Eric Kleefeld notes this awesome allusion from Michelle Bachmann (crazy-MN) at a Tea Party rally against health care reform, referring to their efforts as “the charge of the light brigade!”
Kleefeld notes something important:
The fun part here is that the Light Brigade lost that famous battle of the Crimean War — they lost it badly, sustaining heavy numbers of deaths and injuries. They are celebrated not for victory, but for their bravery in taking on truly insurmountable odds in a military disaster. It’s hardly the sort of positive example that could truly rally the political faithful to success, is it?
I would go even further. Tennyson celebrated the Light Brigade, seeing the futility of the charge but interpreting it through the lens of a kind of noble bravery.
But the more historically accurate reading is that their bull-headed ‘heroism’ was precisely their problem. They saw glory as its own reward, and were therefore utterly blinded to the absolute pointlessness and stupidity of their charge. It wasn’t bravery in the sense of sacrificing life for a noble purpose. It was a poorly designed and completely meaningless sacrifice. In short, it was a stupid mistake, not some piece of noble bravery.
And to top off the irony, the villain in the story is the leadership – who ordered their troops into the bloodbath based on their own incompetence, the acceptance of faulty premises, and personal vendettas. And who acquired their leadership role not through any merit, but simply through buying their way into the spot.
To stand in front of a crowd and call them the Charge of the Light Brigade, then, is basically to declare that they are the playthings of your own ridiculous dreams. I’m not sure that’s precisely what Bachmann was going for…