The Inseminator

Eric Koch is spending two weeks in Europe. A number of his regular readers have generously volunteered to compose guest-postings – this is Richard Nielsen’s second.

The public’s avid response to the difficulties of Arnold “The Inseminator” Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, two middle-aged men beyond their prime and in all probability with their accomplishments behind them, cries out for an explanation.

It’s not as though their crimes as alleged were unusual or exotic, a liaison between a man with money and position with a maid or housekeeper is sordid but commonplace. The details are skimpy, nonexistent or in dispute and that’s precisely their appeal.

We have no idea what happened but a common view is that Arnold, with all the steroids he had to consume to achieve his preferred body image, plus the affairs of state pressing upon him, may have had a problem with virility. Was there then something about this particular housekeeper…was that it?

With Strauss-Kahn, the possible scenario is even richer and more varied. Many are inclined to believe he was set up but by whom – the French? The Americans? After all, he is a socialist leading in the polls for the French presidency about to replace the most pro-American president in living memory.

The point is that everyone has a favourite scenario and that is precisely the appeal of such a scandal – we know nothing – nothing at all about what happened. It could be a parlour game in which each of us is given a random element of a story and asked to provide the rest.

The appeal of these stories will disappear quickly when we find out what actually happened. The facts don’t interest us nor does the pain of those people falsely accused or, at any rate, guilty of offenses so commonplace they would normally pass without public censure.

Writing in 1846 in a book called The Present Age, Soren Kierkegaard pointed out that before the invention of the daily press stories had a beginning, a middle and an end. We read them for the significance of the story itself. But with the arrival of the daily press another possibility existed that by taking sides in the story we as part of the public might change its outcome. It became the journalist’s task to create such a public.

With Arnold and Dominique, the attraction is that until the facts are known we can fantasize about their fate.

What we want is determined by who we are and what we believe. We can absolve them or have them punished – whatever we desire. The media caters to celebrity but loses no opportunity to cash in on the envy such celebrity engenders.

Kierkegaard went on to say that if his daughter became a prostitute and then relented he would welcome her back with open arms, but if his son became a journalist and persisted in it for three years he would abandon all hope.