“Haiti doesn’t have a voice. It doesn’t have an identity. We, Haitians, need to take back the role of storytellers and tell our own history.” This was one of the reasons for filmmaker Raoul Peck to follow the reconstruction efforts in his home country after the earthquake in January 2010. Peck emphasizes that he was not planning on filming crying women and dead bodies in the streets. His goal was to challenge the country’s role of victim and turn the cameras on those who normally do the storytelling and the observing.

The result is the documentary “Fatal Assistance” (Assistance Mortelle), a painful 100-minute exposé on how international development and humanitarian aid have gone bad. It is a story about well-intentioned donors and aid organizations that have lost themselves in rituals of red tape, having become the inefficient players of a rudderless multinational aid-industry. Last week the documentary had its American premiere during the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in cooperation with the Margaret Mead Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. Peck himself was available for questions after the screening and I had access to an earlier interview that Peck had given to a crew from Haiti Reporters before the film’s first screening in Haiti.

Peck has documented the efforts of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) that was created shortly after the earthquake. With the Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and Bill Clinton as its co-presidents, the IHRC was tasked to oversee the spending of billions of dollars of international assistance in a way that was in alignment with the concerns of Haitians and the Haitian government. It was not new to see that after more than two years of “reconstruction,” too many Haitians are still living in extremely poor living conditions. Or, to quote a man who has lost his house in the earthquake, “in houses that the donors wouldn’t even let their dog live in.” It was new to see a two-hour indictment of those who try to help. The main critiques are that the international organizations left the Haitians and its government out of equation and that subsequently, too much of the money has been spent in terribly inefficient and non-transparent ways.

Economic rules that have long been proven to work elsewhere have been ignored and turned on their head. One example is the problem of NGOs that keep prices and salaries artificially high because it is in the interest of their organizations and their donors, while it ruins the workings of the local market economy and destroys incentives. Another painful phenomenon is the urge and conviction of many do-gooders that this moment in history will be Haiti’s finest hour to start with a clean slate, and en passant can function as a laboratory for people’s craziest ideas. As Priscilla Phelps, an American adviser on housing and neighborhood reconstruction explains in the film, “We’re dealing with what people can think of in their wildest dreams. We had an offer for the development of plastic houses. Plastic houses? But it is not only houses but people come with all kinds of products and ideas!”

Media have long been reinforcing the frame of Haiti as the ultimate example of a failed country. Raoul Peck is tired of the endless refrain that the country is too corrupt, its government too weak and its citizens too helpless. In his film, Peck points the accusing finger at the international organizations, Clinton’s organization chiefly among them, but he lets the Haitian government easily get away without much critical questioning. Only one of the heroes in the film, the Head of Sanitation in Port-au-Prince, squarely puts blame on both the local government and foreign helpers for the overall lack of progress. It causes the film to lose some of its strength and begs the question if this was the trade-off for Peck after getting such extensive access to filming the former prime minister and President René Préval. Interestingly, after the showing in Port-au-Prince, many Haitians were critical of Peck for giving the former Haitian government carte blanche.

While not during the documentary, in interviews Peck admits that corruption in Haiti certainly is a problem, but he says it cannot be used as an excuse. In the meantime, the atmosphere in the streets of Port-au-Prince and among Haitians and the foreign visitors isn’t changing for the better. At a recent conference on investing in Haiti, the Haitian crowd answered a berating of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) practices with cheers and applause. During a walk in the neighborhood of Delmas in Haiti, you will hear young kids at the market place yell at foreigners, “go back to your own country,” and many a disillusioned aid worker is wondering if they have overstayed their welcome.

With his film, Peck wishes to start a discussion, which should have started years ago. And it is not only about Haiti. Of course, discussions about a better approach to foreign aid have been brewing for at least ten years. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly represent the two main camps between a more clinically planned strategy and a local market based approach to foreign assistance. Peck, clearly closer to Easterly, pleads for stronger involvement of the people for whom the assistance is organized in the first place. Peck: “If all these NGOs would have been private companies, they would long have been shut down, and their CEOs would have landed in prison. …We have sixty years of experience of development work. The current approach doesn’t work. It needs to stop.”

In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.

The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.

The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.

It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results.  The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. The Republicans are giving ground. The grand bargain to avoid the fiscal cliff will represent a major change in policy, with broad public support.

Boehner is talking tough but is gathering support of his party to enable a deal on President Obama’s terms, the Times reports in another story. The Republicans will support now what Boehner negotiates.

Even Rand Paul is supporting Harry Reid’s proposal in the Senate to increase taxes on the rich, albeit with a professed assurance that this will hurt the economy and in the long run hurt Democrats. Rand’s ideological conviction enables him to politically act. He pretends to know that taxing the rich will ruin the economy and be good in the end for libertarian Republicans such as himself. But note: he is accommodating to the new commonsense as he expresses a conviction that in the long run it will end.

Shockingly, following the same pattern, Ann Coulter, the extreme right wing Fox commentator, scandalized her host Sean Hannity by maintaining that Republicans support Obama’s tax proposals. Rightists are recognizing that the winds are pushing left.

And the far right is moving to the margins. Witness Boehner’s demotion of four Tea Party Republicans from choice committee assignments in the House of Representatives , and Jim DeMint, the Tea Party Senator, choosing exile at the Heritage Foundation, as its president, over completing his term in office, a luxurious exile worth one million dollars a year.

There are also more creative Republican responses. Rising stars in the Republican Party, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, gave speeches to a Jack Kemp tribute dinner, which emphasized the need to address the concerns and needs of the less advantage. I think that David Brooks reading of the significance of this is on the mark. There is a new “Republican Glasnost,” an openness to ideas, beyond trickle-down, ideas that could positively affect the life chances of the vast majority of the American citizenry, ideas that recognize positive government roles, that address the concerns of the less privileged.

