The D.S.K. Endgame

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

For almost two months now, the chattering classes in London, Paris, New York and the Hamptons have struggled to talk about anything but D.S.K. The old animalistic elements have exerted their magnetism: power, sex, violence and race.

The 20 minutes from 12:06 to 12:26 in suite 2806 of the Sofitel New York have become the object of a thousand theories and a French-American bust-up. Yes, there’s talk of a U.S. default and Greece is a bottomless pit, but those 1,200 seconds spent together on May 14 by Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a Guinean housekeeper trump every geostrategic lurch.

Race was long a subtheme in much of the breathless speculation on the encounter of a powerful white man with an African refugee woman from a country where 70 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day. But of late it has merited some French philosophizing. Bernard-Henri Lévy has suggested his friend Strauss-Kahn was the victim of “lynching, in sympathy with minorities, by their supposed friends.”

Huh?

That’s a convoluted formulation from a dashing philosopher.

(More here.)