That mean one, Mr. Grinch, came early and stayed late this year. He arrived before Christmas, then lingered like a bad smell days afterward.
The killjoy of seasonal cheer has various guises, but his most common cover for interfering in everyone’s harmless pleasures is concern over climate change or animal welfare. He doesn’t deny that he’s green, he just pretends his ugly tinge has nothing to do with envy of people having a good time and is all about altruism toward his fellow creatures, including, but certainly not especially, his fellow men.
Two days before Christmas, the Washington Post scolded families for gathering around a log fire. It tut-tutted at those of us who regard a blaze of wood in the grate as a necessary ingredient of good cheer when the outer cold and darkness are crowding in on late December afternoons.
“Many fireplace lovers assume burning wood for warmth is climate-friendly,” the Post intoned, unaware that most of us don’t pause for a moment over such twaddle, then added, “but wood emits 2.5 times as much CO₂ than natural gas and 30 percent more than coal when burned for heat, according to some scientists.” That “according to some scientists” is doing a lot of work.
The Post is clearly unaware that the climate hoax has collapsed because decades of hard data and grift since the scare was first sprung upon us are finally debunking alarmist soothsaying of doom. The facts make a nonsense of the theoretical models, the icecap is still on top of the world, the great extinction isn’t happening, etc., etc. But the Post proves C.S. Lewis right in his observations that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
In Britain, one of few countries where green leftism is even loopier and more pernicious than ours in America, the do-gooder government, which is breaking records for unpopularity, intends to ban trail hunting, a sport in which riders and hounds chase the scent of fox, not an actual fox, over fields, streams, and woodland in an approximation of the traditional rural pursuit that has delighted country dwellers for centuries.
Trail hunters were in a defiant mood as they set off on their annual Boxing Day hunt and vowed to fight to keep their sport. So they should. There’s no good reason they should be stopped from enjoying themselves just as their forefathers did in a pastime that bonds them to the soil of the country in which they live.
Activists who want trail hunting banned say actual foxes are sometimes killed because the hounds get a whiff of the real thing. They claim this is cruel, even though a fox’s death is quick, and it is, anyway, legal to shoot foxes as pests. The death of an animal is not what the antis mind; what the Grinch can’t stand is that hunters, with their noise, noise, noise, noise — their tra-la-la trumpeting and tally-hos — enjoy themselves.
People constantly harassing us to stop doing what we’re doing, to wrench society toward the bleak leftist future they favor, underline the arrogant assertion of New York’s new mayor that not only is there “no problem too large for government to solve” but also there is “no concern too small for it to care about.”