AMERICAN SATIRIST JON STEWART TO MORSI: YOU AREN’T QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNTRY BAZINGA
“Do you know who this Jon Stewart is?” Rifat said. “He’s a Jew, isn’t he?”
I said yes, and left it at that. One of the easiest ways to set Rifat off on a tirade is to remark that Abdel Nasser expelled Egypt’s Jewish community. According to Rifat, the Jews left because they wanted to leave.
“This Jon Stewart,” he continued, “he has an American version of Bassem Youssef’s show, right?”
I said something to the effect that most people, Bassem Youssef included, describe his show as an Egyptian version of Jon Stewart’s.
“I wouldn’t know; I don’t watch any of these shows,” Rifat said airily. In the past, he’s made it very clear that at night he watches nothing but a channel that replays the famous concerts that Om Kalthoum used to give every month.
The front page of the newspaper featured a photograph of Jon Stewart standing, legs splayed, with the heads of Morsi and Youssef superimposed between his knees. Youssef is currently being investigated on charges of insulting President Mohamed Morsi and defaming Islam, and on Sunday, prosecutors questioned the comedian for hours. The following day, Stewart attacked Morsi on “The Daily Show,” saying, “Without Bassem and all those journalists, and bloggers, and brave protestors who took to Tahrir Square to voice dissent, you, President Morsi, would not be in a position to repress them.”
But one thing about the newspaper headline confused me: Where the hell is Bazinga?
“It’s something that Stewart said,” Rifat explained. “He said that Morsi couldn’t even be President of Bazinga. It’s probably just a silly word, a nonsense place.”
“Did Stewart really say that? I don’t think he used that word.”
Rifat flipped to the article on page three, which began with the sentence: “Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz is an actor, writer, producer, and American Jew.” But there was no further mention of Bazinga. “Forget it; that isn’t important,” Rifat said. “Anyway, this whole issue is just to distract people from what really matters.” He pointed to another headline farther down the front page:
THE MINISTRY OF SUPPLIES IS STORMED BECAUSE OF PROPANE GAS
The article explained that yesterday the Egyptian government raised the price of subsidized cooking gas by sixty per cent. It was the first such increase in two decades, and protestors responded immediately. Reading the story, Rifat sighed and embarked on his favorite theme—such things never happened in the days of Abdel Nasser, when subsidies were adequate and people trusted the government, and the streets emptied on the first Thursday of every month, because all of Cairo was listening to Om Kalthoum.
* * *
There’s no shortage of bad news coming out of Egypt these days. Most of what appears in the foreign press is dramatic—protests, arrests, fights—but on the ground it feels more subtle: a slow erosion rather than a collapse. You notice that prices are steadily rising, a sign of Egypt’s dwindling currency reserves. You see dozens of vehicles lined up at gas stations. Daily electricity cuts have started earlier in the year than usual; everybody says this will be a hard summer. It’s hotter than normal, too: on the last day of March, the temperature reached 97 degrees. The word ezma (“crisis”) is everywhere: an ezma of diesel fuel, an ezma of bread, an ezma of propane. At the moment there’s even an ezma of mineral water—since a fire damaged a Nestlé bottling plant earlier in the year. I’ve found myself trolling neighboring shops, snatching whatever water can be found within a two-block radius. Every once in a while I stop and think: Where exactly is this going?
But Egyptians seem to talk less about the future now. When I first moved to Cairo, in the fall of 2011, the thrill of the revolution was still fresh and people often spoke enthusiastically about coming elections and their new government. Nowadays, though, conversations tend to circle back to the past. It’s not just Rifat and his obsession with Abdel Nasser; there’s a sense that many Egyptians are thinking about the leaders of old. I first noticed this at the end of last year, when protestors at Tahrir and other places began to make more signs that honored Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat—something that had been much less common back in 2011. Every once in a while, I heard somebody say that the country had been better under Hosni Mubarak, but such remarks still tended to be rare. Now I hear it all the time: on Tuesday, in the course of routine conversations, no fewer than four people told me that Mubarak had been better than Morsi. Three of these men had even voted for Morsi—I often hear former Brotherhood supporters express regret. This trend has become more pronounced over the past six months, and I’m still waiting to hear a single person tell me the opposite: that he didn’t vote for the Brotherhood but intends to do so in the next election.
