Modern Major-General: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

''Has only been brought down to the beginning of [[Victorian Britain|the century]]

''But still in matters vegetable, animal and mineral

 

The opposite of a [[Genius Ditz]], a character who seems competent at everything... except his actual job. A sort of adult [[Book Dumb]], the main question on everybody's minds, in- or out-of-universe, is "[[Pointy-Haired Boss|How on earth did this guy get hired]], especially given there are other jobs he'd be far more competent at!?" (Though sometimes his [[Blue Blood]] may give you a reason to suspect nepotism.)

 

(If you were looking for the song and works which parody it, see [[Major-General Song]].)

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* Hamdo from ''[[Now and Then, Here and There]]''.

 

== Film ==

* Max Fischer from ''[[Rushmore]]''.

* Max Smart in the 2008 movie ''[[Get Smart (film)|Get Smart]]'' is cast in a role something like this; many characters remark that he's probably the finest intelligence analyst in CONTROL. However, he desperately wants to be a field agent—and when he's finally promoted, he's not entirely incompetent, but he is notably over-eager, naive, bumbling and prone to making a fool of himself.

 

== Literature ==

* In the Cadfael books, Brother Oswin is hopelessly clumsy, refuses to admit that putting cold things into hot places or vice versa shatters them, and is Cadfael's assistant for several books. Cadfael generally has him do all the easy stuff that doesn't put him near fragile things or herbal remedies - especially the ones that could be used as poison. He does get better over time and in the end is quite competent - it just took him a lot longer to learn than Cadfael's other assistants.

* Captain Trips from the ''[[Wild Cards]]'' books. He's a genius biochemist—was one of the best in the world, before his drug-and-superhero problems. He manages to be a competent detective when working with Tachyon on the Swarm case. In regular life, he tries to be a businessman, but couldn't sell tuna to dolphins.

** Lt. Blouse has an element of this, since his genius with military tactics and technology doesn't make him the [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]] you might expect. War in [[This Is Reality|"the real world"]] isn't [[Armchair Military|a neat game of strategy]], making him relatively incompetent as a leader aside for a few exceptions. He is smart enough to let his ultra-competent sergeant run the things he isn't good at. Usually.

* The Austrian general Weyrother is portrayed this way in ''[[War and Peace]]''. A good two or so pages is dedicated to how all the other generals at the war council prior to the [[Battle Royale With Cheese|Battle of Austerlitz]] despise him. He has a knack for drawing up troop dispositions and knowing terrain, just nothing to do with strategy or winning battles.

* Redjack Teal from Brian Jacques' ''The Angel's Command'' is basically Maj. Gen. Stanley...[[Recycled in Space|AT SEA!]]

 

== Theater ==

** Note that Major General Stanley even mentions that operetta in his song:

{{quote|Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

*** Then again, when the player sees him impersonating Phoenix in that case's opening, he...uses Phoenix's exact sprite.

*** However, it helps that this guy also, well, threatens to have people killed.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** Actually, the problems described above did not apply to many armies - paying for commissions was a problem specific to the British army, and political appointments were really more something that applied to republics and parliamentary systems, e. g. the United States in the 19th century. In autocratic monarchies although officers tended to be recruited mostly from the nobility, there actually was quite a bit of competition among them and it generally was possible to maintain a certain level of competence (let's not forget: Napoleon was a product of the officers' schooling of Louis XVI's army). But there were different types of problems, namely that some people would be pushed forward by personal connections to the monarch or those close to him (Villeroi had been raised together with Louis XIV as a boy, others were helped by the influence of a king's mistress like the Marquise de Pompadour) and that the very top positions would usually go to monarchs or their relatives.

** The Charge of the Light Brigade is probably the [[Ur Example]] of this as the incident was subsequently used to discredit and end the practice of purchasing commissions, however the facts themselves are rather more complicated. It was led by Lord Cardigan, described by one historian as "an overbearing, hot-tempered fool of the most dangerous kind in that he believed that he possessed real ability." His immediate superior was Lord Lucan, also none too bright and much too hot-tempered. However, tied up in the performance was Captain Louis Edward Nolan, a "merit" officer, who may have intentionally miscommunicated the order to advance (the supposedly "garbled" order would have been quite comprehensible to a man standing where it was drafted). Lucan ordered Cardigan charge his men through a gauntlet of fire to capture a battery of guns at the far end of the valley. After capturing the guns the light brigade was driven off due to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, retreating through the same gauntlet of fire a second time. The result was over two hundred British cavalryman killed or captured in a charge that accomplished nothing of real military value. At the time Cardigan was lionised as a hero, while Lucan and Raglan the supreme commander variously blamed each other and Nolan.

* This is the intended meaning of [[The Peter Principle]]: that people who are good at their job will earn promotions until they reach their level of incompetence, at which point they will no longer be promoted, because they are incompetent at their current position. This can get short-circuited if the person isn't actually so bad at their job to justify being demoted or fired, yet do badly enough that their superior wants them out. The only solution? [[Kicked Upstairs|Promote them elsewhere]], which is the entire point of the British comedy ''[[The Brittas Empire]]''.

** John Bell Hood of the Confederate Army of Tennessee fits the Peter Principle. He was a fine brigade and division commander, but was disastrous when promoted to Army command.

* ''The [[Dilbert]] Principle'' proposes that the only reason why [[Pointy-Haired Boss|executive management]] positions ''exist'' is to provide slots where incompetents can be removed from day-to-day contact with the company's product and/or customers.

* Idi Amin was a total douchebag and complete moron, as he was shown in the media. With all those badges, he probably fooled himself into thinking he was a real military commander. But he lost completely in his war with Tanzania, as his armies did very little fighting at all.

* [[Mao Zedong]] was pretty much the reverse of Hitler and Stalin. While a skilled commander and charismatic leader capable of leading what was essentially a peasant guerrilla movement to take over China, as a statesman, his economic and social policies were a complete failure.

** Case in point: The Great Leap Forward. Mao hoped to turn China into a first-world country through a campaign in which backyard furnaces were set up in villages to produce steel, untrained peasants were assigned to work industrial machinery, farmland was deep-ploughed (a now-discredited idea that deeper layers of soil were more fertile) to increase crop yields, and sparrows were mass-culled so they would not steal grain. None of this was planned with any knowledge of metallurgy, ecology, or agriculture. The backyard furnaces produced junk-quality iron, industrial machinery failed due to incompetent operators, fields were left untended due to all the farmers being moved to the cities, crops failed to grow properly, and whatever grain that could be harvested was devoured by the swarms of locusts the culling of sparrows (their main predator) had created. Combined with mismanagement and reporting of exaggerated production figures by officials, the ensuing [[Precision F-Strike|fuckfest]] resulted in about '''50 million''' dead.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Military and Warfare Tropes]]

[[Category:Archetypal Character]]