The March of Folly

Our culture is filled with stupid people, both fictional and actual. In fact, we have made a cult of The Stupid. They are cool because they are stupid and happy that they are. They are even sometimes funny. Homer Simpson is funny, for two reasons. One, we don’t have to live with the consequences of his stupidity. Two, we can empathize with many of the stupid things he has done.

Stupid people doing stupid things is the theme of films by the Coen brothers. Their characters amuse us because we don’t have to live with them, even though we know people just like them. They delude themselves that they will live happily ever after, if they obtain a lot of money by a single illegal act. Unfortunately for them, the single illegal act always turns into three or four. A car dealer steals a tan Sierra from his own dealership to pay kidnappers to snatch his own wife so he can extort a big ransom from his rich father-in-law. A hunter takes a suitcase of money from a dead drug dealer and tries to keep it from a professional killer. A fitness instructor tries to raise money for a fanny implant by extorting money from a former CIA analyst, whose physician wife is having lawyers follow him to get evidence for her secret divorce action. All these people believe in "one crime, just this once, and I’ll be okay." They are never okay, and their choices create disasters for themselves and others around them.

If the Coens hold a mirror up to the stupidity in our culture, television advertisements are its echo chamber. To promote its TV-internet services, AT&T repeatedly shows a stupid man running an abnormally long cable through his apartment window across the street to a sidewalk café. All this, so he can play with his lap top computer and drink coffee at the same time. In another repeated advertisement, the same stupid—now tiresome—man attempts to increase the speed of his internet connection by plugging his computer into a jerry-rigged generator, which burns his hair and drains the electricity from the rest of his apartment building. The man is clearly too dumb to understand the advantages of AT&T’s cable service.

Other companies sell their products by showing stupid people using them. Sonic sandwiches are the favorite of mentally challenged customers whose jokes would not amuse a third-grader. GEICO stupidly repeats commercials featuring the most irrelevant characters in all of American advertising: the cavemen who are tired of being called stupid. Of course no one wants to be considered stupid, even consumers. I wish GEICO would tell simply tell us why we should buy its services. (Full disclosure: My wife and I have automobile insurance with GEICO and are happy with them.)

However, stupidity is not limited to our entertainment; it is a large and dangerous part of our political culture. Political leaders are dangerous, because we choose them and have to live with the consequences of their stupidity. Historian Barbara Tuchman, her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Viet Nam (1984) wrote:

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The following American political leaders showed their particular wooden-headedness and thereby revealed the wooden-headedness of American voters.

Bill Clinton got a blow job in the oval office and then lied about it. Kenneth Starr spent millions of dollars investigating it. Henry Hyde, who had fathered an illegitimate child, led the House of Representatives in a moral crusade to oust the sinner occupying the sacred White House. Trent Lott and his conservative supporters spent millions more trying William Jefferson Clinton. We Americans turned the solemn impeachment process into a silly sex comedy. The prosecutors thought it would help convince Senators to convict Clinton with evidence such as a semen-stained dress. Indeed, Americans slavered over every lurid detail of the sex scandal. So much so, that we ignored the reality behind the charges: William Jefferson Clinton had lied under oath.

He was acquitted, but politically damaged. During the impeachment, the Republican leadership in Congress refused to approve a finding by Clinton’s national security team. The finding revealed the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, but the Republicans claimed that Clinton was trying to distract the country away from the blow-job.. We were stupid because we believed the Republicans. The Republicans were stupid, because their obsession with the blow-job allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and plan the 9/11 attack. In sum, Americans are stupid about sex and politics.

In 2000, the Supreme Court—once the repository of wisdom of law, right and wrong—stupidly ruled that the United States of America would suffer harm if the recount of votes continued in Florida. This meant that George Walker Bush became President as the result of an incomplete count of votes. Immediately after he was inaugurated, the Republican-controlled Congress passed an enormous tax cut which reduced federal revenues and caused the depletion of a surplus that had accumulated during the previous administration.

In 2004, after learning that the Bush administration had lied about weapons of mass destruction, American voters re-elected the man responsible for the war and the increasing federal debt. They stupidly believed the lie that John Kerry had not deserved the Silver Star and Purple Heart awarded by President Richard M. Nixon, another American who stupidly believed that whatever he did as President was legal.

Voters loved President Bush. They didn’t care that he had graduated from Yale and Harvard, and was a member of the most exclusive college fraternity in America. He wore cowboy boots and drove a pickup around his ranch. He was a guy they could have a beer with. He talked regular, and they loved him for his inability to pronounce "nuclear." They loved his swagger on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Americans also believed that Saddam Hussein had helped Al Qaeda attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. They ignored Hussein’s highly publicized whiskey swilling, cigar smoking and womanizing, and they forgot all the reports that Al Qaeda, which hated Hussein almost as much as it did America, was an organization that forbade its members to drink alcohol, to smoke, and to be sexually promiscuous. Above all else, they brushed aside the information that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian, not Iraqi.

It is unfortunate, but true, that Americans’ greatest stupidity is their readiness to accept guilt by ethnic group. Americans cannot—or refuse to—differentiate individuals from groups. They should have known that ethnic Arabs were not just Islamic, but were also Christian and Jewish. That Islam was not a monolithic religion, but, like Christianity and Judaism, a conglomeration of denominations, practices, and beliefs. Their culture has been riddled with religious wars, just as ours has. But our stupidity, born from a willful ignorance, made us ready to accept the lies and distortions of the Bush administration.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that he knew where they were. He told us that our army would be welcomed as liberators. He ignored advice from his Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, about how many soldiers would be needed to invade and occupy Iraq. He fired Secretary of the Army Thomas White because White refused to reprimand or muzzle the Shinseki. His stupidity brought about over 4,200 American deaths (and still counting), not to mention the waste of over $615 billion (and still counting).

Americans will have to pay for that stupidity. Our national debt, which will have to be paid by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continues to grow. And the expense of the Iraqi war has not yet been accounted for, because it has yet to be made a part of the national budget.

Some of us are paying for it now. Unemployment is rising, and economists, no longer afraid of the word recession, are even facing the possibility of dusting off depression. We can find plenty of stupid people to blame. Some say that OPEC’s stupidity raised oil prices so high that manufacturers could no longer afford to buy fuel. Which led to lay-offs and high unemployment, which led to the decline in consumer spending, which led to more unemployment, etc.

Then Americans stopped driving their cars to the drugstore two blocks from their home, and put their SUVs in mothballs. As the price of oil and gasoline dropped, OPEC ministers planned to cut oil production. They hold the stupid belief that the price of oil will rise when the supply declines. However, reducing the supply of petroleum will not put the end-user, also known as the American driver, back to work very soon. The end-user will remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, and inventories of oil and gas will likely continue to accumulate.

We can only hope that our pundits are correct in their assessment of President-elect Barak Obama. They tell us he is intelligent, and that his policies will be implemented by intelligent appointees. For myself, I am skeptical. I voted for Obama, but I will wait and see if he changes anything for the better. I hope that he and his appointees read Barbara Tuchman’s book. I hope that they do not join the march of folly. I also hope that we voters don't either.