The age of the attacks on big government is over. The times are truly changing. The New York Times today, under the headline “Obama Trusted on Economy,” reports on a Heartland Monitor Poll, finding broad support for Obama’s economic policies, with little support for  the Reaganesque Republican approach. The age of debate about good government has begun in an America that is becoming more comfortable with and confident of its pluralist identity, with more citizen involvement, and in which eloquence and intelligence matters. The election mattered.

On a more sober note: I don’t think that all is well in the Republic, that we are entering a new era of good feelings, that the President has the answer to all challenging problems. On many issues, the environment, national security, privacy and citizen rights, education and poverty, I think his policies and programs are wanting. I agree with the many leftist criticisms of Obama found on the left. But I think now is the time to push for corrections, with a chance to achieve them. As Obama himself said once, he has to be pushed to do the right thing.

I also think that the ideological polarization of the American public and its leadership is still a very serious problem. I wish the Tea Party were a thing of the past, but I fear it isn’t, and I hope the Occupy Movement will more practically engage in our pressing social problems, but I worry that it may not. It needs to work on speaking American, as Tom Hayden once put it in the 60s, stop dreaming about utopian visions, anarchism and the like, that make no sense to the broad American public, and address the incompleteness of the Obama transformation in ways that the public can understand and support. The emerging commonsense makes this possible. Obama has moved the center left, which has long been his project. The task for leftists is to move it further, engaging their fellow citizens.

Just about all observers seemed to agree that the Democratic Convention, with the speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton highlighted, was an unqualified success, especially when compared to the Republican convention and the speeches of Ann Romney, Congressman Ryan and Governor Romney. Post convention polls and political events confirm this assessment. A narrative was set up by the Democrats, establishing expectations for the President and the Governor, and in the past couple of weeks, they each have been following the Democrats’ narrative, suggesting electoral success, with the prospects for a strengthened Obama Presidency. The political conventions were significant theatrical performances. The Democrats had a hit, apparently with lasting effects.

Romney the unsteady parochial plutocrat, who doesn’t understand the daily struggles of ordinary Americans or the complex and difficult global challenges: witness the private Boca Raton fundraiser and the response to his response to the crisis in Egypt, Libya and the Muslim world. Obama the elegant warm leader, carefully calibrating American response to the crisis in North Africa and the Islamic world and understanding the concerns of “the middle class,” a man who responds to the Romney gaffes with well timed amusement and understated criticism.

But Obama’s acceptance speech received mixed reviews. It was judged to have missed the mark, by the left, right and center, and has been overlooked as it contributed to the convention’s success. The criticism came from all angles: not enough specifics about how the second term would differ from the first, on the one hand, too much like a State of the Union address (i.e. too policy oriented, not inspirational enough) on the other. And then there was David Brooks, who truly irked me, complaining that Obama lacked a clearly identifiable singular political project that would define his second term as healthcare defined his first.

The responses indicated to me less about critical judgment of the President’s address, more about the conflicting expectations Obama faced and, I believe, successfully addressed. This was substantially represented by the false choice Brooks asserted Obama had to make: focus on environmental degradation, economic growth and social justice, or fiscal responsibility and tax reform. This would clearly be bad politics and weaken governing prospects.

Jeffrey C. Alexander’s gets to the point in his piece today at The Huffington Post, though I think he exaggerates a little:

Voters do not decide whom to vote for by weighing their objective costs and benefits. They are not calculating machines, but emotional and moral human beings. Searching for the meanings of things, they want to make sense of political life, working out a grand narrative of where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re going in the future.

Well, perhaps weighing costs and benefits plays some role. But clearly, a good believable story, addressing costs, benefits and interests (think jobs, taxes and healthcare), given by an appealing statesman, is extremely important. People imagine a relationship with a potential leader and their linked fortunes, and decide which way to go.

As Alexander put it about Romney:

With Obama’s help, [the] Romney-character emerged as Bain ‘Capitalist,’ the quarter-billionaire who won’t tell us about his taxes and parked his hidden money offshore. Romney may have brain power, but he lacks symbolic soul. His character signifies self over community, a glad hander who’ll tell us what we want to hear, not what he deeply believes.

In contrast, Alexander continues, the President presented himself in a new sober role: “At least for now, Obama can no longer be a hero, but he can be represented,” indeed he successfully presented himself, “as working heroically for our side.”

Brooks and the other pundits misjudged Obama, as they didn’t seem to appreciate the method to his apparent madness, a cool speech in the middle of a hot political environment. Performing his political persona, revealing his character, showing the electorate and the world his serious authoritative stance in very trying times.

I listen to Obama’s speeches with a deep appreciation. If he makes a rhetorical move that I didn’t expect and don’t at first understand, I start by questioning myself, not him. Such, for example, was how I listened to his inaugural address. Commentators judged it to be a downer, below Obama’s campaign norm. Sitting in my community center with friends and neighbors, I also was a little disappointed. But looking back, it was the properly sober speech for sobering times, pointing to the very real difficulties ahead, rather than celebrating victory and imagining dreams. He understood the situation we are in and spoke to it in persuasive ways.

This is exactly what he did in his convention speech. He understood that the warmth of his personality was portrayed by his wife. That the policy debate, celebrating what he has accomplished and contrasting his program and its seriousness with that of his rivals, was expertly presented by Bill Clinton. Indeed that all different facets of the Democrats program and appeal were represented in a wide variety of speeches about woman’s rights and dignity, a truly diverse view of American citizenship and rights, concern for veterans and national defense (this not always to my liking) and much more. Obama revealed his character, his sound judgment, his understanding of the situation we are in, as individuals and as a nation. Review the speech and see how well this was done. It’s interesting to me to note that on YouTube over three and a half million people have viewed the video, suggesting that many are deliberately re-considering the speech.

