It is my custom before sleeping to read a novel. I turn off the events of the day and start my journey into the world of imagination. Last night, I was reading Madame Bovary when my wife told me about the latest turn in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. I was surprised, but left it to the morning to find out what happened. The New York Times report made it clear, the person who had every right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by the courts, appears to be really innocent, a victim, not a criminal.

The implications for French and global politics and culture are significant. I worry that France, which desperately needs a serious political alternative, may be deprived of a capable public servant as President because of a false accusation and prosecution. I also worry that very serious problems concerning the relationship between public and private, the intimate and the open, sex and politics, may now go unexamined because the case is being closed, when serious deliberate consideration is what is needed now more than ever, there and here.

Daniel Dayan and I have been discussing the case as it unfolds. A few minutes ago, I received an email from him, continuing our discussion. We will actually make this discussion a part of our “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” seminar at the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, later this month.

He wrote:

“Just a little note to set up our discussions to come: I may have told you that I was talking with a friend on a bench in Central Park, one Saturday morning, around 11 AM just when the Strauss-Kahn episode was going on, 10 blocks south. Uncannily, I was telling my friend that Strauss-Kahn was likely to win the elections unless he was the victim of some trap. I did not realize the trap I was anticipating was functioning already while my friend and I were having our conversation.

Later, back in Paris, in a one hour debate on French TV, I kept arguing that DSK was to be considered innocent until proved guilty, and that the French journalists with whom I was debating had no reason to claim ‘they should have denounced him earlier.’ In fact, had they denounced him earlier, they would simply have been guilty of libel. There was no proof the Sofitel episode was a rape. There was no proof there were other rapes. As to being a seducer, this is not a crime.

Fortunately, the various authors of this mess damaged the life of someone who can afford good lawyers. DSK should sue the police officers who, after inflicting unnecessary humiliation, kept illegally leaking damaging information to the press. DSK should sue the press for not respecting the rule of the “presumption of innocence.” DSK should sue the Sofitel hotel management for their crucial responsibility in the whole matter. (I have been to Sofitel once or twice but do not intend to ever return, unless, of course, the alternative is sleeping in the street.)

Of course the story is not finished. After presenting ‘Ophelia’ as an innocent victim (ACT I). I anticipate the press will go all the way in exonerating DSK.  What we are witnessing now is the beginning of ACT II. But then, I also anticipate an Act III, in which DSK will turn out to be guilty again. In this ACT III, he’ll be guilty, but not of a rape. He’ll just be guilty of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing,’ of being himself; of being male, white and rich…   All this has wonderful commercial possibilities, of course. It allows selling the same story three times ….”

Daniel always was skeptical about the case against DSK. He thought a conspiracy was likely, which surprised me, as a person who is committed as a matter of principle to be the last one to recognize a conspiracy. But it turns out, he may be right. Getting to the bottom of this may or may not be possible.

Nonetheless, I agree with him that there is going to be a third act. Yet, I am not sure what will be written, who will do the writing and how the script will be performed. Will Strauss-Kahn really be prosecuted as a rich, white man, as Dayan fears? Or will the needed public examination of the problematic divide between public and private be buried in France, just when it seemed that this issue was receiving real attention, as I fear?

The debate about general principled problems has to be separated from the particular case. If Strauss-Kahn is innocent, as he now appears likely to be, he should be free to get on with his life and should be free to serve his country. But that still leaves much unaddressed: sex and politics, the distinction between seduction and aggression, and the standing of the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

We can imagine how this will develop. I’ll sleep on it.

Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.

At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.

Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in most cultures. Whatever. Still, such sharing is a venial sin, but straight-out lying to blame others edges toward a mortal one. Weiner’s decision was something of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Had he lied and gotten away with it, that would have been the best of all possible Weiner worlds. The problem is that the worst of those worlds is what happened. Lying and getting nabbed. He made fools of his colleagues and that is unforgivable in politics, and he directed our attention away from pressing matters for more than one wet dream news cycle. The fate of Congressman Weiner is in play, and public attention will not fade until it is resolved through a resignation, through boredom, or through a new crisis. (Pray for a tsunami, Anthony!).

The hysteria is such that now a seemingly innocent connection between the Congressman and a 17-year old Delaware maiden is being questioned by the police. Let’s admit it, the truth is that Anthony Weiner can say with a straight face, “I did not have sex with any of those women.” All the tsuris, none of the tingle.

The dispiriting reality is that discussing policies, even as our nation teeters on the brink of insolvency, is not sufficiently engaging. This is not a new phenomenon. Civil society has never been a seminar room. A careful discussion of the “issues” is not to be found in our history and not in any other society that has an open public sphere. Politics is often a slightly elevated form of gossip. We engage in the personalization of policy, understanding issues through the character – and hypocrisy – of their proponents. And it is here that Weiner is doing so much damage to the progressive cause. He personifies the swamp that Nancy Pelosi once promised to drain. As a friend said, rather than drain the swamp, Weiner swamps the drain.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to think that a large and robust public will ever have a profound debate on the debt ceiling or on Medicare reimbursements. We are not experts, after all. Still it is dismaying that so often the discussion zips to whose zipper is undone, ignoring our collective futures.

Today the Congressman has a choice: will he resign or will he be a punchline? Perhaps he can tough it out (as Barney Frank, David Vitter, and Bill Clinton did), but he harms his cause. As long as he is in Congress, Republicans will not let Democrats forget. Democratic leaders from Nancy Pelosi on down, now calling for Weiner’s resignation, realize this all too well.

Weiner’s fundamental flaw was in embracing the “I’m so special law.” After his New York Congressional colleague Representative Chris Lee was forced to resign over his own hunky photo, one might imagine that politicians would recognize that at least that deviance was off-limits. But now, Anthony Weiner knew, just knew that the rules didn’t apply to Queens.

Neither Lee nor Weiner quite reach the charmed scandal circle of Arnold or Dominique, much less the Sultan of Slime, John Edwards, but they rank high on the ick scale. While ickiness has its appeal in a gossip economy, it distracts us from the business at hand. What might be comic relief becomes slapstick.

The worst deception is that one can have it all. This is the belief that one can create policy and have a rockin’ good time. Weiner apparently thought that he could be in a graduate seminar and a happy home at the same time he was in a junior high locker room. Fantasies of omnipotence have their charm, but they also have their price.

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.