Events in the Arab world. Frustration, a desire for change, a desire for freedom. Peaceful revolutions, dictators killed or sent packing (as Gadhafi surely will be). World leaders dithering; but that may be for the best. The hasty stroke goes wide.
Sounds pretty good, right? Do you get a sense the Middle East may finally be catching a whiff of modernity, and its younger generations bringing something truly new?
Don't pop the corks just yet.
I worry because though it looks good now, the revolutions are incomplete. People in Egypt and Tunisia are already wondering when things will really change. Bahrain probably will not really change, as Saudi Arabia cannot, not peacefully. Once the carnage stops and is tallied in Libya, there too the people will find themselves leaderless and waiting and wanting.
The revolutions are incomplete because there are no structures in place for new regimes to deliver the goods. Nor is there any widespread sense of civil rule as we know it to work. Chaos and economic depression will only be corrected by the imposition of emergency measures. And as we've seen, states of emergency can persist for decades. Nothing really changes.
The people will want real change, and as the years pass and their frustration mounts, they will look further and further afield for it. They won't look to us. Our alliance with Israel will undoubtedly cause some event or other to take us out of position. The people will look to themselves. They will look to their own internal forces that offer promises of real change.
I'm not saying that Al Qaida will regain any popularity. They've shot their wad and will never capture the public imagination as they were able to a few years ago. Their behavior in Iraq is one reason the youth of other Arab countries are behaving with such restraint. But there are other movements. The Muslim Brotherhood comes to mind, a very tight organization with eighty years' experience managing public perceptions. This and other religious groups will evolve to take advantage of this huge opportunity. Count on it.
Even that doesn't worry me. People are by and large good, and so long as the outside world doesn't bring cause for rage, a passage through a temporary religious renaissance will not necessarily be unhealthy. No, what worries me is the U.S.A.
More and more we are seeing radical religiosity gain the imagination and allegiance of American voters. Much of this religiosity is a reaction to the resurgence of a militant Islam, and fear of the old days of Muslim conquest. It will fade if the Muslim world moves on peacefully. It will not fade if the Muslim world does not. Indeed, what I see is the band tuning up for a horrible dance: Islam building in reaction to Judaism and Christianity, and Christianity building in reaction to Islam. It doesn't matter who started it. Once the escalation begins, it escalates and escalates until ...
And that's why I'm worried.
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This is why I think religion, not the urge to connect to all of life, to the Great What Is, but religion, dogma, belief is a kind of insanity. America was founded on the principle of separation of church and state. We must not let the fanatics destroy that. They have already seriously compromised it.
I'm worried I won't be able to find a cute wicker basket for my fake tree. I've hit the local meatspace stores and searched online, so now what? Do not want heavy ceramic pot, ONLY cute wicker thing. :(
What "old days of Muslim conquest"? You mean the Ottoman Empire? Dude, look around you. The only empire at work today is your own.
Idn't that whaddhe said, dude?
Remember when the Arabs swept across Northern Africa and into Europe? Then eight hundred years later the Turks were banging on the gates of Vienna? Seems to me I read some paranoid idiot or other invoking such history to stir up more fear. Which is mere politics, but if we elect someone Palinesque any time soon, someone who sees a new caliphate rising out of the dust stirred up by these recent revolts and brings a big train of nascent Crusaderism to our foreign policy, then we're all pretty well fucked.
I'm worried, too. So I read poetry:
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yrouselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I,4)
al Qaida isn't the worry per se although the qaida thinking is. The threat today is also not the nearly-nonexistent threat of a Christian crusade. The treat is of an Ayatollah-led jihad. And, as Don notes, the revolutionaries won't look to us for guidance so the ayatollahs will fill the void.
I noted elsewhere that the many fundamentalist Muslim countries don't have secular law makers like Western legislators. Their leaders and sheiks are constrained by the rulings of the ayatollahs. Those fundamentalists want to impose harsh Sharia punishments for crimes and curtail civil rights for all citizens in countries that _do_ have civil law. We can't expect the revolutionaries to adopt the US constitution on their own.
And when the ayatollahs declare jihad from a base of all of north Africa and southwest Asia, it ain't gonna be pretty.
Paula, LOL. Is that your geopolitical stance?? You're not worried that the jihadic scimitar of hate and poor taste will chop your fake tree down and poke holes in your wicker basket thingy? Although you might go with the ceramic.
Jesus, Don, don't give Palin her own word, or it might take longer for her to go away. Lincolnesque is a word. Palinoscopy might be a word, but not Palinesque.
Asha, I agree with you so totally that at first I didn't think I even needed to say so. But, yeah. I hear snippets of reporting that there is a chance for a more or less secular government to arise where the dialog has enough elbow room, and that's what I hope for. There are strong historical forces that suggest otherwise, but this is a historical force, too, that has gotten its own momentum from time to time.
@Roy: Careful Paula will defend her ficus to the death with Velveeta.
I'm worried about how the wicker basket thing turned out.
No comment. The visual of Paula wielding a block of Velveeta is too intimidating.
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