The Democrats in the first two days of their convention manufactured news. But I think it is important to understand that it wasn’t propaganda or an infomercial, as many overly cynical academics and commentators would suggest, from Noam Chomsky to Joe Nocera. Rather, like the Republican Convention last week, it was a modern day media event, a televisual combination of demonstration and manifesto, revealing, or as my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan would put it “monstrating,” where the party stands, who stands with the party, how it accounts for the past, present and future. The first two days were particularly about the past and the present, identifying the party. Today, Obama will chart the future. This, at least, is how I understand the storyline. We will know, soon enough, if I am right.

The structure of the presentation, thus far, has been interesting and informative. There was a clear understanding on the part of the convention planners. Before 10:00 PM, without the major networks broadcasting, with a much smaller audience watching, was the demonstration slot. It was the time for showing the stand of the party and demonstrating who stands behind it. Between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, with the full prime time audience watching, the manifesto was presented by the major speakers: on Tuesday, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and First Lady Michelle Obama, on Wednesday, Massachusetts Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and former President Bill Clinton.

The coherence of the Democrats’ presentation was striking. This contrasted with the Republican convention, in which candidate and platform were in tension, and the personal qualities and not the political plans of the candidate took priority, and the speeches didn’t add up. The worst of it was Eastwood’s performance piece. It represented accurately the state of the party, with its pure ideological commitments and tensions, as I have already discussed here earlier during the primary season.

The Democrats revealed some differences of opinion, in symbolic floor scuffle on God and Jerusalem (pandering nonsense it seems to me), and also as the more left of center Warren gave a full throated critique of Wall Street, while Clinton more explicitly and softly appealed to the center (see video below). Yet the party was clearly united in its support of Obama and its recognition of his first term achievements, expressing its unity and diversity in the speeches in their embodied words.

Two examples, not given much attention, politically clear, elegantly presented:

Jared Polis, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Colorado –

My name is Jared Polis. My great-grandparents were immigrants. I am Jewish. I am gay. I am a father. I am a son. I am an entrepreneur. I am a congressman from Colorado. I am always an optimist. But first and foremost, I am an American.

And the America I believe in is the America Barack Obama believes in.

A severely wounded Iraq veteran, “one of the first Army women to fly combat missions in Iraq,” Tammy Duckworth, candidate for the US House of Representatives, Illinois, walked up to the podium on two prosthetic legs. She described how she grew up in the family of an impoverished Vietnam veteran, and explained how her family managed and she advanced herself through food stamps, public education and Pell grants. This enabled her to finish high school and college, going on to earn her command of a Blackhawk helicopter company. She testified to her work with President Obama.

President Obama asked me to help keep our sacred trust with veterans of all eras at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. We worked to end the outrage of vets having to sleep on the same streets they once defended. We improved services for female veterans. I reached out to young vets by creating the Office for Online Communications.

Barack Obama has also lived up to his responsibilities as commander-in-chief, ending the war in Iraq, refocusing on Afghanistan and eradicating terrorist leaders including bin Laden. President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs—because America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.

And there were many more speeches that fit a pattern which I think is of crucial importance. Each testified not only to their political support of the President, but also to the crucial difference between the major themes of the Democratic Party as opposed to the Republican: Government can and has been a part of the solution, not the primary problem.

On women’s rights this was expressed most directly by Cecile Richards,  Lilly Ledbetter,  and Sandra Fluke. Each spoke about their specific experience, highlighted the principles they drew from the experience and indicated how this points in the direction of appreciating the achievement and promise of President Obama. Experience, not abstract ideological commitment, illuminated the political approach.

Thus, the remarkable elegance of Michelle Obama’s speech.  It had an apparently traditional approach, too traditional for some of my friends. The wife of the President spoke to his human side, about her concerns for their family as he decided to run, and about her conviction that their decision to proceed on this course was good for them and good for the nation. She testified to the quality of his character, as Ann Romney testified to the quality of her husband. But Mrs. Obama went further. His political project, and her support of it, emerges from their experience and what they have in common with their fellow citizens. The First Lady, and many of the other speakers at the convention, gave substance to the classic feminist slogan: the personal is political.

This was beautifully revealed as well the keynote address by Julián Castro. He poignantly expressed his version of the Barack Obama rendering of the American dream and the American experience (the high note of Obama’s keynote address), in Castro’s case as experienced by a Mexican American: hard work, support of family, government help, including support for education, with aid from and given to community, and, thus, out of many, the singular American success story. Benita Veliz testified to this Latin American variation on the American dream, by illuminating how it is experienced by those who for no fault of their own came to the country undocumented. Congressman Luis Gutierrez applauded the President for his approach to immigration in stark contrast to Mitt Romney and his policy of “self deportation.”

President Clinton brought these strands and others together in a remarkable speech last night. If you haven’t yet, it is worth viewing in full. In form and content, it is a masterpiece. His focus mirrored the deep concerns of the American public about the state of the economy, as he argued that President Obama has been successful in addressing the crisis and also succeeded in foreign policy and addressing many other issues (the speech was long). Clinton’s criticism of Romney – Ryan and the Republicans was forceful but presented with humor. He considered the contrast. He combined analysis of policy detail, with warm humorous affect and passionate commitment.

This afternoon the media chatter is that the President is going to have a hard time distinguishing himself, as he speaks this evening in the shadows of the former President and his wife, both of whom have higher approval ratings than he. My guess is that the President Obama will conclude the convention with a passionate statement concerning his plans and expectations for the second term, drawing on the power of the previous speakers, Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama, but also the many others. If he does, he will not only have greatly strengthened his chances for his re-election, but conclude a convention that in sum has communicated where the Democrats stand, who they are and what they plan to do.  The news from Charlotte was manufactured, but it still was important.

