Pop-Soc Buzzwords Are Not a Plan

Walter ShapiroKirn, guest-blogging Chez Sully, has a great post about the use of the phrase “the tipping point” as a contemporary update of the “domino effect,” with roughly the same empirical validity. I’ve noted that Jon Chait–an excellent thinker when not writing about Iraq or John McCain (more about the latter later)–used this buzzword where an argument about where the mythical hundreds of thousands of troops needed to secure Iraq were going to come from and what evidence existed that Bush was going to send them should have been. But it’s even worse to see Rumsfeld himself invoking it although the concept itself has nothing to do with regime change. As Shapiro asks:

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today’s executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel’s back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on “critical mass” is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It’s the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

What’s next? The Freakonomics war? The Six-Sigma attack against Iran? The Blink campaign against global terrorism? Capturing Osama the Warren Buffett Way?

…Since I misattributed Walter Kirn‘s work to Walter Shapiro, allow me to link to one of my favorite exquisitely mean reviews of recent years:

This style does create an effect and have a point, but it’s an old effect and an ancient point, of approximately the same vintage as Plexiglas coffee tables, ”2001: A Space Odyssey” and Yale University faculty fondue parties. For going on 50 years now, educated Europeans and Americans have been satirizing unbridled materialism, rampant dehumanization and the like consistently and pretty much en masse (though perhaps not to much effect in the real world). This particular nightmare vision of sleek despair and medium cool existential aimlessness has been smelling stale for quite a while now, as riddled with trite conventions and canned attitudes as late medieval chivalric poetry.

I’m an admirer of DeLillo, but Cosmopolis was pretty disastrous…