DSK: The Fall

They say that DSK’s staggering indictment blows up our presidential competition. If only that were all! Alas, it paralyzes the entire nation. Indignity and humiliation grow by the hour. In the cafes, they generalize about the “black holes” of human nature. They dabble on the follies of men made dizzy by power. On the two sorcerers — Sex and Money — that tempt princes. And we see the usual swarm of conspiracies flying in the face of the extraordinary.

We must first, for our mental health, accept the obvious: With 12 months until a national competition, it is absurd to rule out the unexpected. Here is the favorite of France’s favorite election, if not completely stuck, at least physically unable to compete at the Elysée. But to think that in just a few months our city, informed and computerized, was electrified by a Japanese earthquake with nuclear fallout, an unresolved financial crisis that has the power to shipwreck our money and the high risk of terrorism after bin Laden’s death, the unexpected is in the air!

Here is a terrible image: the lord of our political intelligentsia, the most popular candidate in the most popular election, the head of the widely recognized IMF, the flamboyant polyglot, the computer genius, we see paraded in handcuffs, jaws clenched, on all the television screens in the world. France discovers, more thoroughly than in any of the Hollywood soap operas, the rigors of American procedure. It learns that “experts” want to explore the skin and DNA of the two protagonists. It speculates about the miracle that DSK’s chosen lawyer, he of the large caps and lost causes, might concoct.

But beyond that, France understands that with Sex and Money, America and France are on opposite sides. In France, we harp at will on DSK’s contamination by money, on his wife’s fortune and on the Porsche he drives. And we harp still on Sarkozy’s Fouquet’s. America, for its part, doesn’t care about either the Porsche or Fouquet’s. It only sees in this French bad-mouth the Catholic heritage of sinful money. And in French egalitarianism, we see the noble lining of envy.

In contrast, Sex gets all the attention in America. Even the most fleeting adultery is forbidden to all public officials. We remember the torrent of curses and profanity brandished against President Clinton; the relentless fury against the filmmaker Polanski; and countless congressmen’s careers have been sliced by the libertine penknife. In France, however, sexual tolerance has made for beautiful days in our public life. The “elephants” respected by the Third and Fourth Republics boasted in little closed houses. And if a scandal like Le Troquer’s Ballets Roses scandal has legal consequences, we would have seen the complaint from a hotel maid against an enterprising Antoine Pinay stifled. France, like Berlusconi’s Italy and its bunga bunga sessions, is not startled by a display of excess sexual freedom.

These conflicting approaches mean that in the U.S. and in France, the codes do not treat accusations of touching, assault, harassment and rape similarly. Where popular culture discovers the underworld, we see only licenses. But it’s in the United States, in the nets of American justice, that DSK has fallen.

Over the past two decades, French women have reacted with a legitimate demand against the chauvinist complacency of our mores. But the shock of the Strauss-Kahn affair will garner new claims for imposing sacrosanct “transparency.”

“Transparency” is everywhere, behind the eye of each mobile phone. And suspicion is everywhere too, lurking behind the crowds of net detectives. For the public man we demand more than a vocation — a “secular holiness” under Big Brother’s inquisition. Progress? Doubtful.

Whatever befalls DSK on the legal front, it is already clear that his fall weakens France’s position in the IMF and that the notoriety of his disgrace will weigh, as usual, on France. This black mark will pass.

It will weigh much longer, however, and with extreme demagogic exploitation, on the image of our leaders. The Socialist Party lost its best electoral asset. In contrast, Francois Hollande, who presented himself before the overblown DSK affair as a “normal man,” has become strengthened. His weighty presence is reassuring in the upcoming trial in New York City. But again, predictions of truce!

DSK’s combustion is too close. And the stupor makes one stupid.