits, smoking reduction or biochemical stress response.
The study leaders cautioned against reading too much into the findings, not least because 28 of the participants – including a quarter of the mindfulness group – quit before the test was concluded. In terms of a guiding philosophical principle, I think those 28 might be on to something.
We just can’t hack it
Also in this vein is the suggestion from US researchers at Carnegie Mellon university’s CyLab that we change our internet passwords too often. Apparently when people are obliged to modify passwords regularly, they tend not to put a lot of effort into the result. If you have got a strong password, it might be better to change it once every couple of years, as opposed to every few months. While I welcome this advice, I’m still holding out for never.
