David McElroy

We live in a culture that worships ideas, but I’m frequently left stewing in my ideas and getting nothing done. If knowledge is power — and if ideas are supremely important — why do we have so many educated people with brilliant ideas who achieve little or nothing? For me, that’s been a painful question at times.

I grew up with a supreme confidence in ideas — and a supreme confidence in my own ideas. Actual execution was an afterthought for me. When you’re young and nobody expects that much out of you, just a halfway decent execution of your ideas is almost always enough to impress people — and doing that made me happy.

As I got older, though, a funny thing happened. In the adult world, execution matters more than ideas. In so many of the things I did as a child and as a teen-ager, the good idea was enough to carry the day. Teachers and other adults were impressed. “He’s going to do great things one day,” they’d say.

Looking back, I see that the times when I accomplished anything with my ideas, it was always when I had a partner who was working closely with me. The pattern was always the same. The ideas and inspiration were mine. The practical incentive to turn the ideas into reality — to actually finish what I started — was in the more practical partner working with me. At the time, I didn’t know why I needed that. I understand now.

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Last week, we saw what happened when Rick Perry tried to think on his feet during one of the debates. It was 53 seconds of embarrassing video that put a serious crimp into his campaign. This week, it’s Herman Cain shooting himself in the foot. In an embarrassing five-minute segment of an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Cain was asked a very simple question about Libya and whether he supported or opposed Barack Obama’s policy on Libya. (See video below.) I think anybody reading this could easily have explained a coherent position on the subject. Cain could not — and spent five minutes trying to avoid saying, “I have no idea what you’re really talking about.”

I can’t figure out why anyone would have supported Cain anyway, but if you can watch his complete ignorance here and still support him, why?

UPDATE: A friend just pointed me to a similarly bizarre Cain performance when he was asked about his views on abortion.

It sounds like something from a dystopian science fiction novel, but it’s real. The Oxford City Council in England has decided that all of the city’s 600 taxies are to have video and audio recording equipment — to record all conversations of occupants. It’s for “public safety,” of course.

According to the politicians who passed the law, all conversations are to be recorded, but no conversations will be listened to unless it’s a “police matter.” And we know that such information in the hands of police is never abused, so we don’t have to worry.

This is a great idea, but it needs to be expanded greatly. For instance, to protect against the risk of workplace crime — or even sexual harassment — they need to insist that all businesses record all employee conversations. And homes are rife with domestic violence, so every home should be required to have multiple cameras in every room. And given the fact that charges of rape so frequently come down to disputes over what happened, it definitely should be mandated that cameras record all sexual activity. (But your privacy is assured, because no one will look at the video — stored by the police, of course — unless there’s been a crime committed.) And since politicians frequently turn corrupt and take bribes, the City Council members need to be recorded 24/7 in all of their private conversations.

Surely the council members wouldn’t object to placing themselves under the same kind of surveillance they demand of the general public, because politicians never pass laws that don’t affect them as they do the public, do they?