What Really Happened? NYRB.

When the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story broke it seemed to embody many of our most potent national narratives: race; class; sex; European degeneracy bested by Puritan virtue.

What if none of that was true? Or what if that narrative was secondary to another that is much more complex and startling?

Edward Jay Epstein suggests that other narrative in the New York Review of Books.

8 Comments

Two observations: 1) conservatives worldwide consider any ‘leftist’ government illegitimate and will do anything, anything to obtain and retain power; 2) if these events had happened in France they would not have received anywhere near the attention they did in the U.S. – remember that this country was populated early on by religious fanatics thrown out of England by other religious fanatics because they were too fanatical.

@Nabisco: Well, really. It’s all faintly Bond-James-Bond but the writer’s doing his level best not to get into tinfoil country or to blanc laver DSK.

@blogenfreude: Plus the reliable spectacle of the perp walk which is what seemed chiefly to outrage Les Franches.

@Benedick: Imagine the disquisitions DSK could have had with Conrad Black, our most literate prisoner, had he been sent to prison.

@Benedick: I recall reading a review of one of Lord Black’s books – the reviewer pointed out that Black’s literary contribution was that he could use three words where anyone else would use one. To wit (a recent sabre rattling @ Huffpo):

The latest to blunder premeditatedly into this corrupt and common practice in my case is Duff McDonald, an unstylish hack who writes for Fortune and is as undiscriminating a lickspittle of the fashionable as he is a defamer of the transitorily improvident. He has the personality of a turbot, the literary flair of a sloth, and the professional ethics of a baboon. McDonald wrote on a Time Warner-CNN website that he had written a “vicious” piece about me some years ago in Vanity Fair, at the start of my legal travails. (Maureen Orth and Bryan Burrough have done better in the same magazine since, but they all illustrate the difficulty of trying to make a serious point in an unserious place.) McDonald described me recently as a “thief” and I am introducing him in Canada, (a New York Times and Sullivan-free zone), to the brave old world of the laws of defamation. Libel courts in places where the Internet circulates defamations seem to be the only way to detach much of the media from their instinct to be useful idiots for American prosecutors. A retraction is being negotiated, but I would be happy to welcome Duff McDonald to the bracing atmosphere of a Canadian court. Somebody should whack these freedom of expression mutants when they come snapping and stinging out of the undergrowth. It would be my pleasure, as well as a public service.

@blogenfreude: Fuck me in the heart WOW! Bitch got game.

OK. Magic spell… SNAP!

Stingue Law is gone. If you don’t do law you got to hate lawyers, right? Right. Moving on. That Black man is all kinds of persuasive. Lawyers in the US are the great evil (we all thought it was the gays but whatves). That is an astounding piece and I must buy his booque.

Stinque law hep me (as Cain! might say), how is he wrong? Must I reconfigure my worldview?

@Benedick: Conrad Black is upset because he was guilty enough to get convicted by a system weighted heavily towards corporations and the people that run them.

@blogenfreude:
For a crime he committed in Canada City!

Lord Puffy Connie’s always been a literate dickbag.

BTW, he funneled a lot of money into RW think tanks and putting RW douchebags into the press. His “contributions” to US America intelligencia include: Fake Britisher Mark Steyn, Son of Babs Frum, the Prince of Darkness, even little bit of Kristol Meh and Twit Derbyshire.

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