Brooks: Mental equipment

David Brooks writes:

The debate on Egypt—I mean the debate in Washington, obviously, not anything they're talking about in Egypt, which could hardly be of an intellectual heft to interest my readers—is essentially between two different worldviews: those who believe in constitutional government and those who hate Muslims.

Constitutionalists say the main thing is that there is a constitution and that there has been an election* and that the government has the support of the people, as has been confirmed over and over.** Democratic institutions and the rule of law are tender plants that need loving care, indirect sunlight. Give them too much coup*** and they could drown.

*Although in point of fact the election (May 2012 for Parliament, June for the presidency) wasn't under the constitution (the following December).
**A poll last March found 82% in favor of the return of the military to power!
*** [sic]. Brooks seems to have decided that coup is a mass noun: "those who would destroy them through armed coup".

"O my brother! How are the poll numbers?"

[jump]

Cheap shots: Finite, extraordinary, and unnatural states of affairs

David Brooks, talking on the Teevee:

And so what happened is, the election happened. Obama wins. Clearly, he ran on raising tax or raising revenue from the top 2 percent, centerpiece. 

Republicans are not stupid. They sort of understand that. And so they went through a process. The day after, Boehner said, OK, revenues, but not rates, and some began to drift over, OK, rates. 

And so you have had movement, until Friday or until yesterday, Thursday, when Tim Geithner goes up there and delivers an ultimatum, which is a chest-thumping stick in the eye to the Republicans.

And here I thought Geithner was a lad of some breeding! One never uses one's chest-thumping stick in someone's eye, for heaven's sake, it's like eating soup with the lobster fork.

Harem Bath, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1889). From Melbourne Blogger.

My neighborhood shul:

The leadership of one of New York’s most vibrant Jewish congregations, B’nai Jeshurun, has shocked some of its congregants by sending out an e-mail enthusiastically supporting the United Nations’ vote last week to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state.

A little scripture in the email:

In this week’s Parashat Vayishlach, Jacob battles with the angel and earns the name Israel. It is the first time we are recognized as the people of Israel. Our own struggles were rewarded exactly 65 years ago on 29 November 1947 with the UN partition plan that acknowledged the right of the Jewish people to an independent state.

The Parasha also tells us how Jacob prepares to meet his brother Esau again, 20 years after fleeing from him. The risks are real — Esau has threatened to kill him. This meeting is the biblical prototype of confrontation between Israel and the nations. Before the meeting with Esau, Jacob prepares in three ways: he divides his camp in two, he prays to God, and he sends Esau gifts and conciliatory messages. These three tactics mirror the basic strategies that Israel has at its disposal: preparation for battle, prayer, and diplomacy.

(They've now walked that back a little: the original email was missing "key passages on the diversity of views in our community" and may have caused a "feeling of alienation" among some members.)

Suleiman the Magnificent, attributed to Titian, ca. 1530. From Wikipedia via Potpourri.

Hopeful nugget in a Raw Story account of something else (Dianne Feinstein's ban on indefinite detention): The Oveseas Contingency Operation, or erstwhile GWOT, will end some day!

Although neither Presidents Bush nor Obama have discussed actually ending the war on terror, now in its 12th year, one top official recently did just that. 

Jeh Johnson, one of the Pentagon’s top attorneys, gave a speech on Friday in which he claimed “there will come a tipping point” in which al-Qaeda has been “effectively destroyed.” Once that has happened, and he didn’t say when, Johnson said he believes “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.” 

“‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs,” he added. “We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’ Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives.”

Hurrem Sultan, 1500-58. Uncredited painting via Unusual Historicals. Suleiman the Magnificent scandalized his court when he took her as sole wife, monogamy not being a normal sultanic practice, and things got tenser still when she moved out of the harem and into his own living quarters.

The Brothers need to chill!

This page is always very tender toward Muslims who want to get involved in democratic politics, from the U.S. to the Maghreb and on to Xinjiang (or East Turkestan, as some of the natives prefer to call it), and nowhere more than Turkey and Egypt, where they oppose a secular establishment that really resists democracy—maybe a good deal too tender, because I do not wish to condone mistreatment of women or exclusion of minorities (as some allege the draft Egyptian constitution would permit).

