BHL on DSK

Only in France could a creature like BHL (Bernard-Henri Levy) exist, pictured left.  He is a philosopher of some kind, very often pops up to share his words of wisdom with us on the media, is excruciatingly vain, is married to pop princess Ariane Dombasle, who is much younger than him, and is right most of the time.  Allegedly he had some words in Sarko's shell-like, and the latter promptly got stiffened sinews on Libya.  Anyway, he has defended DSK, saying rightly that he is innocent but is being treated as guilty.  One remark he makes in this context is this one, written yesterday:
J’en veux, ce matin, au juge américain qui, en le livrant à la foule des chasseurs d’images qui attendaient devant le commissariat de Harlem, a fait semblant de penser qu’il était un justiciable comme un autre.
This morning I hate the American judge who threw him to the hordes of image-hunters outside the Harlem courthouse, as if he was someone before the courts just like anyone else. (my translation)
That quote has aroused much ire in the comments and elsewhere, from people who say "Of course DSK is subject to the same justice as anyone else".  Of course, indeed, he is.  But this is not the point of what BHL is saying.  He does not say that it is the justice which should vary - calling DSK "un justiciable" is the opposite of that.  He says that DSK is not "comme un autre".  And he is not.  "Anyone else" would not have hordes of paparazzi outside the courthouse.  And the judge should have taken that into account.  In the interests of justice and due process.  That is what BHL means.  I notice that the "guilty" votes are beginning to surge on my little poll.  This may be because we have all seen DSK in the dock, unshaven, handcuffed, looking, in fact, like a guilty man.
This is shameful treatment ahead of due process.  And you, liberal chatterers, especially the French ones, have you thought that this, whatever happened in that hotel on Saturday and whatever the outcome of the process, has almost certainly given us another Sarko term as president of France.  To say nothing of a boost for Marine Le Pen.  Hein?

Happy now?

All Parti Socialiste branches are voting on Thursday on the party's report, essentially the backbone of its manifesto for next year's presidential election. Citizen's primaries will be held in October.

 Doesn't seem much point now.

There are some in France who see it more clearly though:

DSK

watching, on a loop on every French channel it seems, the clip of DSK being led handcuffed to a car, looking five years older and a stone lighter, as people tend to do in these situations, reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with a group of friends, from several countries and various backgrounds.  Three of us (me, an American who had previously worked in politics, and a Swiss academic) were firmly of the opinion that there had been a set-up, no matter what actually happened in that hotel room. For political reasons.  A fourth, (Canadian, a man of the cloth) was surprised we thought so, and thought everyone should refrain from comment until more was known.  Two others (British, Guardianista political views) accepted the media reports uncritically and viewed him as guilty.  Hmmm.

moving frontiers and the German fort

yesterday we visited Fort Mutzig, a fort built by the Germans (it was in Germany at the time) mostly in the 1890s, against the French.  It was used in battle precisely once, early in the First World War, and drove the French to retreat, at the cost of some considerable life.  It contains much state-of-the-art equipment (for the time) including for example a bread oven designed to feed some hundreds daily (the ration for soldiers at that time was 750 grams of bread a day, and not much else, there is forensic evidence that they were hungry much of the time).  The bread oven was made in Hamburg and designed to be used on board ship, so it could bake efficiently and withstand vibration at the same time.  All the equipment was underground, which was where the soldiers lived.  There are proper crapper toilets, which most of the soldiers would not have seen before, much less had in their homes in the Rhineland villages.  Anyway, the fort is enormous, unobtrusive above ground, cost many millions in the money of that time, and was almost not used at all.  Because it was in the wrong place.  Just like the Maginot Line was, not too far away and also in this region of France.  All in all it was an interesting visit and I learned from it in more than one way.  In particular, while the tour group I was with was trailing along an underground tunnel, I thought I heard English being spoken in another group. Tourism in this region is conducted in French and German.  British people do not come here (they would like it if they did) and so it is rare to hear English spoken.  Our tour guide spoke only French to us, though she could speak German and we heard her do so.  Anyway, I was right in thinking I had heard English spoken.  Another member of the group asked about it too, and was told there was a small group of Australians touring at the same time, family members or descendants of one or more Australians who had volunteered during the First World War and had served in Europe, possibly in this very region, nobody could be sure.  The tour guide then remarked that Australians and British people had been noted at that time and later for their willingness, and indeed enthusiasm, for volunteering to go to war, something which was unthinkable (she said) for most French and Germans, certainly from this region, and she mentioned Belgium too in this context.  I had to speak up at this point.  I have never been tempted to volunteer to go to war, though I entirely understand the motivation of those who do, and I consider myself privileged not to have been obliged to fight or otherwise contribute to a war effort for my country.  It has given me the luxury to pursue other interests.

