The View From 1776

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Visit Burt Prelutsky’s delightful website for a common-sense take on the Left Coast.  The following is his reflection on the debate about Darwin.

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For the longest time, I thought that the main difference between those on the Left and those on the Right was that whereas conservatives believed that liberals were wrong on the issues, liberals were convinced that conservatives were just plain evil.

I still believe that to be the case, but I’ve also become aware that, in addition, leftists regard those on the other side as stupid.  My basis for that is that they like nothing better than to stereotype us all as creationists while they wrap themselves up all snuggly and warm in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Just to get all my cards on the table, I am not religious.  I don’t take either Testament as gospel.  But that doesn’t mean I think that those who do are ignorant or even a lower form of animal life.  By and large, I think that religious people – yes, even born-again Christians and creationists – are often better people than those who aren’t.  By better, I mean more kindly, more decent, better friends, better neighbors, better parents.

So many people who know even less about science than I do, and who have never bothered reading any of Darwin’s works, base their defense of his theory on Stanley Kramer’s truly awful movie about the Scopes trial, “Inherit the Wind.”

Representing enlightenment, as Clarance Darrow, Kramer cast Hollywood’s avuncular Spencer Tracy.  As William Jennings Bryan, he mis-cast Fredric March, and then had him sweat and spray spittle for two solid hours.  It was, by the way, the only time that the two fine actors, who had each starred in a version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” worked together.  With the notoriously heavy-handed Kramer at the helm, Tracy naturally came off like Jekyll, while March came off as Hyde.

It’s true that Bryan was a loquacious fellow who’d never use one word when there were thirty or forty lying around just going to waste.  Darrow, however, was the criminal defense attorney who, for an enormous fee, used his verbal skills to make certain that the vile Leopold and Loeb didn’t die for the cold-blooded murder of young Bobby Franks. 

Between those two, I’d take my chances with Bryan.  Better a bore than a man with innocent blood on his hands.

The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t make much difference if Darwin was right or wrong.  Really, how would it affect your life if his beliefs could be proven one way or the other?  Unless you’re one of the very small number of academics involved in evolutionary biology, it wouldn’t make a scintilla of difference in your daily life.  Even Darwin couldn’t explain how everything began in the first place; his theories only dealt with the manner in which things evolved from some unexplainable point of origin.  So if creationists choose to believe that God set everything in motion, and that belief makes them happy, there’s nothing in Darwin to refute their theory!

The truth, so far as I can see, is that liberals only love Darwin because they hate those who don’t swallow him whole.  It makes them feel smart, as if they were somehow scientists themselves, logical and intellectually superior, even if they can’t tell the difference between a Bunsen burner and a tiki torch.

So while the snobs of the Left lump all conservatives in with those they regard as ignorant, simple-minded, anonymous oafs, conservatives aim their barbs at the leaders of the opposition – Ivy League-educated twerps like Kerry and Kennedy, Pelosi and Dean, Reid and Leahy, Clinton and Clinton, Boxer and Feinstein, Biden and Byrd.  I’d say it sounds like half a dozen shyster law firms, but, then, that would be unfair to shyster law
firms.

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