The Bathoes Show an Ugly Face

Anyone seeking insight into the workings of contemporary democracies should study the crisis in Egypt. Not that they are a democracy in any way other than parody; most democracies seem to be moving towards Egypt, not Egypt towards them.

A small number of people, 250,000--not small for a ball game but small in a city, city, of eighteen million--have gathered in a square and chanted for the removal of the current president-for-life. Their motives are unclear, certainly disparate, and apparently conflicting. Drawn to the chaos, groups without colors or flags move through the crowd fighting, intimidating and killing. A sniper sets up somewhere. The American press is frightened and several are roughed up.

Editorialists discuss and debate. "Democracy" is apparently in the air, in the air of a country where a candidate for president must have two-thirds approval from the parliament, a country whose current president has been in power for thirty years, a country in which the only nonreligious institution is the military. Somehow this event is seen as optimistic, democratic and hopeful. Somehow this is change, and change in the dialectic view is by definition positive. A vacuum is just the intermediary of progress, chaos the stew before the meal.

No thinking person would defend the Mubarak regime. But the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular group regardless of what the American government says, "change" in itself has no inherent value regardless of what the President says and destabilization of the Middle East would be a nightmare beyond anything the military thugs in Egypt could imagine to wish upon their enemies.

The government has changed positions so many times they seem to be waterboarded. But they, like Mubarak, always come up pompous and idealistic, full of absurd pronouncements. This is a microcosm of our future: Stupidity, violence and insincerity presented by the idealistic, the incompetent and the homicidal.