That remark by the tour guide, who did not know I was English until I spoke up, struck a chord which had not been struck in me before.  Why would British people volunteer to fight when French and Germans did not want to?  The guide said something along the lines of "That war did not affect the British to begin with, so why did they want to get involved?"  Family members of mine, cousins of my grandfather on my mother's side, had indeed volunteered in the First World War, and not all of them came back - they were teenage boys when they volunteered - and they thought they were fighting for their country, even though their country had not been invaded, and did not have land frontiers to defend as France, Germany and Belgium did.  I said that young British men volunteered in that war because they wanted to save England (they would have put it that way) from the threat of war and conquest elsewhere in Europe.  This was not understood by the other members of the group  They appeared to think that fighting in a war was something you were forced to do and which always had bad consequences.

I do not discuss the merits of the First World War here, or indeed its causes, there have been and will be historians to do that, for the benefit of all of us.  That was one war.  There have been others since, including in Europe since 1945 (will no-one remember the siege of Sarajevo?), and there will be British volunteers - remember the Falklands?  There is an outlook in British, maybe I mean English, minds that says that where our people, whatever that means, are threatened, we must fight, or we will all be threatened.  French and German people do not think this way.  Discuss.

spoiler? smear? guilty?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF and potential Socialist candidate for President of France in 2012, was arrested last night just before the plane he was on took off from New York for Paris. A chambermaid at the hotel he had been in in New York earlier had accused him of attempted rape, sodomy and kidnapping.  The police were inclined enough to believe her to arrest him.  He will go before a judge today.  If found guilty he cannot of course be a candidate, and there are many who say he is the only credible Socialist who could give France a Socialist president for the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic, since Mitterrand did it in 1981.  If not, many will say, no smoke without fire.  If this is a set-up (he left the hotel in a hurry, without his mobile phone and some other personal things) it is a daring one.  The people who surround French presidents have been known to engage in smear and set-up and sting before, but this... the Socialist line is, naturally enough, let us see the outcome of this before any statements are made.  Sarko's people are, also naturally enough, saying nothing whatever.  DSK, as he is known here, is of course more than a French politician of the Left.  He is an internationally known mover in the world's economy, which is part of the reason why he would be such a credible candidate.  Up to now the Sarko line against him has been "What does he know about France?  He lives in Washington".  They have something else to play with now.  Where did it come from?  DSK's human weakness and the syndrome, common to many politicians, of engaging in risky behaviour, or something more sinister altogether?

they slapped his wrist

David Laws that is, for fiddling his expenses to the tune we hear of about ninety grand, some of which, but not all, he has paid back. But others, including David Chaytor, who was a colleague with whom I was on good terms, have gone to prison, after months of hell for them and their families. So what is the difference? oh. Apparently David Laws is a fab bloke who ought to be in Cabinet. Maybe so. I wouldn't know. David Chaytor had the talents to be in Cabinet too. But he is in prison and David Laws is not. Some things are just hard to understand. When the law does not seem to apply to everyone equally, that's when I find the world, or some parts of it, very hard to figure out.

Blogger has had an outage, readers may know, and while I can now post again they are still in the process of restoring posts from the last 36 hours or so. So you can relax, nothing sinister is going on.

the rats are the heroes

I saw this picture and a post  by Dr Sima Barnathia on the Independent blogs.  The animal is a giant African pouched rat, and as you can see because there is a human in the picture too, it is a lot larger than rattus norvegicus, the sewer rat of Europe, ever gets, despite popular myth ("as big as cats" - no, they never are).  Like all rats, these are intelligent, have no objection to social interaction with humans, and can be trained to carry out quite sophisticated tasks for food reward. These African rats make minefields safe.  Yes, really.  They can be trained to locate the mines by scent (all rats have a very acute sense of smell) and are too light to set the mines off.  Although each rat takes about nine months to train, they live for about eight years (the Norway rat lives three at most) and reproduce prolifically - training starts at six weeks, so they are not expensive.  As regular readers know, I have kept Norway rats as pets for many years, but have had none since coming to live in France, for no particular reason.  Time (a) to welcome a couple of rats into my life again (two because they are social animals, same gender for obvious reasons, males are more docile and friendly than females) and (b) to find out if there is a charity or foundation that supports this work (the blog post doesn't link to anything) - if there is I would like to support it.

Can readers help?

before we were three

this piece in Psychology Today, rather spookily illustrated with a picture of a staircase, was brought to my attention by Norm, for which thanks.  It indicates that while most of us remember hardly anything from before we were about three, young children have memories that go back further, but they lose the ability to recall those memories as they get older.  This appears not to be the same syndrome as in older adults,  whose memory changes too, but for short-term events, and it also appears not to be to do with the ability to put memory into words.  I always thought it was, and that I couldn't remember much other than certain visual images from before that age because I didn't know the words for those events at the time, but apparently I was wrong.  A recurrent nightmare I have had, of soft walls pressing in on me and making me feel I am suffocating, is I believe a memory of my own birth, and recurs as a nightmare because that is the only way my brain can process it.  And, which concurs with the Psychology today piece, I used to have this nightmare A Lot when I was a child, and the frequency of it has steadily diminished over the years.  It is several years since I have had it at all.  I am not alone in having that kind of (bad) dream, others have told me of very similar dreams.  It occurs to me to wonder if those born by Caesarian section have that dream.  And to mention in passing that babies born by Caesarian are much prettier (perfectly round heads and flawless skin) than others are.  Just musing...