DSK….no looking back?
Slog scoop of last Saturday confirmed as Judge Obus dismisses the charges. But will the lessons of this case be learned?
As revealed here ahead of the pack last Saturday, Dominique Strauss-Kahn walked free from a New York courtroom today. The defence appeal will be heard later on this afternoon EDS, but is rated by those close to the matter as having ‘a chance in a million’ of being successful. The former IMF boss should be free to return to France tomorrow….although his accuser Nafissatou Diallo still professes an intention of bringing a civil suit against the Frenchman.
Will DSK spend the rest of his life looking back – or will he move on? It’s too late for him to enter the French Presidential race (a reality the American media still seem largely unable to grasp) and he will not be welcome, at least for the time being, as a high-profile politician in his home country. Lest we forget, he is also facing a degree of harassment from former ‘victims’ of his unique chimp-rutting sexual style.
A sensible approach would be for the guy to sit down and write a frank autobiographical account: about the nature of his sexuality, and the ramifications for feminism and liberty (often two separate things) of his arraignment and then release without charge. Not only would this make him even filthier rich than he is already, it would also be an important step in his rehabilitation – if it was sincere.
But that’s not the DSK I’ve been told about over the last three months. The real Strauss-Kahn is, I suspect, a man whose very high IQ wrestles constantly with his passionate nature. The real DSK, it seems, does not forget: egos that enormous must not forget…or they cease to exist.
The Slog has consistently supported the former financial heavyweight throughout his ordeal for one obvious reason: his case was about to turn into a show trial – a parody of Sherman McCoy, Tom Wolfe’s anti-hero laid low by his accidental manslaughter of a negro youth about to damage his car with intent to rob. It seemed to me from the start that certain insane tenets of the Progressive tendency were also on trial here:
(1) All men are barely controlled rapists
(2) Rich, male defendants deserve to be paraded through the streets in a tumbril. Poor female accusers deserve to be protected by anonymity, as they are obviously victims of foul assault and in need of stress counselling.
Facts – and facts alone – questioned the first of these assertions, and disproved the second. This is a result I regard as entirely healthy in the campaign to remind over-educated bigots that equality before the law is the basis of civilisation.
But it doesn’t fool me into believing that Strauss-Kahn was necessarily innocent of the charges. Rather, it confirms me in my belief that minority groups are not made holy by the act of being minorities. A female friend whose views I increasingly respect offered the opinion to me recently that DSK is “a pest”. I think she is almost certainly right. But I want the man convicted in a fair trial: not tried by the media in a circus where it was obvious from the start that Diallo and her oddly-defined ‘family’ were on the make.
Just as with men, women are frequently let down by their gender. Blokes who try hard to give their partners every assistance to enjoy a fulfilling life feel humiliated by male jerks making gross observations in company. And women sometimes unwisely balancing lots of life-bits in the air are appalled at the divorce-greed of lazy women who are no better than leeches. But dealing in stereotypes gets us nowhere. More precisely, it gets us to the position where very odd human beings like Harriet Harman and Dominique Strauss-Kahn are running things. Bit then, that’s a place I’d regard as nowhere useful.
I’m damned if I know how we got into a state as a nation where principles as central to liberal democracy as these are in doubt. But I do know what our job is: to continually remind the plot-losers that their role is defend our freedoms, not circumscribe them.
CATCH UP WITH THE WHOLE DSK SAGA FROM START TO FINISH AT THIS SPECIAL SLOG ANTHOLOGY OF POSTS
The Slog 