TRAGEDY, THEN FARCE, THEN ....WHAT?

Lea Carpenter, Eleven Days: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("When Jason asked, 'What's incentive alignment?' he got a lecture about the fog of war, and about math, how math made Western Front attrition rates mean something and formed the philosophies of men in Ford C-suites who once ran the world. The lecture ended with an 0-6 saying, 'But math can conflate success and activity, you know what I mean?' And while Jason thought about that, the officer said, 'Let me put it like this: If history repeats itself a second time, what do you call the thing that follows tragedy and farce?'" Id. at 152.).