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| Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in a letter announcing his intention to resign, wrote, “I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me." |
I am no fan of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, still less of the Socialist Party of France that he is a member of or the nation-wrecking IMF that he currently runs. Yet I can’t help feeling that his arrest on charges of sexual assault is being turned into a modern-day medieval drama, a kind of reality-show version of the witch trials of old, in which DSK has been assigned the role of all-purpose hate figure rather than suspect in a crime. I never in a million years thought I would find myself in agreement with the professional poseur and state-sponsored philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, but he has a point when he says that there is something distinctly off in the way the “entire world” is “revelling in the spectacle of this handcuffed figure”.
Here in NYC (where I currently am) it is pretty clear that DSK has become a twenty-first century evil entity for the weirdly medieval media to gawp at and mock. He has been turned into a kind of voodoo doll, into which various political factions with a mish-mash of agendas can stick their pins. Indeed, the arrest of DSK has united some normally violently opposed forces – from Fox News to feminists – in an orgy of moralistic handwringing about the warped morality of French Socialists or the evil nature of men in general or how DSK’s alleged actions demonstrate the corruptibility of political power.
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