DSK and the Franco-American Moral Dance
I really enjoyed reading this Nation article by Katha Pollitt entitled, mischeviously, 'Your Movies Were Boring Anyway, France'. Well, not all French movies are boring but the admonition has less to do with film than an indictment of certain aspects of French culture in the wake of l'affaire DSK.
At some point in the past decade a clever person coined the expression"Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus", a play on the supposed masculinity and femininity of the two sides. Yet everyone knows that 'Europe' just means 'France'. Conservative Americans are fond of vilifying France as everything that their ideal America is not: unindustrious, libertine, morally clouded, self-indulgent, wasteful, and irritatingly anti-war. American liberals, though, quietly regarded France as something of a utopia in which everyone got health care, six weeks of vacation, fabulous wine, and topless women on beaches. One's position on France functions as a litmus test for where one stands on a whole range of other, seemingly unrelated issues.
One of the interesting side-effects of the DSK arrest is that this romance between the American left and France has been shattered. I don't mean that American liberals will cease visiting France or drinking French wine or watching French movies (though Pollitt just might). But the romance with France's supposed moral superiority has ended with a thud. As Pollitt notes, the reaction of leading French public figures to the arrest has been ghastly:
"It was just a quickie with the maid," said the famous journalist Jean-Francois Kahn, using an antiquated idiom (troussage de domestique) that suggests trussing up a chicken. Former culture minster Jack Lang was outraged that DSK was not immediately released on bail since after all, "no man died." (He probably didn't mean to, but he did say "no man" — Il n'y a pas mort d'homme — not "no one"). And let's not forget Bernard-Henri Levy, whose pretentious drivel has to be the worst thing you've exported to us since pizza-flavored La Vache Qui Rit. Levy can't get over the way the New York justice system is treating his friend: "I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other." Treating a master of the universe the same as anyone else — even the African immigrant who cleaned his hotel room, quoi— isn't that what justice is? Didn't they teach you that in high school philosophy, M. Levy?
What these men don't understand is that DSK's alleged attempted rape of a maid had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with power. It has to do with a powerful, wealthy man with everything he could possibly want in life trying to take advantage of the single most defenseless person in society- the working-class immigrant. You would think that given France's fondness for social welfare that more public intellectuals would be rushing to the maid's defense. Yet instead you have the disgusting spectacle of French elites defending their own, all the while having the temerity to criticize the vulgarity of the American criminal justice system.
The French- and other Europeans- have long maintained that they do not care about the personal peccadilloes of their leaders provided they perform their duties competently. When the Republican Party attempted to crucify President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s for lying about an affair he had with Monica Lewinsky, many American liberals found this attitude to be enlightened. Yet while attempted rape and a consensual extra-marital affair are by no means equivalent, I wonder whether the DSK incident will lead liberals to reconsider this point of view.
As fate would have it, we immediately have a test case- as Dominique Strauss-Kahn attempted to diddle the maid in his Manhattan hotel, Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed that he had fathered a child with his Guatemalan maid and had kept it a secret from his family for well over a decade. Did this act affect his ability to (rather badly) govern the state of California? Probably not. But in considering what damage he has done to his wife and children, my one thought is that I was ashamed to have voted for him in 2006. If any positive can come out of these events, I hope that leaders will think twice before abusing their power in this way. I'm not holding my breath, though.
