11 posts tagged “usa”

Over here in London, I am sensing through various little thoughts that I
overhear, or see on the net, that some people are in denial over the new
Obama presidency. It is a little 'out of left field' for them.

"For how long?" is a common question (as in how long before he is
killed).

And, the lengthier: "The guy played it really well, well done, but
there's a trick up his sleeve."

At a coffeeshop tonight, I overheard the conversation between two men.
One guy was filling the other guy's brain with his grand theory
about what happened: Obama is not really the outsider he is, and the
election, why, it 's all part of a meticulously organised master-plan.

It is fun to observe people adjusting their 'brainwash' programs to take
account of unexpected developments; to 'restore order' after an event
has caused some serious cognitive dissonance. "The USA is a f'cked up
place" just cannot sit with the contradictory implication of the new
developments.

I wonder how I myself am adjusting my brainwash programs. For starters,
I know I am cynical about Obama. Too much so. I cannot get myself to
give him two months of honeymoon. Is the notion that "The Highly
Improbable can Happen and Good Things are Possible" too much for my
brain?

My brain has been busy painting Obama; that career-savvy, smooth-talker
who plotted his rise to power for almost twenty years. My brain takes
his audaciousness in seeking power with a name like his to be indicative
of immense self-absorption. Why sometimes I cannot but think he is a
cynical bastard who will show that nothing has changed at all to all
those unwashed, politically-illiterate masses!

Is the cognitive dissonance of seeing someone inspire, organise, put his
talents to disciplined use, and beat the odds, too too much for my
brain? Why, in my world, people who try to inspire or organise or do
anything audacious fail miserably, this Obama must be a schemer.

Hey, maybe that guy I overheard at the coffeeshop was onto something!

Maybe it was even me! ;-)

Moral of the story: Give Obama a chance.

So how do I feel knowing now that Barack Obama is the new president of
the USA?  Well, excited of course. It says something particularly
important that Barack Hussein Obama, an African-American, married to an
African-American woman with African-American kids is going to be in the
White House. This election will confirm to a lot of people that the USA
is still an exciting leader of the world. It will change attitudes
around the world.

I hopefully also look forward to a competent and intelligent presidency.
I believe he is a uniter, and that should be good for the USA and the rest
of the world.

But ... I see that his margins were actually not that huge in many
states. His popular vote share is only 3-4% ahead of McCain. This was a
closely-contested election despite the appearance of a massive
landslide. He used his slight advantage across many states to accumulate
enough winner-takes-all electoral votes.

I am also reminded that he is part-Caucasian; this played an important
role in securing many white voters. He may have a strange name (for most
US citizens) but he has balanced it well with his autobiographical book
(which helped cement his image of "the typical American story") and his
Christian awakening (the US would not have elected a Muslim BHO).

I do not think he will change things radically foreign-policy-wise. The
US system ensures that the president is "contained" by Congress.

This election is a momentous one for US citizens primarily, not for the
rest of the world so much. It marks the USA's transition into a new era
where race is less of an issue than previously. It particularly marks a
very important transition for the status of Black people in the USA.

Barack Obama is an interesting, unflappable, intelligent guy; but he is
largely untested. He has promised a lot. God only knows how much he will
deliver. By the end of the campaign he was already breaking some of the
Change ideas he started off with (such as accepting private donations).
He has been assisted by a terrible outgoing president, bad economic
circumstances, and an opponent who never felt 'right' (and made a few
mistakes too).

Nevertheless, here is to a hope and a wish that he rises up to the
occasion and produces streams of good, sound decisions that not only
stand his country in good stead, but also the people of the world.

Earlier this evening, on Old Brompton Road - close to South Ken
station - in London, I noticed a big TV screen displaying a live news
channel. There were clips of Barack Obama striding on to a stage,
then of him giving a speech, then there was a series of pictures of
his grandmother and grandfather. The news item's caption was
"Decision Time USA". I had come to a complete halt and was watching
from across the road. I thought there was something new.

