Ode to the Madness of Crowds
How durable are popular delusions?
I met a poet once in a meta wonderland
His literary merits proved unsurpassing bland.
Verse scraps of his served a palsied rodent’s bed
And popular delusions erupted from his head.
“Three volumes to which I strove to put my pen
Purport such madnesses of crowds
Which crowds recount again.
My tulipmania explains most everything
My Indian scalps are forgotten
As are my prophecies of beards and kings.
Miss Fanny Kemble ‘twas £75 rotten
Yet perusing tulip prices was so often so verboten!”
I asked him if he cared that none knew a word he writ.
He shrugged, shook, sighed then hung his head,
Toked twice, then said he didn’t give a shit.
© 2022, Tom Tordillo, all rights reserved.
Victorian poets not named Alfred Lord Tennyson struggled to find paying readers. Imagine that you had to actually buy and carry paper around to know what somebody said! No audiobooks. Public libraries? Nope.
So if Charles Mackey struggled to advance in the Top 10 Poets rankings of his era, he opted to ply his creativity to business acumen in the form of the three volumes of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
In writing the chapter on Tulipmania, Mackey engaged in somewhat questionable historical precision, discovering the notes and conversations of long-dead British persons wandering about in a colony inquiring into botanical practices as the Dutch prepared for the next phase in their longrunning war with most of the rest of Continental Europe (and a few years later, with the British as well).
Isn’t it odd that the tulip incident — of questionable historical provenance — is widely known, but not the fact that the Dutch were almost simultaneously engaged in real world wars with the Habsburg Empire (Spain, Austria/Hungary, portions of Germany), France, and the United Kingdom? One might wonder how so small a country could not only engage in so many wars, but also have so many wealthy botanists running around.
What other agricultural practices were the Dutch involved in as they carved out an empire in Indonesia, China, India, North America, the Caribbean, etc.? How on earth could they earn so much in profit? Perhaps some other trade was afoot in that era more important than tulips…