It’s sometimes said that presidents don’t control the economic weather but rather it controls them. We have reached the moment, however, when magical powers are going to be attributed to the presidency, and the current incumbent, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, will be charged with incompetence in using them. One manifestation of this thinking is the Romney campaign’s recent claim that women have suffered more than 90 percent of the jobs lost since Obama became president, a blatant attempt to undermine his lead among women voters. This claim involves two distortions; and most of the mainstream media have caught what I view as the smaller one—namely, that the claim ignores the full history of the recession and the huge job losses borne by men when George Bush was president.

The larger distortion has generally gone unnoticed, indeed, it has been mostly accepted. According to it, some 740 thousand jobs have been lost on Obama’s watch. This claim is another expression of the Republican mantra about a “failed” presidency.  And it involves some statistical crafting to fit the data to the argument, manipulating data in a way that we are likely to see a lot more of as the campaign proceeds, especially given the huge amounts of money available to hire “researchers” to come up with “facts.”

The Romney campaign arrives at the estimate by attributing to Obama all of the job losses since February 1, 2009, even though he had barely taken office at that point and there was not enough time for any of the new administration’s policies to have an impact. To understand how much timing matters in this case, recall that Obama entered the White House when the labor market was already in a swoon, and the number of jobs lost that February was more than 700 thousand, on a par with the losses for the final months of Bush’s second term. If we tally the jobs record of the current administration from March 1 instead of February 1, then the jobs deficit under Obama shrinks dramatically to 16,000 and, with any luck, will be erased in coming months.

This dependence of any jobs statistics to the choice of a starting point obviously leaves the question of how best to characterize the Obama administration’s record, which has been challenged not just from Republican ranks but also from the left, by Paul Krugman and Noam Scheiber (in his book, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery), among others. There can be no doubt (see chart below) that the job market has been largely stagnant since the end of the Clinton years, except for the run-up that started in late 2003, fueled at least partly by the bubble that collapsed with the onset of the deep recession in December, 2007. Today, the total number of jobs in the U.S. economy is a mere 350 thousand higher than it was in February, 2001, when George W. Bush assumed office.

It’s not my place to assess the economic policies pursued by these two administrations and their role in this stagnation, and in the event, I lack the competence for such a task. Rather, in light of the consistent Republican charges of a “failed” President, especially because of high unemployment, I am looking for an empirical standard by which to assess labor-market changes while Obama has been President. The record under George W. Bush is an obvious reference point, since both presidents have had to face similar structural forces determining their economic weather, such as the growing impacts of globalization and computer-driven automation on the labor market, exemplified by accelerated off-shoring of jobs and the emergence of manufacturing jobs that cannot be filled because they require technical skills possessed by few in the U.S. workforce. Moreover, like Mitt Romney, George Bush is a Harvard MBA who worked in the private sector before entering politics and depended on tax cuts tilted toward the affluent to stimulate the economy.

There is also the issue of how to temporally calibrate the comparison, especially because the early months of the Obama presidency were affected by the precipitous economic slide that he was not responsible for. Starting the comparison therefore with the end of the recession, designated as June, 2009, by the official arbiter of economic cycles, the National Bureau of Economic Research, seems appropriate. The much shallower recession that took place during Bush’s first year gives us an equivalent starting point for him.

This calibrated comparison clearly turns out in favor of Obama. As the chart shows, some 2.3 million jobs have been created since the end of the most recent recession, while in the equivalent period after the end of the earlier one, about 700 thousand jobs were added to payrolls. There is, as noted, still a jobs deficit for the entire period Obama has been president, but that was also true for George W. Bush throughout his first term. In fact, the jobs market was still in negative territory when his second term began.

So, when the mantra of the “failed” presidency starts humming, and Mitt Romney characterizes Obama as one of the most “ineffective” presidents of all time, be wary when jobs statistics are hauled out to support these charges. The “data” are likely to be phony, to have been contrived to match the claims. They shouldn’t be allowed to enter public discourse unchallenged.

An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history, Judith Shapiro. He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China, confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free.

Poland

Then there is Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 70s and 80s, and later after the changes of ’89, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.  And also importantly for me a personal friend and a friend and colleague of many at my university, the New School for Social Research, a frequent visitor since he received an honorary degree from us at the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile. He is memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in special ways. He reminds his readers of something in the past and proposes it as a guide for future action, thinking between past and future, as Hannah Arendt would put it. Thus, in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism,” he remembers the so called Polish positivists of the 19^th century who proposed pragmatic reform over romantic revolt, and he remembers those who joined the communist system from Catholic parties and made small differences in the post Stalinist period. He presents such memories to his readers as he proposed in 1976 a new course of resistance to the communist system, remembering the failures of 1956 in Budapest and of 1968 in Prague. He proposes not revolution from below or reform from above, but reform from below for social change. He proposed a vision of change that anticipated, even guided, the action that became Solidarność and contributed in a significant way to the democratic postscript of the Communist experience.

And I also am very much involved in what I have called the enlightenment prejudice. In my work on the relative autonomy of culture as one of the definitive structures of modernity, I have posited a positive connection between collective memory and creative independence. I studied artists who remembered the past, a variety of artistic traditions, to establish their distinctive work apart from the orthodoxies of the old regime of previously existing socialism.  Solzhenitsyn used the officially available works of Tolstoy to create a new literary alternative to socialist realism (the post-Stalinist Lukacs not withstanding). Grotowski used Stanislavsky.  My beloved Polish student theaters drew upon the literary and theatrical imaginations of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz. The inherited socialist and nationalist cultural traditions available because of official support for a dominant interpretation, the officially supported collective memory of the cultural past, provided the grounds for critical creative innovation.  One of my favorite quotes comes from Milan Kundera. It comes from his The Art of the Novel. He asserts “The novelist needs answer to no one but Cervantes.” (Kundera, 1988, p.144) His is an argument for a specialized collective memory as the basis for artistic creation. When this is enacted a significant support for cultural freedom is constituted. I have worked with this insight repeatedly in my comparative studies in the sociology of the culture.

