In principle, I.M.F. director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty, but that doesn’t hold back most Americans, including Maureen Dowd, in her column in yesterday’s New York Times, from convicting him right now. It’s a done deal both in our minds and our casual conversations. Admittedly, in Strauss-Kahn’s case, things don’t look too good for him at the moment. But that’s neither here nor there. The man will get his day in court.
We Americans deeply relish watching the mortification of people at the moment they’re charged with a crime—before their trial ever takes place. I have to admit that I feel this schadenfreude in myself—for example, I hear myself talking about Strauss-Kahn as if he were already lodged in some upstate prison somewhere, and, just as unseemly, I find myself chuckling approvingly at the clever tabloid headlines about the scandal. (I’ve particularly admired “French Whine” and “French Diss.”) It’s exciting, not to mention titillating, to read about how the police raced out to the airport to grab such a powerful man as Strauss-Kahn, caught him on board (only minutes before his plane was to depart) and then brought him back to court where he was charged and denied bail. When the director of the I.M.F. gets arrested on a rape charge, we all cry out in dismay. But on a deep level, we experience the humiliation of the man as a satisfying comeuppance for a super-alpha male who gets to stay regularly in $3,000-a-night hotels, fly first class wherever he goes, and live in a multi-million dollar mansion in Washington, D.C.
We like to see the “high” brought down to the “low”—flattened, as it were, by the law forcibly blowing the air out of their puffed-up lives. The showiness of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest—handcuffs, the perp walk, being sent to Rikers Island without bail—is showy only because he is a powerful man. Most of those hundreds of perp walks and subsequent trips to Rikers Island are dreary affairs that go unnoticed. But each of them signals one of the few moments in American life where we feel, in our gut, the meaning of the phrase, “Equal treatment under the law.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, the French (who seem to rather approve of the rich and flashy Strauss-Kahn, despite his being secretly whispered about as “the great seducer,”) find American law to be exceedingly repugnant, not to mention unjust. No perp walks for them. They see everything to do with our pre-trial system as a gross miscarriage of justice, convicting people before they have their day in court—even before an indictment is handed down. Worse, when Americans charge people with crimes, we treat important people, such as Strauss-Kahn, the same way we treat unimportant people. What strange irony that the French, who only a few short centuries ago gleefully lopped off aristocratic heads merely for the fun of it, have today become so protective of the rights of the privileged, the rich, the famous, and the powerful.
A few years back, a friend gave me Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography of the Marquis de Sade (At Home with the Marquis De Sade: A Life, 1998). That wondrous story opened my naïve eyes to all sorts of matters about sex that my mother, bless her soul, never mentioned. Du Plessix Gray’s book reveals the marquis to have been a sweet and generous sort of fellow, liked by many, but a man who, in the name of sexual freedom and art, crossed the line into a sexually cruel realm most of us who call ourselves civilized would never want to enter.
Sade came from a long line of French libertines, getting himself into trouble because he went a little too far, boasted of his conquests a little too eagerly, and pushed his luck with working class girls a little too much. Even his fellow French aristocrats, who were casually tolerant of the way their class sexually abused working class women and the female peasantry, grew impatient with the man.
Strauss-Kahn landed in his situation because a female victim of a lower class (I should remember to say “alleged victim,” not to mention avoid using the word “class,” lest it incite class warfare here in America) wouldn’t play quiet—in this respect, the same thing that caused Sade to land in prison, where he ended up living for over 30 years.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
