A lil bi' o' politics

In all honesty, i haven't been keeping with egyptian politics as much, and whenever i do, it's some story that made headlines like the one below, so they are bound to be bad news. oh, unless of course it's the retirement of our government.

i don't know Gamal's agenda. he might be one of the more charismatic candidates available. the way i see it, and i may be wrong, is that because the national party has been monopolizing the rule for so long, i doubt that other parties actually have the right connections or approach to improve egypt's situation all around. that said, i feel that there are some latent voices within the national party that need to be heard, and feel that it's ok for the one party to have different views and negotiate them until the best one succeeds to make it into a popular decision. i may be too optimistic if i wish for more than one party to share the rule-- that would in a way be ideal, but i don't feel that our political parties have shown enough maturity to handle such a co-op.

in the last presidential election, mubarak "won" the popular vote, and even if the votes have been tampered with, the contestants were a bunch of puppets. i have no idea whether or not that was purposeful. Gamal, much like Obama, can get easily caught up into self-promotion and falls in the cracks of controversial issues he's confronted with, and soon you'd see him stuttering to the safety of agreeing with the status quo. sometimes he reverts to the popular political way out: to digress ansering a question that has never been asked. politically, i doubt he can do otherwise right now, given that he's under his father's wing, so even if he had different views or better intention for the people, he wouldn't be able to vocalize them publicly. unless of course he has the balls to overthrow his father's rule, which happened in Qatar and allowed media as bold as Al Jazeera network to survive. but i'm almost sure you're not going to be reading about Gamal overthrowing Husni in this lifetime.

the problem with egypt, when it comes to the rule, is that one ruling agent (the government) is not practically monitored by other agents (the judicial system, the media, etc), even though this may be what the constitution says. the attempts to do so are quickly suffocated by heavy military presence and raising red flag of treason and betrayal of what's patriotic and in the best interest of Egypt (sounds familiar? the Bush administration used to pull out that flag pretty often). The strive for power comes with many promises that are either forgotten or found too hard to fulfill given the already existing corruption. besides, the nature of politics, anywhere, mutates the politicians into self-protecting carnivores that are too consumed into their own survival and forget the original reason of being given the authority which they are. no one president or one official can change things on his own. not even the prime minister. but each official has enough inertia to cause some stir, the baby steps that are essential to change the big picture. interestingly, facebook fulfilled the baby-steps prophecy, because the individual voices of frustrated young egyptians started to conglumerate into a national movement opposing the status quo, or so says the article below.

in egypt, i don't feel that we have attained the level of professionalism about any industry so that we regard work as simply work, including governing a nation. things tend to get personal, and a critisizm is usually seen as an insulting challenge that jeopardizes the official's history of achievements. so the official usually takes it upon himself to shut up those voices of critisizm, not simply out of mere corruption, but largely because it creates dissonance between the image he wants to project vs. the image that is being urged by his critics. the same scenario takes place in the typical one-man show business, in advertising, in the grocery store, in academia, in the supreme council of antiquities... you don't see a lot of feedback boxes where you can rate the service around here. there aren't as many reviews in your career history, and meetings are often about what has already been decided, not for the sake of brainstorming. so these are all really atomized versions of a monarchy. one man decides, all rest concede. the more successful prototype is that of Al Shura, the parliament, the house of commons, the congress, the board of trustees, the round table where the decision is arrived at by contemplation of different, sometimes opposing, members who are all just as good and just as powerful, and where the leader's role is that of a chief executive, not a chief executioner.

so it boils down to a management problem, deeply rooted in our models of education, in how things should be, and how we ought to think and challenge others' thoughts, and how we can express ourselves and remain politically correct or at least be diplomatic. And most importantly, it's a problem rooted in how we ought to listen. I don't see any debate classes around my schools. the only model of a co-op was the student union, which at best was a sterile version of a typical government. i am talking about elementary schools where values and models can be easily fostered at an early age. the only glimpse of some real co-op takes place on university grounds, and then sadly, it's all polluted with egos and the thirst of competition and winning, without any true sense of responsibility. i remember how when in the american university in cairo, the student union "lost" 25,000 egyptian pounds (at the time $5,600), and how students got so sucked up in acting as UN officials that they believed themselves and started bossing other students around. All symptoms of early signs of a good ol' third-world government fulfilled.