Mark André ’s Reviews > The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam > Status Update

beneath a reign of uncouth stars
November 6, 2024. A black day!
The blackest we’ve ever known.
Poor US. Poor World. Poor All.!

To an unusual degree in the Renaissance good walked with evil in a wondrous development of the arts combined with political and moral degradation and vicious behavior. Discovery of classical antiquity with its focus on human capacity instead of on a ghostly Trinity was exuberant experience that led to a passionate embrace of humanism,...

Too many Americans had come to feel that the war war wrong, out of all proportion to the national interest and in successful besides. Populists like to speak of the “wisdom of the people”; the American people were not so much wise as fed up, which in certain cases is a kind of wisdom. Withdrawal of public support proved the undoing of an Executive that believed it could conduct... war without... the national will...

On 7 October Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, in the long line of political independents bred in that region, filled the void with the announcement of his candidacy.

American fighting tactics were designed in terms of large troop formations making use of mobility, and in terms of industrial targets for the exercise of air power. Once in motion the American military machine could not readjust to a warfare in which these elements did not exist. The American mentality counted on superior might, but a tank cannot disperse wasps.

As 1950 opened, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 “card-carrying” Communists in the employ of the State Department, and for the next four years Americans joined in more than they opposed his vilification of fellow citizens as Communist infiltrators of American society.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods ... are a concept of the hunan mind: ... They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or ..

A peace without victory would not only terminate dreams of mastery but require enormous taxes to pay for years of fighting that had grown profitless. It would mean revolution. To the throne, the military caste, the landowners, industrialists and barons of business, only a war of gain offered any hope of their survival in power.

While all other sciences have advanced, confessed our second President, John Adams, “government is at a stand: little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.