Although Egyptians are thinking about the past, they may not always see it clearly. Perhaps that’s the nature of a moment like this: the ezma tends to focus attention on immediate needs, until both tomorrow and yesterday are blurred. Nobody knows where the country is going, but memories also seems selective. In addition to the interrogation of Youssef, there have been a number of legal complaints against journalists, activists, and bloggers. One of the most often-quoted statistic comes from human-rights lawyers, who say that under Morsi there have been four times as many lawsuits for insulting the President as there were under Mubarak. But Mubarak had no need for such lawsuits. He had the power of a true dictator, and his censorship was absolute; a show like Youssef’s would have been unimaginable in the first place. It’s important to remember this, and to recognize the difference. Jon Stewart was essentially right about this on Monday evening, when he addressed Morsi and said: “When you are actually powerful, you don’t have to be petty.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the truly powerful are broadminded and just. It means that if Morsi had the kind of power that Mubarak once had, Youssef would already be in prison.
The truth is that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are much weaker than most people realize. The public prosecutor, who was appointed by the President, may be eager to go after Youssef and other critics, but there’s no guarantee that the rest of the judicial system feels the same way. Egypt’s judges and courts have traditionally been at odds with the Brotherhood, and such tensions were exacerbated by last year’s vicious conflict over the constitution. This doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the individual threat against Youssef, but it questions whether the system will support a full-scale crackdown led by Morsi.
Likewise, there is deep wariness toward the Brotherhood in both the police and the army, two key institutions. The media remains withering in its criticism; most journalists refuse to be intimidated. And the current economic crisis is only going to worsen unless the government agrees to a four-billion-dollar loan from the I.M.F., which insists that subsidies be further reduced—a move that will worsen the Brotherhood’s reputation on the street.
The I.M.F. officials, like most representatives of foreign governments, seem increasingly impatient toward Morsi and the Brotherhood. This is also true of the United States, whose official pronouncements during the past year have often seemed gentle and even naïve. Last November, when Morsi’s role in the Gaza cease-fire resulted in a flurry of positive press, he met with Hillary Clinton and then the very next day issued a Presidential declaration that granted him powers beyond the reach of any court. The timing couldn’t have been any more blatant, but the U.S. State Department issued an anodyne statement: “We call for calm and encourage all parties to work together… .” The following month, a member of the Administration told the Times: “One thing we can say for Morsi is he was elected, so he has some legitimacy.”
Nobody makes such remarks anymore. This week, Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “real concerns” about Egypt’s direction, referring to “the recent arrests, the violence in the streets, the lack of inclusivity with respect to the opposition… .” Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, referred to the actions against Youssef and others as “evidence of a disturbing trend of growing restrictions on freedom of expression.” The Embassy in Cairo even linked to Stewart’s show in its Twitter feed, prompting Morsi’s office to accuse them of engaging in “negative political propaganda.”
So that’s the thinnest of silver linings: there may be a lot of bad news coming out of Egypt, but at least it’s coming out. Critics like Bassem Youssef remain active, if endangered, and the international community is attentive and much more aware of the Muslim Brotherhood’s flaws than it was a year ago. But as for what’s going to happen in the next six months—that’s a bigger mystery than Bazinga. The word nagged at me all day, until at last I asked an Egyptian colleague to watch Stewart’s broadcast carefully and see if he noticed anything I was missing. After half an hour of close study, he called back.
“I think ‘Bazinga’ is NBC,” he said. “Stewart says it quickly and the newspaper must not have understood. They screwed up the translation.”
I watched one more time, and finally it was clear, both the puzzle of Bazinga and Morsi’s job prospects. “Silencing a comedian doesn’t qualify you to be a President of Egypt,” Stewart said. “Just president of NBC.”
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Peter Hessler
No comments:
Post a Comment