Considering the reputation and self-presentation of the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we work hard to resist the thought that he sure *looks* guilty enough. The former governor of California, Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, et cetera, et cetera, at least spares us the personal trial of deciding how guilty we presume him to be as we debate the significance to our public and private lives of what these men did, and what men, quite generally, do.
History was unkind to both in meaningful ways. An ordinary economy would have allowed the governor to impress friends and enemies alike with his honest and earnest firmness, and belief in a smaller and more sensible government (if not, alas, a smaller and more sensible governor). He’d have been a good counterweight to the unions and other organized interests in the state, had things been more or less as they’d been before. But there were no good options post 2008, and California was filled as much as any other state and more than many with the long-lingering effects of poor personal financial decisions, malicious banks, and sleepy regulators.
Strauss-Kahn, remarkably, was considered quite brilliant at his job even in the face of global financial disaster. Hard to know why on the merits, but his job was certainly one of the few at which one cannot – short of assaulting the maid – fail. He directed considerable lending of other people’s money generally without collateral, on the principle that economic ideas ought to drive the global economy. Hard to do that too terribly wrong, unless one tries too hard, and Strauss-Kahn has a reputation for many excesses but not for excess of effort at the central work of his day job, for which the world really ought to be grateful.
Are there lessons from the travails of these men? Not many that might regard the governing of states or global ubernational banks, but perhaps a lesson here or there about the folly of all men’s work, and, just at the level of a whisper, the false hope for perfection. None of us, it turns out, are that much better than others, and that ought to limit our hopes not only in the habits of men, but in the workings of institutions that might at times seek to save our souls, or our accounts.
The.American.Word. 