By Myles Ludwig
To coup or not to coup, that has been the question in Egypt. Lots of money rides on the answer. Billions, in fact.
Up until the sad, chaotic violence of recent days there, the galumphing of government, citizenry and military has often seemed to me like a Facebook War. Semantic shots were being traded between opposing forces, both of which were claiming legitimacy. They flew with deadly intent across street corners and public parks.
Official Tweets wrangled in cellphone-to-cellphone combat with their unofficial counterparts across the bandwidth. Each side was sure it had an exclusive purchase on the divine texts thumbed on electronic tablets. Each cohort has its own cyberbanner, its own Facebook page.
Once again, social media has played a leading role in the process and definition of governing, and this in country in which about a quarter of the population has access to the Internet.
The real violence changed that.
But, still, I am thinking we’ve finally come to a place in our world in which the old terms, the old dialectics that colored our thinking, so common in the days leading up and through the cold war between capitalism and communism, the ideological rowboats that we grudgingly crewed, have really slipped their moorings of meaning. They are adrift, now in some pretty rough seas. Some foul winds are blowing pretty hard, and the poor old gods are barely treading water, maybe dog-paddling as fast as they can towards the ambiguous safety of a rapidly receding shore of relevancy.
At moments like these, like this, anything can happen.
And it does.
Take China. The replacement of the purist Maoist ideal of Great Leaps Forward with the Chinese clone of the uber-materialist American Dream dropped the sacred notion of harmony on its head and sent many Chinese scurrying back to their occult roots for guidance and comfort. Post-modern Feng Shui.
In Russia, the poker-faced tsar in the gray suit has replaced the old, wedding-cake tsars. Cathedrals are being rebuilt, pogroms are no longer fashionable, and feudalism has taken a distinctly contemporary turn. The most blessed beneficiaries of this semi-private tsardom can now buy U.S. basketball teams. In the Hawaii of the 19th century, Christianity gained a foothold in the islands when Queen Ka’ahumanu got hungry enough to sit down to eat with the men, thus upending the old taboos.
We are all a bit at sea.
The writhing of post-Arab Spring fever in Egypt shows us that our treasured idea of democracy is neither so sacred nor so surefooted, nor so clearly understood and shared on the streets that it can’t be tipped over as certainly as a dictator can be deposed. What defines a democracy, now? Is it the ability to vote or the ability to shout? Is crowdsourcing a benefit or a threat?
And that tired old saw of one man’s freedom fighter being another’s terrorist, one man’s treasure being another’s junk, is now reformed as one man’s whistleblower being another’s traitor. Should Edward Snowden find asylum in Nicaragua, does that bring the troubled history of that country, once ruled by an American adventurer, William Walker, who made himself president until he was deposed and executed in Honduras, full circle? Or is it a cruel irony?
These examples underline the Richards theory of meaning, which posits that words have meaning only in their cultural context.
Up until the last few days, I had been thinking about the Egyptian mess in a lighthearted manner. I admit I was blasé, musing that, had we had access to the Internet ages ago, maybe some of the great historic and bloody battles of the past — the Hundred Years War, the American Civil War, the Chaco War in Latin America — could have been fought by Facebook proxy, leaving the battlefields strewn with androids instead of humanoids.
How did a way to meet girls so quickly become a weapon of change?
And how do you walk like an Egyptian?
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.