The TV screen hung on the wall inside the Foxton's Estate Agents
office that was across the road. I noticed I was standing next to a
bus stop, and that two young women were standing there. We had all
been focussing on the Obama clip. Obviously, the estate agents office
was closed, and we had no idea what the clip was saying. Then, I
noticed they were also looking at me; laden as I was with rucksack
and various other bags, I had stopped to watch the news clip.

The editors of the clip had picked only those shots that flattered
Obama; he looked dynamic and utterly presidential. One shot had him
framed between two US flags. It hit me: this man really does not fit
with the usual image of a US president. Had he been running for
president of Brazil or South Africa, there would have been no
surprise. And we would have seen very little of him on TV,
presidential as he may look.

The young women at the bus stop were probably white English folk. We
were all united in finding something eye-catching about Obama. We are
preparing ourselves to getting used to seeing him on television all
the time. Had he been running for the presidency of Brazil or South
Africa, I doubt they would have looked up. I doubt I would have
stopped dead in my tracks.

I do not like that some people find it unacceptable that a US
president can have a middle name like "Hussein". They think Obama is
a closet Arab, or Muslim, and therefore he should be out of contention.

It troubles me that Obama could not have come this far without being
a Christian. Or half-white.

There is another side to the story, but the points above are worth
pondering.

Mostafa El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American scientist, has been awarded

a "National Medal of Science, Technology and Innovation" by president

George W Bush.  See the vid here.  (Skip to the interesting bits.)

Always amusing to see the high and mighty humble themselves in front

of the great and good.  GWB did a fine job of humbling himself, gotta say.

But you have to wonder how on earth a frat brat gets to be the fella awarding 

medals to these esteemed propeller-heads!  Something is amiss.  It is one

of the rare occasions when the guys at the bottom pull the strings and play

puppet-master.  The C-grade guy is made to present medals to people he

spent his entire life avoiding.

I enjoyed Professor Viterbi's treatment of GWB: "How odious it is to stand next

to you," he almost said.  Viterbi is the author of the Viterbi Algorithm, taught

in many a textbook - it was my first time to see the distinguished man on

camera.

The medals were awarded about a week ago.  I was in Egypt at the time,

and all the media gave the story prominence.  Professor El-Sayed invented

a method to help cure cancer via nanotechnology.  He authored many of his

papers with his son.

Still, an A+ to George W Bush for graciously playing his designated role of

humblest-in-chief.

I was sitting with my old friends from college: B and M. We were in
Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, one of the many fashionable coffeeshops
dotting Cairo's well-off spots. M was in mid-story.

He was at a scientific conference in Canada and he'd run into our old
colleague, T. T's mother is Russian, his father is Egyptian; his full
name is very Muslim. M approached T to chat; T's name label said he
worked as faculty in one of the US's better universities. M spoke to
T directly in Arabic. To his surprise, T pretended he did not speak a
word of Arabic, had never been to Egypt, and was, apparently, a
Russian-American. M would not stand for it, but T was pleasantly
adamant, so M left.

Later, T is approached by D, a girl who also used to be in the same
circles back in Cairo. T spoke with her in Arabic. Spotting this, M
did not let it slip. He went right back to T, said hello to D, and
now confronted T. How come he could now speak Arabic? Red-faced,
T claimed he suffered from Alzheimer's and tried to pretend like
he suddenly remembered everything.

At this point, both myself and B said in unison: "if he doesn't want
us, we don't want him". We were so angry.

M went on to say that he'd researched T's web page and found that T
had written Egypt out of his CV. T claimed going to schools in
Russia, university in Russia, and to speak only his mother tongue:
Russian. We were just appalled.

B was reminded of when he used to go out dancing in various parts of
the world: his Lebanese friend would call himself Juan or Antonio and
claim to be Cuban. B told us he never hesitated to give his full
Muslim name and say he is Egyptian. And if the girls were not
going to like him, well they can go to hell.

In Egypt, everybody agrees that the country's system of government is
stagnant, that change is needed, that it will take a long time to
come, and a long time to really change things, that everybody's
meanwhile looking after themselves, and that most people
understandably want to go abroad and earn a decent living. But like
the Irish and the Italians who emigrated to the US because they had
to, loyalty to the motherland is beyond dispute.

