In the book “My Family and Other Animals” by the famed naturalist Gerald Durrell, he relates an episode of his childhood (mid to late 1930s) when his family lived on the Greek island of Corfu for a few years. During this time, his two older brothers (Larry and Leslie) often duked it out when it came to ideas.
Larry fancied himself an intellectual and was an as-yet unpublished author. Leslie, by contrast, was a sportsman known for his hunting prowess. Neither brother understood the other’s talent. As a result, sparks often flew between the siblings.
One day after successfully killing a wild boar, Leslie described how the situation wasn’t dangerous “unless they break cover right at your feet; then it’s a bit of a job, because if you miss they’re on you.”
His brother Larry mocked the danger. “I don’t see why it should be dangerous even then. … If they charge you, and you miss, why not just jump over them?”
Leslie scorned his brother’s preposterous idea and explains the reality of boar hunting, after which Larry snorted in dismissal: “The trouble with you hunting blokes is lack of imagination. I supply magnificent ideas – all you have to do is to try them out. But no, you condemn them out of hand.”
“Well, you come on the next trip and demonstrate how to do it,” suggested Leslie.
“I don’t profess to being a hairy-chested man of action,” said Larry austerely. “My place is in the realm of ideas – the brainwork, as it were. I put my brain at your disposal for the formation of schemes and stratagems, and then you, the muscular ones, carry them out.”
This backstory about the Durrell brothers – one a lofty intellectual, the other a grounded realist – came to mind recently when I read a piece called “The left careens down the road toward totalitarianism” highlighting a radio program with talk-show host and author Mark Levin.
“The Democrat Party is intent on destroying our nation from the inside out,” Levin said. “And while the leftists might not come bearing physical weapons, they do have a more insidious kind of attack:
“It’s the battle of ideas,” he continued. “People are persuaded by socialism and Marxism. Why? Because they never produce what they say they’re going to produce. They produce horror, they produce death, they produce impoverishment. But the promises are endless.”
Kinda like the idea of jumping over a charging boar, right? What could possibly go wrong? Why can’t those “hairy-chested men of action” make the left’s brilliant concepts work?
The left is just of Great Ideas. It’s when those ideas are implemented the trouble arises, because Great Ideas seldom take into account the Real World.
Let’s look at some Great Ideas on how to become a cleaner, greener world, shall we?
These ideas are so terrific because they come from what my husband calls “chalkboard experts” – highly educated people with no real-world experience but who devise “fail-safe” theoretical scenarios, even for things with which they have absolutely no firsthand experience. You know the kind I mean: “But I’ve got it all figured out! See, I’ve written it all out on the chalkboard! Of it will work!”
It’s like the Great Idea of jumping over a charging boar, isn’t it? Except these Great Ideas are being implemented (often forcibly) on a worldwide scale, wasting billions of dollars, destroying the environment, killing wildlife … and all because the left can’t (or won’t) understand why their Great Ideas won’t work.
But the left fancies itself, collectively, as great intellectuals, putting forth Great Ideas to a grateful world. They get defensive and angry when anyone points out how and why their Great Ideas are bad.
Of course, those who get defensive or angry are just the useful idiots charged with making sure these Great Ideas are enthusiastically embraced at the ground level (you’ll spot a few while reading the comments to this column). The elites implementing these Great Ideas are simply power-mad tyrants whose goal is to control everyone to the nth degree.
And, of course, the elites are never the ones to jump over the charging boar. That’s what they want the rest of us to do.
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
This post originally appeared on WND News Center.