Cheerleading

Not a discouraging word in another cheerful report from Cairo by Anthony Shadid. I imagine the writer is filled with pride at what was accomplished, and that's fine. But it's more like a letter to the editor, or maybe a blog post, intensely personal without acknowledging it, and it seems to want to substitute poetics for insight.

There's a pretty clear vibe that he believes all of Egypt's problems were imposed from the outside: "The ecstatic moments of triumph seemed to wash away a lifetime of defeats and humiliations, invasions and occupations ..." Of course, the arch bad guy in all these is the United States, with jabs at Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It's labeled analysis, but to my ear, the sentiments here are as deep as, It's the first day of the rest of your life. These diminish the valor of the people who spent 18 days on the street, because they so minimize the problems ahead.

He also dismisses the "the threat of Islamists" with a wave of hand. The Muslim Brotherhood may not be the Taliban, and in fact may have been comfortable in an accommodation with Mubarak, serving as a straw man to scare the gullible Americans. But the murder of dozens of Christian Egyptians in a church bombing on New Year's Eve does not bode well.

Also missing in action is any mention of Iran. OK, Iran is not an Arab country, but very much an Islamic country, one where similar popular, Twitter-fueled outpourings were violently put down by the religious police not too many months ago, and it's a country where an outpouring of anger by the people was taken over by autocratic clerics.

He has a nice line near the end, referring to the big unanswered question in the Mideast:  "How to reconcile individual rights with religious identity in devout countries." But from everything I've seen, religious identity is a euphemism for religious authority, which is all too easily turned into violence, here as well as there, in both Israel and the Arab countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12revolution.html

Now, over at the other end of the room, is profile of Mubarak in the most measured tones, a very kind story to a very bad man. I'm sure that many readers would object to my view of the story above, but in its own quiet way, this one is just as bad.

Egypt is different from most places in the Arab world in that it once had a middle class, it was more cosmopolitan and better educated than most. Mubarak could have been a lot different with or without the American support he got, but he wasn't. He was just another totalitarian military man who fostered corruption and economic decline and brutality.

This story, too, is unhelpful. I hear an echo of  the old joke about a bunch of blind people trying to figure out what an elephant looks like by touching it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12mubarak.html

Another story on an endless theme is the Republican plan for cuts. They came up with a handful of items totaling only a few billion of the hundred billion they want. And what are these cuts? A few billion by decimating the EPA, and a tiny amount by eliminating funding for Public broadcasting. These are not money saving ideas; they are targets of the conservative political agenda. The story needs to push these idiots and not regurgitate the recent array of press releases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/politics/11congress.html

The tech staff was also at it again. They have the discovered that the Huffington Post offers a lot of gossip, and that the public likes gossip with plenty of pictures. I think this was yesterday's story, but I know it is ancient news. The excuse for turning this out now is that the public also uses Google to satisfy their curiosity about all kinds of matters, and that on any day, a lot of them are interested in gossip. This dynamic is called "an example of an art and science at which the Huffington Post excels." Is the translation of that, "Times editors really don't know what ordinary people want but they desperately want to"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html