Gilles Savary, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to Mr. Strauss-Kahn's Socialist Party, wrote on his blog that the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had hints of American-style hypocrisy. "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," he wrote. "In puritanical American [sic], infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism, financial misdeeds are far more tolerated than pleasures of the flesh."
Of course, as James Taranto pointed out pithily in his column on Monday, "The encounter at the Sofitel does not sound as if it was the least bit pleasurable for the maid..."
To carry this off into a slight tangent, we can only conclude that the issue of feminism and women's rights is anything but sophisticated. Then again, these issues were never supposed to be sophisticated--they were supposed to be fundamental. Small wonder that French women didn't achieve suffrage until 1944.
But let's return to this issue of American Puritanism (which I prefer to Savary's reference to American Protestantism). In Clinton's case Paula Jones' civil suit was "settled but without an apology." In DSK's case, it seems as likely as not to be settled, and we also imagine that it will get buried without an apology. One wonders then if the real difference between American Puritanism and French libertinism is merely a difference in dollar (or euro) amounts. No one seems to be sorry in either case or to find his own behavior reprehensible. Maybe this is just an understated nod to the globalization of morality--see, we are all more alike than we originally thought.
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