The American Dream Delusion

Here’s a statistic that I still can’t wrap my mind around: 70-80% of the American population isn’t remotely engaged in matters of American foreign affairs.

Ironic right?

A few weeks back I blatantly stated that the American society is plagued with a dry consumerist internationally absent mentality. I’m kind of hesitant calling it a mentality since it’s more like a complete absence of one. Unfortunately, I got responded to with sentiments such as “you obviously hate America”. Plain and simple. I’m an Arab Muslim so it really doesn’t take me by surprise that that is the default reaction.

This concept of political ambivalence was visited innumerable times by my college professors. Given materialistic incentives to mobilize and enliven capitalistic enterprises, individuals have no psychological vacuum (let alone need) to fabric politics into their interests. Living in this country, it’s not very difficult to identify this theory as a reality; I like to call it United States of Entrepreneurship. In a nation where you can gain a substantial sum of money as a result of the death of your spouse, it’s not really a challenge to identify its priorities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not venting here. Not at all.

What baffles me is this: despite American apathy to its, and not to mention our, political alignments, we still hold “American Democracy” as the holy grail of modern day liberalism. The “American Dream” as that of modern day living. Knowledgeable figures, such as Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to conjure up a discourse on American Exceptionalism. As a result, we, the peoples of peripheral societies, became enamored with the concept of “libertarianism”. Unfortunately this concept has mutated into something of a social disease. Liberalism has been translated into the belief system of loose morality and abandonment of restraint.

I’m sure you would all agree that in the Middle East when an individual outright states that he/she is “very liberal” it often connotes morally/religiously indifferent. My question is: why did we neglect the American judiciary system and Supreme Court structures, civil and criminal laws, admirable judicial temperament and professionalism, hard work and self-discipline and merely focused on the very much coveted lack of moral restraint? For some mysterious reason, we took “liberalism” and tailored it to cater to our deprivation of social freedom.

Post January 25, I heard people left and right commending American democracy and “liberalism” holding it capable of molding our currently-fragile Egyptian society around. There’s an essential difference between liberalism and libertarianism. The former is political and the latter social. Politically, Egypt is desperate for progressivism and change. Socially, we have a responsibility to NOT be internally imperialized by Western lifestyle.

Call me crazy but I’d much rather not have homosexuals, PDA, teenage moms, failed marriages, and alcoholism taking the country over. We're a conservative society for a reason.

What we’ve seen so far in 2011 only accentuates the incredible democratic drive that Arabs possess. The Arab revolution has become emblematic of change and shackle-breaking. We inhabit the holiest region on the planet having hosted the nascence of monotheism and tradition. Let’s think twice before proposing to adopt a hollow indifferent ideology mindlessly negating all that we have stood for.

Rationalization of Stereotypes

Since the last time I've written, I've had the most eye-opening conversation involving political discourse among Egyptians living abroad.

What I've heard infuriated me to no end. It's the type of talk that makes stereotypes completely justifiable and even rather commendable.

I'm not going to try to be objective in delivering to the reader the main arguments of the conversation. You are free to judge for yourself whether you think what this particular person said is of any substance. The reason I’m sharing this encounter is to fortify this following claim:

Every stereotype, alleged weakness, or speculated threat is fully reinforced by certain Arab-indigenous catalysts who take part in Western foreign policy/intelligence institutions and/or media outlets.

It is excruciatingly ironic how the sugarcoated ideal of Arab ambassadorship helps us sleep at night while these very entities are willing and able to stab us in the back whenever they see fit. The insufferable truth is this: Once you entrench yourself in a certain executive structure, you become a cog in a vast mechanism of self-righteous group think. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of the potential volume of their own voices; it’s tempting to give in to the general conventional wisdom in this given environment. For instance, if your line of work involves intelligence operations covering global terrorist networks, it wouldn’t make sense to vocalize contentions that are not parallel to the philosophy and nature of your job (which, consequently, rationalize the need for this particular organization in the first place). Unfortunately, this certain philosophy starts to intrude on your political and social perceptions, tainting them with unsubstantiated condemnatory rhetoric with your line of work being the rationalization.

With that said, I’d like to share what this particular conversation comprised (I’ll refer to my adversary in this conversation as X): In a status on Facebook, I intoned the quintessential importance of political pluralism in any democratization process (which would undoubtedly accommodate any Islamist and/or leftist organizations), there’s no possibility of us calling ourselves democratic while still condemning certain groups to social and political fringes; common sense, right? Why should we allow petty futile banter on religious superiority eclipse the infallible nationalist stride of the people’s revolution? X’s main arguments were evidently very enamored with utopian American principals and believed it was appropriate for Egypt’s upcoming regime to adopt them as constitutional foundations. I replied to X stating that a relatively young nation-state such as Egypt cannot be assimilated to a Western liberal model since our society is hungry for incorporation of tradition in policy. We cannot rule out cultural groups for the sake of mimicking a foreign (and very dissimilar) nation. Post-revolution transitional government is required to tailor a modified democratic process that doesn’t step on anybody’s toes while simultaneously providing lacked human rights. Throughout our debate, X would tease out imaginary claims out of my arguments to reinforce his own beliefs on the subject.

I was quoted for saying: Arab culture is incompatible with democracy; Islam is a hindrance to the democratic process; and, the best one, I HATE/CODEMN THE US.

What I found to be exceptionally droll was the manner in which X would be critical of my way of writing instead of the actual content; a very tactical fake demeanor of authority. Although this person claims to have a “respectable” background in academia, I found myself doubting the merit of his discourse.

In case I didn’t explicitly and clearly spell it out: X’s occupation is attributed to US terrorism intelligence and surveillance services. X only holds the Egyptian passport but has lived his entire life in America.

I personally had to question the authenticity of his “Egyptianness” when he said, and I quote: “Egypt will never have honor. They are not civilized, and never will be”.

It’s funny how we’re usually wondering how Americans are inspired to firmly believe that we’re backwards, weak, and lesser than core countries. We’d be asking ourselves: How did 9/11 convince an entire nation that 1.57 billion Muslims are militarized and angry? Simple, self-proclaimed Arabs took part in the very institutions that implement foreign policy contributing their opinion of how Muslims (and most Arabs) do not welcome democratization and push an anti-Western agenda.

Why wouldn’t you believe a native about his own homeland? He must be portraying reality, right?

I cannot imagine how many of these people are infiltrating American executive offices. Who knows what kind of information they deliver about us. What’s worse is the covertness of these situations; we can’t be fully aware of them if they are done behind closed doors. We only get to experience the outcome of these policies; and then we start to wonder why stereotypes run international relations.

Please stop using your religion as a weapon. Muslims are not anyone’s antagonists; Muslims are not democracy’s enemy; Muslims are not taking over your country and suppressing your women.

We’re constantly being played against each other against our will.

Wisen up.