Some thoughts on DSK

I put down a few ideas about the DSK saga at Catholic Lane. One's blood boils at the response to this atrocious episode, especially the French insults concerning our justice and virtue.

In fact, many across the pond are tut-tutting American provincialism, in the manner of Socialist member of European Parliament, Gilles Savary, who noted, “Everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine, and that he is distinguished from others by the fact that he doesn’t try and hide it.” The problem is “puritanical America, infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism,” which cannot deal with issues concerning “pleasures of the flesh.”

Alas, he is not alone in that way of thinking.

UPDATE: In response to one of the comments, let me clarify that abortion has always been essential to socialists, from their inception. They also denigrated marriage (a bourgeoise trap) and flaunted their libertinism through cohabitation and shared intimacy. That is why abortion always had to be available, for children weren't terribly welcome. When they did arrive, collectives were set-up for their care, because the mothers' priorities had to be the revolution, or their work.

Ultimately, "left" and "right" are inadequate terms, because those on the right often share the disdain for conventual morality. That is why I indicate that the Catholic ethic stands squarely in the center to counter excesses from all angles. We are the one who always serve the person first, without allowing him to be subsumed in ephemeral schemes.

UPDATE II: More details are emerging of escapades old and new, including other incidents with hotel staff on the trip that ended his career.Another fascinating article addresses the curious question, Why do French women put up with this sort of thing? The only woman, journalist Hélène Jouan sat on a panel that addressed this issue:

Every woman journalist, she said, knew the pervasive atmosphere fostered by powerful men in France, in which females were at the very least importuned with impunity, and disregarded – not even disbelieved – when worse happened. This had created, she said, the culture in which someone like Strauss-Kahn could, and did, think he could get away with anything.

She herself, Jouan said, hadn't been the victim of over-the-red-line harassment, but the very atmosphere in which salacious propositioning texts or late-night knocks on her hotel room door by politicians on the campaign trail were a common occurrence. She said it "was so heavy sometimes that at the beginning of my career, I almost gave up journalism."

The lack of response from the hitherto voluble other guests was spectacular...

The men around her couldn't grasp the problem, with one saying "Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help," and another insisting it was "overblown:"

Really, nobody died in that hotel room.

The understanding is, she notes, that French women will not take any of this seriously or fight back (there will be repercussions), and she points out that First Ladies have always studiously ignored their husband's transgressions. Furthermore, France's leading feminist, Elisabeth Badinter, is married to a Socialist leader, and thus we come full circle: socialism is anti-virtue and anti-family, and pure feminists see their struggle as the next stage in the dialectic. There is no other path to "progress." 

Keep that in mind when considering the merits of the left. Women must pay a very high price for their utopia.

 

Comments

[pam]

Was this entry written during the "chick party?"

[gsk]

You betcha! If the economy continues its decline (in the hands of socialists like DSK) we have to be assured of our "nest eggs."