With such observations in mind, why then the full title of this presentation, why am I presenting a paper not only for but also against memory, when collective memory is so important for human achievements that I deeply admire and have dedicated much of my career to studying? I now turn to some details, some small things, to explain.

It has to do with a complexity of the sociology of collective memory, much examined by specialists on the topic. I am just looking at this complexity from a different point of view, not only asking how we work to remember but also how we work to forget, understanding, as has been often been observed, that memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin.

In order to remember together, we must forget together, pay attention to some things that happened by ignoring others. And sometimes, we need, or at least want, to change what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. This is what Michnik was trying to work on when he came up with his politically wise counsel: “amnesty without amnesia. It is also what happens in the various memory battles over controversial exhibits that reveal hitherto unexamined aspects of the past, as for example, Vera Zolberg has studied in the case of the controversies over Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. Or, as Robin Wagner Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, analyzed in their brilliant analysis of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. People go to the memorial calling a truce in a cultural war, forgetting their differences on the War, at least situationally. They remember together a shared, though differently understood, collective experience.

In the idea of amnesty without amnesia, Michnik wanted to pretend that it is possible to have it both ways: to both remember the injustices and suffering of Polish society under communist rule, and to avoid the problems of revolutionary justice. He wanted to forgive, but not forget.  There was a real practical problem with this. Poland is a complex modern differentiated society, meaning many different people, doing different things at different times. It is because of these differences that Michnik’s idea could not succeed.  It required concerted forgetting that he didn’t work on. Michnik, standing in a very privileged position in society, could come up with his subtle idea, and his informed reading public, both at home and abroad (including me), were persuaded. But when he acted following his idea and was seen by a broader, differently positioned public, the meaning of his actions was understood in very different ways. He presented his subtle position, but in his actions he appeared to the less informed, the less well connected, to just forget what happened, or worse, he seemed to want people to forget what happened because he was somehow implicated in the crimes of the past.  Beyond the political class, when he had his weekly meetings with his former jailers and publicly treated them with respect and deference, he appeared as one who didn’t remember and who was complicit in the injustices of the communist regime.

In a sense that was Michnik’s point. He wanted to act as if the wrongs of the past were forgotten so that the pressing problems of the present and the near future could be acted upon. Being too involved with the past would not allow for sensible action. Because he didn’t convince the broad public to willfully forget together in their actions, while they remembered what happened in the stories they told each other about theirs past, the problems of “lustration,” of purging those complicit in the communist regime, has haunted Poland ever since. Thankfully the party that was building its future around this theme of retribution has not too long ago lost in Poland’s parliamentary elections, and the progressive collective project of forgetting is again on the agenda.

Of course, I am being ironic using the phrase “progressive forgetting,” but only a bit. Looking closely at politics, looking at what I call the politics of small things, I have become very impressed by the importance of forgetting in developing a free politics. The politics of small things is a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman. When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it has profound democratic capacity. As Hannah Arendt has theorized, it constitutes political power as the opposite of coercion.

Israel – Palestine

But each element of this conceptualization of micropolitics has to be worked on. It is in fact much harder than my simple formulation makes it seem. Meeting and speaking to each other, developing a capacity to act in concert is no easy matter for Israelis and Palestinians. There are the physical mechanics of occupation, which are meant to separate people, and, less apparent though no less significant, there are memory problems.

Consider scenes from Encounter Point a moving film about The Parents Circle, a Palestinian Israeli organization of bereaved families for peace. The film depicts the extraordinary side of rather ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. These are people who have lost love ones in the conflict, victims of wars, military raids, suicide bombings, terror of the state apparatus and of resistance organizations. The group members are dedicated to not having their loss used to justify a politics of retribution. It started in Tel Aviv, among a group of Israeli parents. It now has both Palestinian and Israeli branches, with the Palestinian group slightly outnumbering the Israeli one. The groups operate independently and also work jointly.  Getting together, a crucial part of their endeavors, though, is not easy. Travel restrictions make Palestinian movements within Israel proper difficult if not impossible. And Israeli citizens also are restricted in their movements in the occupied territories. In the film we see a group meeting in Jerusalem. What we don’t see are the obstacles and checkpoints that had to be surmounted for the Palestinians to take part. We are shown an attempt by the Israeli group to meet a group in the West Bank, and though they finally do get through, their difficulties are clearly depicted. It includes a postscript of the Palestinian host of the gathering being arrested as a terrorist, but released from prison thanks to his Parents Circle Israeli colleagues. Road blocks, checkpoints, official regulations and fear are the group’s immediate obstacles. But memory is a more profound one.

In the report of the Jerusalem meeting we see a discussion between two families who lost their daughters to the conflict, in an anti terrorist military operation in Bethlehem and in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. It is a quick empathetic conversation, casual, seemingly not of profound significance. But we see more outside the meeting. We learn that the family from Bethlehem had the bad luck of driving their late model car on a shopping trip on the same day a group of suspected terrorists were driving the same model. And when their car came into view of the Israeli army, they were attacked and their daughter was killed. We see the funeral, a full martyr’s ceremony, with aggressive nationalist, almost militaristic, rhetoric and with the father actively taking part. And we see the father, later, now a member of Parents Circle, as deputy major of the city. This is a moving sequence of events. The family, of course, has not forgotten the loss of their daughter, but in their actions, they are undermining a dominant way of remembering, trying to create another way, apparently with some success. Their Israeli counterparts do the same thing. We see the father who lost his daughter to the suicide bombing go to school groups and argue not only for peace and reconciliation, but also against the linking of memory and retribution. He may not convince, but he is, at least, opening up new possibilities. Both fathers know that as they work in their own communities, they make it possible to work together, and in doing so, they are creating new political alternatives to the logic of the central authorities, by redefining their situation and acting together based on that redefinition.  As I work on such politics of small things in Israel Palestine, formally named as an SSRC project “Micropolitics: Spaces of Possibility?” I am struck by the fact that working against memory, or, at least, “re-remembering,” collectively remembering in a different way, is a first act of establishing a space of possibility. This is the case in the many examples of alternative practices in the region, which I would be happy to discuss with you in the question and answer period. Representative of these in a highly dramatic way is a movement that Yifat Gutman is studying: an Israeli Jewish group that is working to remember, in Hebrew, the Nakba, the disaster, as the moment of Israeli independence is commemorated among Palestinians. As they describe themselves on their website: “Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948.” They go on to describe their goal: “We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes.” Note how their project of coming together is pitted against memory. It is about remembering in a different way, re-remembering. It’s not a Jewish memory of the Jewish state, but a memory for an Israel for all its people.

