Bernard-Henri Levy: A Caricature of Himself

I don't often link to Iowahawk because it is often profane and also because his extreme libertarianism sometimes borders on libertinism. However, with that disclaimer firmly in place, I have to admit that his satire is always witty, often hilariously funny and at times sublime in its skewering of the self-important, self-righteous, self-preoccupied Left.

His latest entry, entitled "Justice, I Spit on Your Justice" was purportedly found "Under a hors d'oeuvres tray at a Tina Brown cocktail party, the first draft of Bernard Henri-Levy's Daily Beast cri de coeur on behalf of his ami Dominique Strauss-Kahn"

It reads, in part:

I do not know what actually happened Saturday, the day before yesterday, in the room of the now famous Hotel Sofitel in New York.

I do not know — no one knows — because can there or cannot there be such a knowing? I do not know. All is but existential abyss. For who is to know this mocking mime which taunts us by its cruel appellation, "reality"? Even reality itself cannot know, because have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. We have only the leaks regarding the leaks of his so-called "DNA." Was he was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there, or if, or at which why, as was stated, he was having a mud bath in Baden-Baden with his daughter? Reality, you are a cruel mistress.

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, if knowing were indeed a matter of conceptual possibility—how a mere proletarian chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” to remove to the myriad of empty Dom Perignon bottles and half-smoked Gauloise crushed into beignets they should have expected from one of the most closely watched figures on the planet. In protest I have written to the Michelin guide and demanded they be demoted to 3 stars.

And I do not want to entertain the considerations of dime-store psychology that claims to penetrate the mind of the subject, thrusting remorselessly and without consent into his libido, observing, for example, that the number of the room (2806) corresponds to the date of the coming liberation of France by the Socialist Party (06.28), in which he is the uncontested favorite to storm the Normandy beaches, march triumphantly into Paris, free it from its Sarkozian captors, seduce to the grateful lovesick coquettes with his Hershey bars, and thereby concluding that this is all a Freudian slip, a subconsciously erotic role-play, and blah blah blah. Sometimes a baguette is only a baguette.

What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to a ravenous pack of dogs, a breed of which has neither been obedience trained nor clipped in the proper poofs. . . .

The best line comes half-way through:

This morning, I hold it against the jejune American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, dared treat this man of nobility as subject to the justice of the peasant.

I am driven to ennui by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along waving a stained hotel towel and accuse another fellow of any crime— even when the one accused has a pied-a-terre on the Left Bank and sits on several film prize juries.

And they think American cowboys and country rubes invite mocking. Do they have any idea? Any clue how ridiculous they look to normal people?

It goes on. Read it all here.

The American pop-culture allusion in the Conclusion, which will be invisible to the denizens of the Left Bank even though they undoubtedly will still be smarting from the insult in the penultimate paragraph, is deliciously ironic:

Enough is enough, I say. I will not stand idly by as the uncultured puritanical prudes of Les Etats-Unis and their mad inspector Javerts hound another hero of the French nation — as they did Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Ira Einhorn, and Theodore Bundy — for the mere sin of intellectual virility, and listening to the "oui" in a woman's eyes instead of the "non" in her screams of ecstasy.

J'Accuse America - with your filthy cheeseburgers, and your stupid tailfins, and your unnuanced medieval notions of "rape." Until, and unless, my friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn is freed from his political bondage, I refuse to provide you another paragraph of philosophy.

Bye-Bye, Miss Americaine-Pie. You can drive your Chevy to this Levy, but this Levy is dry.

Bravo, Iowahawk!