Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Egyptian Discord, American Public Stupidity

If you have the mental fortitude to consider stupidity without harming yourself, you could Google "Palin Egypt" to see a pretty blatant example of a lot of people's thinking. (not limited to right or left) The thinking is that we, the USA, are somehow in charge in Egypt. It certainly is the case that Mubarak has survived as Egypt's leader thanks to our imperialistic behavior, it is not the case that we somehow established him or created his political party.

Sarah seems to believe that our government knows just what is going on and who all the players are and that we can dictate the outcome. Thanks to Mubarak's version of governing, any real opposition groups are of the clandestine variety, they are the sort of groups that can operate under the watchful eyes of security forces. Whoever has claim to any sort of leadership has not been on TV/print exhorting opposition - a la Teabaggers. This means that organization within this opposition is pretty much limited to - opposition - not governing policy.

Foreign aid and other foreign policies can help prop up a government but creating one out of chaos is well beyond the reach of even our considerable swat. Whether the President and diplomatic arms have been direct enough or not with Egypt's government might be debatable. What passes belief is that people seem to be asserting that the US should take an even more imperialistic approach to Egypt - that we should control the direction of the outcome. Gee whiz, not only shouldn't we do that, we flatly cannot.

People really ought to take a look at the state of US politics and control before they start thinking about controlling an even more chaotic situation. For Egyptians to have a government that reflects the will of the population is going to require some time to put together anything that remotely resembles political parties. Governing will require politics ... or strong arm tactics. Politics requires constituencies beyond "this guy sucks."

3 comments:

SButcher said...

Glad you are back blogging! Someone needs to say it as it is and I don't have the computer knowhow. S.Butcher

Phaedrus said...

Americans are taught from a young age that we are the most powerful and good nation ever created by God. In school/church they're taught that the answers lie with the authority figure. Then a whole life of inane news service doesn't really set them up to make strong, thoughtful decisions about the world.

Don't blame the victim :)

Chuck Butcher said...

@ Phaedrus,
There is news out there, the problem is that there is such a large percentage of the electorate that is 'low information' and frankly doesn't give a rat's patoot beyond some emotional reaction. Even people who pay attention can get overwhelmed by the 24 hr news cycle and the disappearing stories lightly covered.

Person to person contact trumps almost any other presentation. So there is that - given one is willing to put that kind of time in it.

Nice to see you around