”Who's the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him?”

Thank you, Obi Wan Kenobi.

If you haven't been making sure to watch for the occasional columns of Barbara Ehrenreich in the New York Times, you really should. Today, she's brilliant in a piece titled "All Together Now." Her thesis is that our government and many of us have been the perpetrators and the victims of groupthink.

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

It's about time someone with a national podium made judicious use of irony and snark. It is long past due and well deserved. We all know - at some level - the danger of groupthink, especially when it invades the halls of power and those who advise the powerful.

Ehrenreich, however, is right to remind us:

This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.