"With the open consent of the people, they have proclaimed before the world the failure of their 'democracy.' Through them a sovereign people shows itself thrust from its throne of justice, shorn of its infallible majesty. For there is no denying that this evil has befallen us with the full complicity of the people itself...The people is not God. Anyone could have foreseen that this new divinity would some day topple to his fall. A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his throne."
It struck me for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was my suspicion that few if any politicians currently in office could have written something as thoughtful, lasting, and eloquent. The quote refers to the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer of the French intelligence staff was wrongly convicted of treason, and his trial with the inevitable accompanying public circus sparked a wave of anti-Semitism, violence, and similar such rabble-based nonsense.
Clemenceau and others opposed the trial as a brutal miscarriage of justice. Their motivation was a belief that the republic in which they lived existed to preserve human dignity by treating every citizen as equal before the rule of law (this is another trait that I feel today's politicians generally lack, as demonstrated by our recent policy regarding extraordinary renditions, and the minimal outcry that it generated).
Eventually, Clemenceau and his fellow Dreyfusards forced a compromise in which Dreyfus was acquitted, somewhat illegitimately, in a hardscrabble compromise that seems to be equivalent to a current Pakistani politician somehow managing to rewrite Pakistan's blasphemy laws to require a higher standard of proof for conviction.
The second reason that the quote struck me, and the one that has led to me writing this blog, is that I have this sensation that we're living in a time in which the toppled popular god (in the form of masses who vote for an amorphous "change" that will be panacea to all their misfortunes, who panic and beg for Congress to legislate away and economic crisis and then complain about government spending, who vote for the Tea Party in reaction to expensive stimulus legislation that was mandated by their own panic, who blame unions of teachers and police and firefighters for bankrupting the state instead of thanking them for teaching their children, guarding their streets, and saving their lives, et cetera ad nauseum), that this vulgar mass of simmering discontent is masochistically destroying all that is good and beautiful about America.
And that is a shame, because America has a lot of potential.
In theory, our government, by means of its civilian leadership, would form a bulwark against that sort of nonsense. They would disregard fickle, self-destructive demands and inspire the people so that they cease to be a bleating mob and return to their rightful state, as citizens of a nation.
This has proven not to be the case. Rather, the government, particularly Congress, has shown itself to be a gaggle of bickering children who would rather natter on about partisan politics than actually accomplish something, lead the nation, fix problems, help the needy, or any number of other things.
And I figure one (hopefully) thoughtful blog about politics, economics, art, literature, history, philosophy, or wherever else my fancy may take me can only be a step in a more thoughtful, productive direction.
In any case, it probably won't hurt anything.
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