A taxi driver, a man I have no qualms about describing as simple and
not particularly knowledgeable of world affairs, was telling me about
his Saudi Arabian passenger. The Saudi passenger got a bit lippy
about Egypt: crowded, some people are unscrupulous, disorganised,
etc. The taxi driver told him: "Your country may be wealthy now, but
it was not too long ago when you awaited our largesse. It used to be
that Egypt was the centre of the world, and the day will come again
when it returns there." The Saudi passenger replied: "I hope this day
never comes." The taxi driver pulled over and told him to get out.

How do my friends in Egypt see the upcoming US election? The answer
may surprise US readers. My friends see it as a choice between two
candidates worse than each other. They have no preference for either
candidate and see both as representatives of the same system; a
system steeped in domineering unfavoured others.

They perceive that Obama has charisma, they know McCain is
experienced. They can see that Palin will hoover up votes from
certain demographics. They know about the US election cycle, and the
huge campaign budgets involved. But they fundamentally believe
neither candidate will make their own lives better. As far as they
are concerned: the US political system produces a stream of
standard-issue presidents.

Let's take the last two Democratic-Party presidents of the US:
Clinton and Carter. Clinton was no great reformer of US foreign
policy. He instigated sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime,
sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; he authorised
illegal attacks on Sudan to pull attention away from his Lewinsky
scandal; and he tried to force Arafat to accept what he deemed a
'good' offer by Ehud Barak. When Arafat walked away, Clinton passed
on a decidedly anti-Arafat message to Bush.

Back in the late 1970s, even though Jimmy Carter was a personal
friend of Anwar Sadat, Carter leaned on Sadat to accept what then
became the Camp David peace accords. The Egyptian negotiating team
had decided unanimously that (Israeli Prime Minister) Begin's offer
was unsatisfactory. But Carter laid it on the line: "Anwar, if you
walk away from this, you walk away from it all, and I will cancel the
US aid program that we have prepared for Egypt".

The eight years of GWB have left people in Egypt (and elsewhere) in
no doubt that he is a particularly bad sample of US president. My
mother curses him whenever he appears on television. She sees him as
responsible for a lot of the bloodshed in Iraq; he lied about WMD and
he should be tried in court for it.

When my mother sees on television Condoleeza Rice, she says to her:
"you, God will punish you." Rice is not the typical US
white-man-in-charge; my mother expected her to come to the job with
an independent mind. Instead, Rice is working from the rule-book that
was set by her predecessors and her president.

The US has got itself in a terrible position: it is right in the
middle of a polarising "war on terror"; it supports a bad regime in
Egypt because the regime accepts instructions from it; and it is
always willing to see things from Israel's point of view. Put
yourself in the place of the common Egyptian: is the US on 'your
side'? Let's see.

The US supports the corrupt, oppressive regime that torments you on a
daily basis, it is "fighting terror" by launching wars against two
Muslim countries and killing lots of Muslims and torturing them, and
it refuses to stop Israel from occupying territories that are not
hers.

People here see the US as a blind supporter of Israel, a country that
in most people's minds is spoilt rotten by the blank cheques it gets
from the US. It is true that Egypt fought Israel as an enemy forty
years ago, but today most Egyptians just want a fair settlement,
something that will please the Palestinians and compensate them for
having lost their country sixty years ago. But the Americans are not
pressuring Israel to make serious concessions.

It is not just the US that is in a terrible position; the Egyptian
people are too. They absolutely resent the way they are being ruled,
but they are struggling to find a way to change the regime. There's
an old joke going around the country. The government raises taxes,
and the people cope. The government mismanages the economy so badly
that people can barely eat, and the people cope. Then the government
institutes a policy of whipping every bridge-crosser, and now finally
protests are organised: "the lines are too long, we need more
whippers".

I believe the Egyptian people need to change their own government by
themselves, I really do not want to see a US president try to "help
out". The best way to help out is to affect what is under the US's
direct control and to not interfere in other people's affairs. What
is under American control is their policies: they can stop giving in
to the short-sighted pro-Israel worldview, they can stop going to war
unnecessarily and fighting Muslims worldwide.

