For decades I have maintained this habit of putting down random comments and thoughts about a particular event or development that catches my attention. I do not always develop them into something bigger. I have hundreds of such lines written on scraps of paper. Many of them are not prompted by anything specific.
I am giving you this background for a reason. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested on the charges of sexually assaulting a chambermaid, I wrote down this comment on the virtual sticky pad on my desktop “The IMF tells the world to tighten its belt while its boss cannot wait to get rid of his own.” I thought it was a funny line that pithily summed up the situation but never published it.
I had forgotten about this line until this morning when I was reading Maureen Dowd’s sharp witted and stinging column on the very subject. Dowd asks in her column, “Was the chief of the International Monetary Fund telling other countries to tighten their belts while he was dropping his trousers?”
Unless Dowd stealthily flew into Naperville, found my house, broke in, came down to the basement, accessed my computer despite its difficult password, opened the sticky pad, copied that particular line from a whole lot of useless information, went back and wrote her column, I think she came up with it strictly on her own creative merit. Of course, there is the more fiendish possibility that she broke into my mind telepathically, went through various memory folders and found this line.
In any event, if she managed to pull off either, then I suppose she fully deserves the authorship of that humorous construct. There is nothing unusual about two totally unconnected people independently coming up with similar constructs. As I wrote in this blog sometime ago, there is only a limited number of thoughts -- that number may be huge but it is still limited-- that human beings can choose from. So statistically, it is possible for the same thought to pop up in two unconnected minds.
Dowd is justifiably incensed at the manner in which some in France have spun the Strauss-Kahn drama. While it is entirely possible that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, the story’s more compelling point is that the US law enforcement system responded to the allegation of a relatively powerless person to arrest someone who is easily one of the world’s most influential figures.
While I am no the subject of Dowd’s column, I have one disagreement with it. (I like the way I am presuming parity between her column and this blog to create the impression that both enjoy the same level of readership and, more importantly, that anyone gives a wet booger about what I think.)
It is strange that Dowd chooses the label of “European” to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same column for his own aggressive womanizing habits which led him to father a child with a member of his own household staff. “Another famous European with a disturbing pattern of sexual aggression got in trouble over the help this week: The ex-governor of California, who got elected after his wife, Maria Shriver, defended him so eloquently against groping charges.”
Why should Schwarzenegger still be called a European? He has been in the U.S. since 1968. I suspect he has earned his right to be called an American. And if it is fine to describe him as a European male because it somehow helps explain his egregious behavior, then every white American male should also be described in those terms. More strangely, this makes it appear as if European men have a special propensity to be boorish and sexually aggressive simply because they are European. The other European being Strauss-Kahn.
Other than that Dowd as usual makes some telling points.
Note to self: This is quite a confection considering you had nothing this morning. I did not want to write more about the Tahawwur Rana trial.