The United States

“Re–remembering,” a notion Toni Morrison presented in her masterpiece, Beloved. She challenged the collective memory of slavery in America. When I read the book, it helped me to find my position on the ethical question of the relationship between poetry and atrocity, first opened by Adorno. I think Morrison revealed that necessity of poetry, the necessity of artistic imagination after horror. It makes an ethical political life possible.  More specifically for this presentation, Morrison has helped me understand how memory works, and how working against memory is so important. Her idea about re-remembering is exactly my point in this paper. So I will conclude with how what I have said thus far applies to the American experience, and specifically how it relates to the American dilemma, race in America.

We are living through extraordinary times in the United States, markedly more hopeful than our most recent past: a Presidential election campaign in which the likely victor will be either an African American or a woman. As I wrote these words, and as I now utter them, I am revealing the problems I wish to raise. Perhaps I should have said “an African American man or a white woman?” The former coupling, “African American or woman,” assumes the normality of the white man, the latter, “African American man or white woman,” seems to emphasize the masculinity of Obama and, it is my sense, especially, the whiteness of Clinton.  There is a dilemma here even revealed at the moment that the issue is raised. The politicians, the media and the public are struggling with the problem of memory and with the problem of forgetting. That is my point, and part of the struggle is to work not only on collective remembering, but also on collective forgetting, not only for, but also against memory.

How do we remember gender and racial injustices and also overcome them? This re- remembering, this for and also against memory involves tough work, work that occurs in and through interaction. When we remember the significance of race and gender, we are perpetuating their continued salience. But if we don’t pay attention, if we imagine that the significance of Obama’s and Clinton’s candidacies as being about two able people who “happen to be” a black and a woman, we don’t do any better. Clearly the moment that either of them becomes President will be of great significance beyond their personal qualities. I personally think that Clinton’s case is more complicated in that she is Bill’s wife, and for me less compelling (as many know about me). So let me discuss the issues involved more closely in the case of Obama and race.

(Written on January 23, 2008) Obama has faced a dilemma, he is running to be President of the United States, not the first black President. He needs to make appeals to the public that don’t draw attention first to race and our memories of what race means in America. His candidacy is reported in the press most often without reference to race. His opponents engage him in debate, also most often as if race were not central. All are working against memory, but it is not easy. Race matters in America and although acting as if it did not, does have situational effect, the effect does not last, because we remember.

After his surprising victory in Iowa, blacks came to realize that it just might be possible that white America might elect an African American, and started moving in his direction. Whites realized the same thing, and then suddenly the problem presented itself to the fore. It was collectively remembered. Nothing crassly racist, but Clinton, the former President, called the black candidate a kid. Clinton, the candidate, said odd things about the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baynes Johnson. What these things meant, whether they were subtle attempts to use racial attitudes to diminish Obama’s legitimacy as a serious politician, is in the eyes of the partisan beholder, much debated in the media and by the public. In the rabid Obama camp that is my family, I (the author of The Cynical Society) am the only one that thinks that this may not have been an intentional political calculation.  I actually don’t know whom this helped, perhaps Obama in the short run in South Carolina, perhaps Clinton, in the long run, on Super Tuesday. But I am here not as a talking head, not as a race track handicapper.  Rather, I want to show how working against memory is an important part of political action — note how difficult it has been to work against the memory of race and racism in the campaign.

In South Carolina, the former President attacked the press, noting that his wife may lose this primary because of the African American vote and complaining that the press is being fed a line about the Clintons injecting race into the campaign. As the New York Times observed:

Mr. Clinton also suggested in public remarks that his wife might lose here because of race. Referring to her and Mr. Obama, he said, ‘They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender, and that’s why people tell me that Hillary doesn’t have a chance to win here.’

And a little further down in the same article:

Mr. Clinton said no one in the audience in Charleston had asked him about how race was being used in the campaign. ‘They [the Obama campaign] are feeding you [the press] this because they know this is what you want to cover,’ he said. ‘What you care about is this. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this and you happily go along.’

And after this, Clinton, Bill that is, made infamous comparisons between Jesse Jackson and Obama.

Yet, I still do not think that the Clintons are rabid racists, using the race card to prevail. And Obama is not a cunning advocate of black power. But as they compete in their little gestures and sound bites, in employing political tactics as usual, they reveal how race still matters, racism still exists, perhaps because, more likely it seems to me, despite, their own intentions. It matters as they appear, as they present themselves in a highly mediated social situation, and re-produce the collective memory of race in America. It is a memory worth fighting against.

To conclude with a general observation: there is power when people come together and speak and act in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. How we manage to actually come together, recognizing each other as equals involves the difficult challenges of social interaction, working on a common definition of a situation, which often involves a re-definition. When the definition is drawn from the inherited collective memory, which is usually the case, (Erving Goffman structured his “frame analysis” around this), it is the dynamic force that constitutes memory, for better and for worse. Redefining in our actions makes re-remembering in creative ways a possibility. It makes it possible to overcome the looming repressive implications of memory. But this is a difficult political project that requires much more than Michnik’s beautiful formulation: “amnesty without amnesia,” whether this is on the European killing fields, in the lands of Israel and Palestine, or on the American campaign trail.

