Law, order, and the American style of gossip

While tabloid culture is transnational, a peculiarly American pattern is apparent in the collusion between the official investigators - the police, the prosecutors, the congressional committees - and the vast, empowered observing public. And yet this American style of obsession may have universal implications. Is it just our way of working out perennial human questions?

The French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy finds something “pornographic” in the way Strauss-Kahn was first treated, especially in the so-called “perp walk,” the ritual whereby law enforcement collaborates with explosive media coverage - a broad public seemingly invited to take “cannibalistic” pleasure in the humiliation of one who has yet to be convicted. A puritanical condemnation, combining the speculation, rumor, and guesses in which pundits trade, can simultaneously transform the condemned into an object of rampant titillation, especially when the matter is sex. For the proud and the powerful, the perp walk, replayed in endless loops on cable and over social networks, can be a grotesque form of punishment that obliterates the presumption of innocence. Indeed, as Strauss-Kahn’s accuser is now learning herself, just to be accused of misbehavior in the amplified megaphone of round-the-clock media can make subsequent and more rigorous adjudication anticlimactic.

All of this comes to a head in a courtroom, where, unless a deal is struck, the Strauss-Kahn case heads next week. The nation’s attention will be riveted, and why not? Dramas of the court define the mythic center of the public imagination - the never-ending reruns of “Law & Order’’ being the most obvious case in point. In the courtroom, the betrayal of virtue is reckoned with, but the legal forum’s very ubiquity as a cultural holy-of-holies suggests that far more is being dealt with than the miscreant behavior of marginal characters. Is it that an egalitarian nation is hostile, or at best ambivalent, toward pre-eminence? Is the common, if mostly unacknowledged, anguish of having fallen short of ambition somehow assuaged by the spectacle of downfall?