Desert tsunami – the Arabs rebel...
December 17, 2010. A sleepy provincial town in Tunisia called Sidi Bouzid. Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit-cart street-vendor drenched himself in gasoline, lit a match, and set the entire Arab world on fire. Within days, his self-immolation made Arab dictators from North Africa to the Gulf tremble in their palaces. Within weeks, two long-entrenched dictators fell to democratic protestors. Several other autocrats squirmed to save their power: first with brutality, then bribes, then fatherly rhetoric, then violence again. No Arab dictator now seemed safe. Bouazizi’s holocaust-nightmare became for them all a lamp to light “the way,” like MacBeth’s fools, “to dusty [political] death.”
Oh, what a lovely war!
Revolutions are always exciting, especially if you don’t get killed. A lot of eloquent Englishmen played key roles in America’s 1776 breakaway from Britain (starting with George Washington, a disappointed English colonial officer who led revolutionary forces). The songs and books and legends they helped inspire were memorable. The Star-Spangled Banner relives the “the perilous fight,” “the ramparts” and “the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” But it’s not in the sanguinary league of La Marseillaise with its “bloody standard,” “howling of fearsome soldiers,” “throat-cutting” and “impure blood [to] water our furrows.” Or even in that of peace-loving Danes who still sing that King Christian’s sword “was hammering so fast, through Gothic helm and brain it passed.” In the anthem O Canada, as you might expect, those gentle Canadians don’t cracks any skulls (except at hockey games); they just “stand on guard” about fifty times. But between skulking and skull-cracking, the U.S. anthem comes off as a fairly satisfying warlike hymn. Its big problem: It’s a waltz -- thus impossible to march to, unless you are Viennese or have three legs. Even the Aussies’ Waltzing Matilda is in splendidly ‘marchable’ 4/4 time.
But let’s not digress.
Dumbing down America...
Understanding Islam is hard enough. But understanding Americans? Is it true, as wags sneer, that God invented war to teach Americans geography? Most non-Americans know well that glazed-eye look that afflicts many Americans when they hear too much of anything or anybody beyond their blessed land “from sea to shining sea.” Why does the rest of the world seem to bore Americans? Same question: where do average Americans get their ideas about the world’s problems?
Six main sources: journalists, teachers, preachers, entertainers, intellectuals, and politicians. Few of those equip the “world’s only remaining superpower” with the information and perspectives it needs to lead the world. Or indeed to avoid becoming a myopic rogue elephant stumbling from crisis to crisis. The thought-leaders’ mission: to convince Americans that their country is right even when it’s plainly wrong. “My country, right or wrong?” An old, familiar theory which leads to hypocrisy and, for its victims (as much as its believers), to buckets of blood, sweat and tears. For America’s promise to work, it demands the assiduous cultivation of ignorance, myth and illusion. And a gullible, or at least distracted, citizenry.