Why Is this Woman Smiling? C’mon, you know the answer to that!

As’ad AbuKhalil in his blog post asks, regarding the photo above of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife who is smiling after charges were dropped against him, why is she smiling when the dropped charges mean her husband was engaged in consensual sex.  I hope his was a rhetorical question.  A fairer question would be why has corporate media and particularly New York city media taken such a like to an avowed socialist and former communist?

As for the former, Strauss-Kahn has returned to being  one of the most powerful men in the world  after these charges were dropped.  Even though he is no longer in charge of the IMF, a vindicated DSK could declare his candidacy for the presidency of France in an election only a year away. If he were to defeat Sarkozy, the hugely unpopular incumbent, Strauss-Kahn would then govern a country that is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and has the world’s third-biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons. That’s why his wife is smiling.  Power is an aphrodisiac that his wife Anne Sinclair has grown accustomed to and likes.  She lives with, tolerates his very public infidelities in order to remain his wife, close to the center of power.  She has abrogated her role as a wife and taken on the role  of a call girl, prostitute, mistress.  In the process, she is teaching her two sons from her first husband a valuable lesson in how French women are supposed to behave.

I think the answer to the latter question lies in the racial, socio-economic complexities of this case.  An African housekeeper who has a questionable past is far less valuable and certainly more vulnerable than a white reporter reporting during the Arab spring from Cairo, Egypt who claims she was traumatized, raped and then goes into a months long seclusion before emerging to tell her story.  No aspects of Laura Logan’s story were questioned or examined, except by bloggers like us, and consequently journalistically she remains pure and her story blemish free.  Not so for DSK’s victim who faces potential legal action  by DSK himself, which is meant to show to the poor and disenfranchised when they are pitted against the rich and powerful there  is nor should they expect justice.  No doubt that’s another reason why Strauss-Kahn’s wife is smiling.