Almost everybody in Egypt thinks the US hates Muslims. Look at it
this way: the US is very worried about China, but it has actually
invested in China over the past twenty years in a manner that brings
puzzlement to many; it is almost like the US wants to help China out.
A lot of US debt today is in the hands of the Chinese government,
China can harm the US economy. But US policy is very careful when
addressing China. Likewise Russia; a lot of care is taken, and no
unnecessary wars or confrontations are sought. North Korea was able
to test a nuclear weapon.

It is only when it comes to the Muslims, be they Iranians, Iraqis,
Afghanis, Lebanese, or Palestinians that force is threatened and
actually deployed. It seems like the US is using these countries as
whipping boys. The US strategy seems to be to pick on the guys they
know they can beat, the guys they know they can play against each
other, the guys with 'development issues', who are still groping
their way out of bad governance. That's a really terrible strategy.

No one I know in Egypt thinks either candidate will change that
strategy.

John Gray is a  bit of an apocalyptic writer.  But, darn, he's right: while the US economy melts, the Chinese are doing space walks.

Are we going to look back on this time as the beginning of the decline of the US?

I watched the McCain-Obama debate in full last night. I watched it on
CNN with my father (in Cairo). About fifteen minutes into it, my dad
thought it'd be a great idea to switch to Al-Jazeera and get the
Arabic-dubbed version. My father is very comfortable with English, so
I was a little surprised, but he is used to watching and listening to
stuff in Arabic. We switched to Al-Jazeera for another fifteen
minutes, and then he called it a night and I switched back to CNN.

The interpreter Al Jazeera assigned to cover Obama was loud and spoke
expressively, whereas the guy who did McCain sounded quiet and
robotic. I was surprised how with Arabic as language of
communication, and the personalities of both candidates now muted, I
could focus much better on what was being said. Context matters, eh?

Returning to CNN was welcome though, because the original version
felt more right for the occasion.

In my opinion, McCain scored heavily in this debate. He came off a
lot more articulate and substantial than I had ever seen him before
(admittedly only a few times). Overall, he seemed authoritative and
made more of the debate than Obama, who I thought was going to be an
expert debater. He engaged robustly and easily brushed off
potentially damaging attacks by Obama.

Obama, on the other hand, appeared more refined and gentlemanly. He
attempted to connect with all parties of the debate: the moderator,
the audience in the room, the TV audience, and McCain himself. McCain
never once even looked in Obama's direction. Towards the end of the
debate, I began to feel that McCain had over-reached a little, he was
coming off as superior and patronising. But he did not get to the
school-master levels of Cheney, when the VP debated against Edwards.

I felt overall McCain won though. Obama did not call McCain on that
overbearing attitude, he did not call him on Iraq or Afghanistan
strongly enough, he left Palin, McCain's age, and a few other things
in the debate unsaid. I also felt that Obama, though a great speaker,
sometimes slowed down a lot - clearly his brain was racing on.
McCain, who started off nervously, became much more fluent quickly.
He seemed to speak from the gut.

Nevertheless, McCain was in his bubble. He thought highly of himself
and little of his opponent. Obama was engaged, on his feet, and
impressively smooth. But he was slow and failed to inflict serious
points against his rival.

Given that most Dems and Reps would have fallen behind party lines,
this was a battle for the independents and 'soft' voters. Unless I am
mis-reading the pulse of the US voter, who may turn out to prefer
refinement and thinks less of experience, McCain won. The good news
is that there are two more debates to really firm up people's minds.

PS. Both drew blanks on the economy.

I am particularly impressed with whoever coined - within minutes of Palin's nomination - the abbreviation VPILF.

Now when VP Palin (it is possible!) goes around world capitals doing courtesy visits and attending funerals (that's pretty much what VP's do, Sarah), the enemies of the USA will be confused.  They'll be burning flags, chanting and yelling: "Death to America, Death to America, F* America, oh, damn, ... that's actually not a bad idea."

Am I pushing it too far?