P.S. This project of re-remembering plays a key role in the re-invention of political culture, something which I developed in greater detail in my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power.

On September 21, 2011, two American men, both in their early 40s, were put to death by order of their state government. One death provoked much discussion; the second was widely ignored. However, it is that second death that matters should we as a nation – or as a collection of states – decide to eliminate the death penalty for good and for all.

Outside of Georgia’s Jackson Prison, opponents of the death penalty gathered to hope, pray, and pay witness to the long death of Troy Davis. Mr. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer, Mark McPhail, in 1989. Whoever the killer was did a dastardly deed. And Mr. Davis was, according to the courts, that man. Over the years there came to be real doubts as to whether he was, in fact, guilty. The case depended largely on eyewitness testimony, and since the trial most of those eyewitnesses changed their stories. Perhaps Mr. Davis was not guilty of this crime.

No one, whatever stance they take on the legality of the death penalty, wishes for the state to kill innocent men, letting the real killer go free. Still, Mr. Davis had twenty years of appeals, and he never found a judge or parole board that was persuaded of his innocence. Shortly before his death, the Supreme Court, without dissent, refused to stay his execution. And it was done. Perhaps we must establish a more robust level of proof and be more modest in our certainty. Without doubt Mr. Davis came to be an impressive advocate for his own innocence. He wanted to live. However, shortly after 11:00 on the night of September 21^st, he was put to death by lethal injection. CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the death watch with inspiring intensity, raising issues of Mr. Davis innocence and also the justice of the death penalty.

Eight-hundred miles west of Jackson, in Huntsville, Texas, another death occurred, quietly and without network klieg lights. Whereas Mr. Davis’s death came with complications over his possible innocence, for most observers the Texas death lacked much in the way of factual doubts. That same Wednesday evening, the state of Texas, also using a lethal injection, put to death Lawrence Russell Brewer. If the death penalty is to be eliminated, the American people must determine that the lives of people like Lawrence Brewer – no, not people like Mr. Brewer, but he himself – must be spared.

Perhaps Mr. Brewer had his fifteen minutes of fame at the time of the murder for which he – as one of three – were convicted, but those minutes had long passed. Lawrence Brewer was found guilty of involvement in the ghastly murder of James Byrd. Back on June 7, 1998, Mr. Byrd, walking along a local road in East Texas, was grabbed, beaten, chained, and then dragged for two miles behind a pickup. In the process he was beheaded. Brewer remains an unrepentant white supremacist and admits some involvement in the events of the night, but he denies being the killer, although he also claims that he would do it again. However, his involvement is certain and his politics – if such is the proper term – is dark and fraught. There was no vigil for Mr. Brewer. He died unmourned. He was no figurehead of unjust justice. Yet, if the death penalty is to be abolished, it is not only the articulate Davises that will live their full years, but the angry Brewers.

In stark contrast to Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer, in spite of his claims of innocence for the murder, supports the death penalty. The question is, should we? It is hard to deny that over the decades, the death penalty has put some innocent men to death. While we now have instituted an elaborate system of checks as to legal procedure, we often don’t include the possibility of exculpating facts. And that is wrong. Further, many murders are fairly routine, as was that of the police officer whom Davis was accused of killing: they dismay, but do not outrage.

But there are some acts, and the death of James Byrd is a case in point, that call for a collective performance of disgust. The death penalty is not about the killer, but about the society that firmly announces that this must not stand. In our resolve we must not act “as animals,” lusting for blood or applauding the killing, but as a community that announces that some do not to remain in our midst. These deaths stand as a recognition of the possibility of evil.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton said of abortion, “It should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” I apply his model to state-sponsored death. The death penalty should be humane, it should be possible, and, most of all, it should be rare. The dramatic differences in the justice of the deaths of Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer underline that only in extraordinary cases, horrific and unambiguous, death is not a blow at humanity, but a basis of that very humanity.

On Monday, August 22^nd, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. was opened for visitors. The official dedication of the memorial was scheduled to take place on Sunday, August 28^th (indefinitely posted by Hurricane Irene), the 48^th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom before over 200,000 people. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation notes that this is the first memorial on the National Mall “to honor a man of hope, a man of peace, and a man of color.” The memorial, according to the project’s mission statement, honors Dr. King for “his national and international contributions to world peace through non-violent social change.” A virtual tour of the memorial is available on the Foundation’s website.

The 120 million dollar memorial is located on the Tidal Basin adjacent to the FDR Memorial, and its line of sight connects it with the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. The project was launched in 1996 when President Clinton signed a resolution to build a memorial in honor of Dr. King. Groundbreaking for the project took place on November 13, 2006. The origins of the idea for memorial is traceable to January, 1984, when George Sealy met with four fellow Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity brothers to develop a proposal for building a national King memorial.  As with most projects of this type, it origins were small and informal. It then had to proceed through numerous associational and institutional gates as public and private support for the project was developed. The bureaucratic and procedural steps involved were formidable; and the long process had many controversial elements, including its design, the selection of Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, the use of Chinese granite, and the $800,000 of licensing fees charged to the Foundation by the King family for the use of Dr. King’s words and image in fundraising materials. McKissack & McKissack/Turner/Gilford/ Tompkins are the design-build team. All the principals are American, and many have strong connections with businesses owned by minorities and women, or are principals in these businesses.  Such are the backstage considerations.