I should add that they are also capable of making themselves ridiculous, as in the current spat in Turkey over the television series The Magnificent Century, a soap opera version of the love story between Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (reigned 1520 to 1566) and his favorite wife, Hurrem. Apparently since the secular establishment in Turkey continues to celebrate itself as the vibrant young alternative (at the age of 90!) to the Ottoman empire, and vilify the empire as a sink of fez-wearing degradation, the Brothers by oppositional instinct treat the Ottomans as saintly martyrs, and they object to the depiction of Topkapi as the location of sexytime activities and wine-drinking (presumably the most historically accurate elements of the script). Shocked, shocked to learn that there are lawful connubial pleasures being experienced in this harem! 

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt again

Well, Egypt is a pretty big country, after all. And a lot of things happen there, especially just now. And today's Thomas Friedman surrogate mashing up the distinct and mutually hostile parties into one terrifying "Islamist" majority is the normally unpanicked Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, on Morning Edition:

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in Egypt are flexing their growing political muscle. They control the legislative agenda in parliament, and in recent weeks introduced controversial proposals to curb social freedoms and legal rights.

Islamist lawmakers also handpicked a 100-member panel that began meeting this week to write a new constitution, which is widely expected to enshrine Islamic law.

Clouds 2 Elephant. Uncredited photo from The Magnifying Glass.

Only not exactly. As usual. Because the controversial proposals—the revival of traditional punishments like cutting thieves' hands off,  elimination of foreign language instruction [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

Today's visitation from the things that go bump in Thomas P. Friedman's night is our old friend the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose officials are telling the Times that they have been telling their daughter organization Hamas to moderate its stances a bit and try to find more common ground with the atheist Fatah, by way of forming more of a common front in negotiations with Israel.

Elephant rope dancing. From Percy J. Billinghurst, A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals (London, 1901).

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had [jump]

Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!

 

Airborne elephant watch

Alas, the Times and the BBC both headline their Egypt election stories with the announcement that "Islamists" have won.  Once again, that's just not exactly what happened, which is what you read in Al Jazeera or Voice of America: The Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party is the winner, with 47% of the seats in the People's Assembly, a "sweeping victory" but not a majority; their Islamist rivals Al-Nur finished second, with 29% of the seats, and the liberal Al-Wafd third, with about 7%—enough to enable them to form a majority coalition with the MB, if that's how things work out, which is no less likely than some kind of "Islamic front".

Reconstruction from the late 16th century of an automaton by Heron of Alexandria (10-70 C.E.), a mathematician of uncertain ethnicity who invented the steam engine. From here. When Hercules whacks the dragon on the head, the dragon shoots water in the hero's face.

Airborne elephant watch

Among those unpanicked by the Friedman Fear of Egypt's being overrun by Islamic fanatics, count the Google person turned revolutionary Wael Ghonim, currently on a well-deserved book tour; asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep if it didn't upset him that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections by working door to door while he and his fellow liberals were online, he replied something like, "Yes, perfect--we should learn from them."

Watching elephants write op-ed pieces

Don't look now, but Thomas Friedman has locked on a new idiotic metaphor. None of us can predict the title of his next book, but I'll bet a good bookie can give you decent odds on Watching Elephants Fly. Tell 'em I sent you.

Flying elephants--if he wore a mustache, wouldn't he look a little like--OMG!

Watching elephants fly is a trope for coming across a totally unexpected story (like, "Amazingly, it took more than six months!"). Friedman uses it in particular as a description of how he felt [jump]

Muslim traditional values voters?

Nicholas Kristof in today's Times, on the success of the Islamist parties in the Egyptian elections, brings up a supremely important point that we Americans seem utterly unaware of: a big part of the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups is in the way they provide real political value to the public long before they even consider getting elected:

[their] offices are social service agencies. Citizens dropped in to ask for blankets for the winter, and the party handed them out — along with campaign brochures. Several people asked for help paying medical bills, and they got it. In the evening, women arrived to take a free class about science.

But then he misinterprets his observations in a way that makes them less useful: