BHL: "God is dead, but my hair is perfect"

He is known in Europe by his initials, BHL, which sounds like some French luxury conglomerate such as LVMH (Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton). There is something fascinating and infuriating about Bernard-Henri Lévy's impeccable style juxtaposed to real world misery-cum-political cause. The Parisian philosopher and public intellectual (does America have those?) was featured in the New York Times this week as tooting his own horn in convincing France, the European Union and Hilary Clinton to help Libya's civilians against Gaddafi. As the article points out, Lévy style trademarks include flowing hair, black suits, unbuttoned white shirts and supermodel blondes as accessories. BHL's photograph in the Times is both beautiful and disturbing as he stands regally in his couture and flawless coiffure in the middle of what looks like a bombed warehouse -- probably a site where corpses, or limbs, lay in pools of blood just a few days prior to the photo shoot. Is this where the dandy belongs? How can we compare BHL to someone like Sean Penn (an anti-dandy in real life), who had his own very rugged yet just as coutured photograph on the cover of New York Times style magazine T just last week? Penn's suit and shirt look like a certified copy of BHL's signature look (although I doubt they will end up in this week's "Bitch stole my look" in Joan Rivers' "Fashion Police"). We can also think of Lady Di's style in her charity photographs, which seemed to always highlight her royalty against the ordinary and miserable peasantry surrounding her instead of attempting some kind of staged overcoming of difference. The ones with Diana and Mother Teresa show the princess of the people literally bending to the woman's level in what looks like a Valentino skirt suit and black-and-white Chanel heels. These outfits inside these photographs form an incongruous juxtaposition that work as guarantors of difference in times of crisis. Don't worry, folks, Europe is still European, undeterred, not even a hair out of place -- and the unfortunate lands of elsewhere still a pile of dog shit.