Center stage is the memorial itself as it honors the man, his vision, his values, and his actions. A paragraph from the “I Have a Dream” speech inspired design elements:

“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

The entryway to the memorial is through two stone granite structures shaped like a mountain (the Mountain of Despair). Through it, visible on the horizon is a granite monolith (the Stone of Hope) symbolically separated from the mountain. The design emphasizes the monolithic struggle that has been taking place. As visitors approach the Stone of Hope, the following text from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream speech” is chiseled, “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” On the other side is a reflective comment by Dr. King, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

It is out of the Stone of Hope that Dr. King’s likeness is sculpted looking out over the Tidal Basin. The gaze is intended to share a vision of the future for which citizens strive to achieve justice and equality. Connected with the Mountain of Despair is a 450-foot curved inscription wall which features fourteen quotes from Dr. King. The quotes were selected to act as a platform to contemplate messages about “Justice, Democracy, Hope and Love.” None of the quotes are taken from the “I Have a Dream” speech. Reasons given for not including elements from the speech are space limitations and a desire to share less well-known observations by Dr. King. The open elements of the memorial are enhanced by Yoshino cherry blossom trees which were a gift from Japan in 1912 and are meant to be a living sign of unity and peace. The foundation contributed another 182 cherry blossom trees. The trees blossom each year in the spring and the peak period for blossoming is around the same time of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4^th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Motel, which is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum. The motel as an artifact of a tragic event still has the feeling of pathos haunting it.

The Telegraph incorporates an interesting short video showing the statue in its article about the Memorial. I have mixed feeling about the statue. My memories of Dr. King are different from the characteristics captured in the 30-foot statue. Dr. King is shown bigger/huskier and sterner than I recall; and his crossed arms holding papers in his left hand send mixed signals. Yes, he was resolute, yet he was outgoing. While I remember him as being determined and resolute, I don’t have an image of sternness. The depiction of Dr. King offered by Lei Yixin was challenged during a U. S. Commission of Arts review in May of 2008 where some members thought that the statue looked more like a socialist leader than a non-violent protest leader. The Commission asked Lei Yixin to rework some elements of his rendering.

I would hope that anyone who visits the memorial would also revisit the “I Have a Dream” speech, remarkable in its form and content. It demonstrates how social transformation can be imagined and enacted through a powerful speaker, delivering forceful message. Dr. King presented a compelling reason for change; identified an inspiring vision; shared his values (the MLK National Memorial Foundation cites: courage/truth, unconditional love/ forgiveness, justice/ equality, reconciliation/peace); identified the sources of legitimation; and offered a call for action. Dr. King’s voice and body amplified his charismatic message. The moving tone of the speech builds throughout its approximate 17-minutes; and ends with:

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

For a dozen years I have taught a freshman seminar at Northwestern University, entitled “Scandal and Reputations.” When I first selected the topic “Bill and Monica” it was the topic du jour, filled with phallic cigars, hypocrisies and conspiracies. I had planned the course to capture that sour, if momentarily historic, time.

Over the years I have never been without subject matter. I could pick and choose among the birthers, the deniers, the earthers and the truthers. Would we discuss churchly pedophiles or Abu Ghraib? DUI or DNA? Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, Britney, Paris or OJ Redux? Always some claim of conspiracy or scandal emerged that would capture the attention of students.

This week demonstrates that whether we run out of oil, we won’t run out of oily elites. The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and prominent French socialist politician, is instructive. (Yes, yes, innocent until proven…). Mr. Strauss-Kahn is currently holed up in a snug government-supplied suite on Riker’s Island (a neo-socialist dream of free housing for all). Mr. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested and accused of having attempted to rape a hotel maid in his self-paid suite at New York’s Sofitel. No doubt several of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s new compatriots will be happy to turn the tables on their new friend. DSK, don’t drop your soap in the shower.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was apparently naked in the bathroom when the maid arrived. As a prominent economist, he surely figured that since he was already naked, intercourse was simply a matter of structural efficiency. Perhaps he saw her as “my cute little Portugal.” Never having interned at the IMF, she had not been adequately educated in recognizing how the powerful organize the lifeworlds of the powerless. Metaphors gone wild.

But the tawdry events at a slick hotel reveal something more. First, they remind us that often what makes bad behavior scandalous is when it emerges outside the local domain in which “everyone knew” of its likelihood. As more evidence appears, it seems that Strauss-Kahn’s colleagues were aware that he was a sexual predator. Possibly they were surprised that he would be as rough and rushed as reports of his hotel encounter suggested, but he leaves a trail of accusations, discretely excused by friends and colleagues. Perhaps he was embarrassing, but this is what (some) rich men do. Most shameful is Anne Mansouret, a Socialist party official and the mother of a young French journalist, Tristane Banon, who Strausss-Kahn apparently attempted to rape nine years ago. Knowing this, Ms. Mansouret suggested that her daughter not press charges, presumably satisfied to have a politically correct rapist as the president of France. There are just some things that we provincial Americans will never understand. Strauss-Kahn had been previously criticized for his inappropriate sexual behavior by the IMF for a coercive affair with a subordinate in 2008. Ho-hum. He’s our colleague and by winking we can make the embarrassment disappear.

A scandal is not just bad or criminal behavior. A scandal is different than a crime (of which this rape is both), but scandal results from a form of behavior that “everyone” knows about, but which had been defined as normal or innocuous, leading the perpetrator to be conclude that he is protected. How many people knew about Tiger Woods’ behavior or that of former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? More than zero. The inner group considered the behavior acceptable, if undesirable, until it broke outside its charmed circle.

Finally, the Strauss-Kahn imbroglio reminds us that the capacity for conspiracy never dies. Some French socialists, once they learned of the arrest, concluded that the event was a frame-up by the supporters of Nicolas Sarkosy, Strauss-Kahn’s likely opponent in the next French election. Just another vast right-wing conspiracy. Mr. Sarkosy, of course, has his own problems, political and ethical, although surely less than his neighbor, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. A Euro-conspiracy to discredit Strauss-Kahn seems laughable today, but one is well-advised “never to say never.” Still, the claims speak to the belief that some enemy will always stand behind the breach in reputation of those one admires.

Today Strauss-Kahn’s future is dim, but mine is bright. As I prepare to teach Scandals and Reputation this fall, I prepare confidently, knowing that my students and I will analyze lustily – as we have each year.