Egypt. Cairo, Giza, Luxor. Tunis.

Egypt. Cairo, Giza, Luxor. Tunis.

January 28, 2011

http://hpub.org/eyewitness-cairo-january-25-2011/



I seen the small throngs of younger folks at 6 October bridge at

nightfall on December 26, 2010, as I inched throughout the Nile after my solo

jaunt to the fabled Egyptian museum. No one was paying any consideration

to them or to Egypt because the media was fixated on the protests in

Tunisia. The ocean of stalled site visitors and noxious fumes appeared as

huge because the Sahara and contrasted sharply to the dreamy nether world

of historical emperors Akhenaton and Ramses, and the fantastic historical past of

Egyptians long gone. “25 million folks in Cairo,” the taxi driver

blurted out. Within the coming days I marvelled that motorists didn’t

leap out of their automobiles and shoot one another in street rage. Cairo is an

completely unliveable metropolis. In all my travels I had by no means seen such

anarchy, congestion, lack of planning and maladroit metropolis authorities,

and this earlier than the rebellion.





I felt smothered by the mud and over the approaching weeks the

breathless monetary asphyxiation of each Egyptian I encountered

jogged my memory of a drowning man. I imbibed the grandeur of the Pyramids

of Giza and visited Memphis earlier than I resolved to flee the Hades of

Cairo and head to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, earlier than returning

as soon as once more to Cairo after a stint in Sharm el-Sheik and my risible

expulsion again to Egypt after a daft six-hour interrogation by

Israeli border guards full of astringent paranoia . Certainly, all

the Egyptians handle me in Arabic as my African-American heritage

spawns illusions that I'm their Native Son and certain supply of

sympathy together with badly wanted money. The dearth of financial

alternative warps personalities and makes human beings disingenuous

and sleazy. I remarked, and Egyptians I met concurred, that the one

factor retaining a lid on the scenario in Cairo is Islam, which is

omnipresent and reaches the decrease depths of the unconscious of

everyone right here. It’s the anti-freeze that retains boiling scorching water

from boiling. The identical may be stated of the nation as an entire. Dour

catechism places a brake on Egyptians’ instincts and urges to lash

out…till now. For all of the feckless hand-wringing and shibboleths

rolling of the tongues of half-bright talkingheads concerning the risks

of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic affect, it's Islam that

greases the wheels of the untenable status-quo they yearn for I

additionally suspect that Egyptian males really feel stifled on this very

conservative and sexually repressed society.







Ladies outdoors of the

vacationer trade stay lined in head scarves and dwell within the

shadows. In Egypt, a person with out a job would possibly as nicely be a eunuch

as a result of he ain’t gettin’ any. Within the 1930s psychologist Wilhelm Reich

explored the hyperlink between sexual denial in German tradition and the rise

of Fascism. At this time in Egypt involuntary asceticism followers the flames of

revolution and if the revolution is denied, Islamic extremism will

discover fertile floor.







The Praetorian Guard



Dapper quickly to be ex-president for all times Hosni Mubarak is definitely

an Air Power normal sufficiently old to have gotten his wings on propeller

plane within the wake of World Warfare II, however clever beauty surgical procedure

makes him seem like in his 50s. He's bigger than life in a darkish

suite and sun shades main troops in to battle on authorities murals,

MiGs overhead. To his left are photos and reliefs of pharaohs firing

arrows from bigas...