Alfred Dreyfus

The trial of Alfred Dreyfus in France in 1895 was a pivotal event.  Dreyfus was a Jewish captain in the French military, accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. He was tried and convicted.

Rumors that he had been framed made the trial into front page controversy with the Dreyfusards pitted against the anti- Dreyfusards.  The controversy became centered on his Jewish heritage and brought out the anti-Semitism that had remained barely below the social surface.

Picture the trial as the OJ Simpson trial in France in 1895.  The sentiments paralleled the famous Leo Frank trial in Atlanta only a few years later (1913). Because of the controversy he was retired and eventually acquitted. It was proven that he was framed.  The trials dragged on for years.  (Leo Frank fared less well; after a new trial was ordered by Governor Slaton, Frank was kidnapped and lynched. )

J’Accuse (The Accused) was an open letter written by Emile Zola to the French government protesting the unfair treatment and blatant anti-Semitism.  A correspondent from Vienna covering the trial, Theodore Herzl, started the Zionist movement as a result of his observations of the trial.  He observed that any hope that modern institutions would reject centuries of anti-Semitism was a false hope and began the quest to create a Jewish homeland.  The roots of modern Israel lay in the Dreyfus trial.

Theodore Herzl

It was during this trial that the word ‘intellectual’ was coined in France in reference to those who supported Dreyfus. ‘Intellectual’ was a derogatory term equated with “the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the unsound.”  Those who used the word ‘intellectual’ with such contempt considered themselves to be defending an “organic, harmonious and ordered society against nihilism.”[i]

Today I consider an intellectual one who has a keen interest, either professional or otherwise,  in writing, thinking, and discovering insights and concepts that would ultimately clarify our human condition.  I respect especially the ‘blue collar’ intellectuals who are able to combine the ideals of intellectual pursuit with real world experience, as opposed to academic intellectuals who have less real world experience.

I do find it interesting how words like ‘intellectual’ and ‘liberal’ have changed from their original meaning or intent in the old country.

Conrad Black writes in the National Review online edition April 28, 2011

The Media Don’t Get Economics
And this illiteracy has a high price.

excerpt:

In the 27 months of the Obama administration, there have been spectacular rises in the prices of gasoline ($1.83 per gallon to almost $4), oil ($41 per barrel to over $90), gold ($853 per ounce to $1,500), corn ($3.56 per bushel to $6.33), and sugar ($13.37 per pound to $35.39). The real median household income has declined by $300, to under $50,000; the number of food-stamp recipients has increased from 32 million to 43 million; the number of people officially in poverty has increased by 10 percent, to 44 million (more people than the whole populations of Poland or Spain); the ranks of the long-term unemployed have increased from 2.6 million to 6.4 million; and the U.S.’s position in the rankings of economic freedom of the world’s countries has declined from fifth to ninth. I have admitted that my canvass of television news and comment is sketchy, but I have seen almost no reference to any of these problems except the prices of oil, gold, and gas.

HKO comments:

we are allowing the irrelevant and the noise to distract us from the important.

There is an axiom that if you have to jump a canyon you don’t want to do it in small steps.  If you have to lose a leg to cancer or gangrene, you do not make the task any less painful by amputating in pieces.

The lack of seriousness and honesty from our leaders on the fiscal crisis speaks loudly about the lack of courage and quality of our leadership, but it also says something about us.

Are we really more interested in Obama’s birth certificate than his budget?  Trillion dollar deficits are so unfathomable to the ordinary voter that we will often succumb to lesser, easier to understand issues.  We seem unable to discern which PhD economist is correct in analyzing the problem so we just ignore all of them, or only listen to those whose analysis verifies our existing opinion.  We want confirmation, rather than information.

We want to blame the problem on past concessions to the wealthier Americans as the cause of the problem, but if you tax 100% of all the income and assets of everyone who makes over a million dollars you will barely make a dent in the projected deficits.  And you do not need to be a supply-side ideologue to understand that if you tax anyone at 100% this year you will not likely find that revenue stream available next year.

At some point the quest for ‘fairness’ is simply juvenile.  Is it unfair that the rich got richer if the poor got richer as well?  Pragmatically, if soaking the rich is to be the preferred method to fiscal sanity a lot of Americans are going to be shocked at the fact that they are now considered rich.  The lack of clarity on such subjects as ‘wealth’ and ‘fairness’ provides excellent camouflage for moral supremacists and semi-socialist ideologues.

Some of the poorest countries have the most equal distribution of wealth.  Do we really want to sacrifice growth for equality?  Do we really think we are smart enough to ignore that trade-off?

Our news media perpetuates economic ignorance in their coverage as well.   It is much easier to blame oil companies and greedy speculators for the high price of oil than our political leaders who are inflating our currency rather than cutting expenses. Do they blame evil steel companies for the 30% jump in the price of steel?  Do they blame evil farmers for the sharp increase in sugar and corn prices?  Has anyone seen one media celebrity possibly suggest that that cause of all of these price increases is not the producers of these products, but our leaders who have deliberately degraded the value of our method of paying for these products?

Our oil is more expensive because we have restricted access to our own resources and have created inflation to attempt solve our problems.  To blame others is dishonest, ignorant or cowardly.

The budget is THE battle.  It will be solved with hard but clear solutions, not by slaying fictional demons, and not by diluting our efforts with popular but far less important political considerations.

Politics can’t save us.  Politics is the idea that society’s ills can be cured politically.  This is a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. Your bottle of cabernet savignon is rolled in bread crumbs and dunked into the deep-fat fryer. Hence our big , fat political ass.

from Don’t Vote – It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O’Rourke