March of Folly

Barbara Tuchman was a historian who worked very hard at writing history so that the average person could understand it. She did not use a lot of scholarly sources nor did she document her works. Her most famous work was The Guns of August, but the book that I remember best was called The March of Folly. Her observation was that there are moments in history when leaders confront a major situation and despite wise and consistent intelligent counsel the leaders do exactly the wrong thing. She picked the Trojan Horse as her first example. There was massive opposition to bringing the horse inside, but the leaders brought it in. The decision resulted in defeat.

She has other examples such as King George and the American colonies. King George got all kinds of request from the colonies to be more responsive to them. He had lots of advisers in England who spoke against the King's policies of taxation. King George's arrogance and belief in his own power as King continued the polices in a march of folly into the American revolution. He lost.

Barbara's last example was the American policy in Vietnam. She suggested that there were no lessons won from the French. There no education in the Pentagon from the leaders on the ground. There was no listening to the voice of the people who grew more and more opposed to the war. And We lost the war. None of the horrible domino consequences seemed to have happened.

Barbara is dead now, but certainly if the march of folly was going forward in Vietnam the march is continuing in our country even more. We have had the movie the Inconvenient Truth, the movie Food, Inc. the movie, Waiting for Superman, and the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exposing for us the major fault lines in our society. The response has been to pretend like the problems are not there or just to continue on as if there is nothing wrong.

The March of Folly is to continue to march forward in the same direction that you have been marching even when you have been clearly warned that there is danger ahead. We seem to be marching pretty steadily forward. The only good news may be tht England still exists as a pleasant place and the U.S. may be a pleasant place to be a former power.