I blame the Egyptians

 

My inner-blogger, first activated to my great surprise five years ago, is experiencing its first existential crisis. Yes, I know I have posted only twice (and very lightly) since coming back from Alexandria two weeks ago - and only twice while I was there. I have had emails and calls checking if I am still alive.

Can I continue to blame the Egyptians? Yes, I think so. For the fifteen days that I was in the city of the Ptolemies the place was merely tense and touchy after the Christmas church bombing. Since then I have had that nasty feeling for a journalist of not being where I ought to be. I have been watching too much Al Jazeera and, although I was in Alexandria for wholly classical reasons, nothing to do with journalism or politics at all, it still feels odd to be back in the UK when so much is happening in the city whose ancient rulers, almost all of them, saw as natural home of riot and revolt.

Alexandrians, for example, were famed for abusing Roman emperors - and for enduring a good deal of oppressive architecture in return (see pic). Alexandrians gave a very nasty fright to Julius Caesar in the mini-war that followed his first meeting with Cleopatra. 'Barely abject at one extreme, rashly foolhardy at the other' was the verdict on his fellows of the city's pioneer novelist Achilles Tatius. None of that comment is of any relevance for journalism, or even blogging, but it sets up a kind of angst all the same.

On Monday evening I broke away for a while to hand over our annual translation prizes - to all the winner bar the one besieged in Cairo.

Last night I saw the wonderfully distracting new film of Brighton Rock, a vivid account, inter alia, of the bad things that can happen under cover of riot.

Next week, I'm hoping that calm both in Egypt and closer to home will be restored.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

[WikiLeaks cables: FCO 'refused to speak with doomed British hostage' Foreign Office officials turned down the opportunity to speak to a British man held hostage in Mali before his execution because they did not want to be seen to negotiate with terrorists, cables obtained by WikiLeaks indicate.] UK Telegraph.

It would be useful to have an update on the current role of the UK Telegraph, since the paper is breaking a lot of WikiLeaks stories right now.

Among the news sites associated with the Ivy League universities (Harvard Crimson, Yale Daily News, Daily Pennsylvanian, Columbia Spectator), CJR would have to rate as invaluable.

Perhaps the student press at Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown could be improved (I think so).

But what would be best of all would be an IVY Express site in which all eight universities (with partners such as MIT and NYU) would share analytical resources, and try to get a systematic overview on academic issues.

The site could also be a test point for hardware (Chillblast Fusion Dimension), and also the complete Adobe creative suite.

In case Ivy League students have not noticed, the US is afflicted with obsolescence. If we were to examine the mysterious practices of AP Psychology and note the potential to teach fundamentals to students from grades nine to twelve by starting with a good text in Cognition (Ashcraft) and then working into Memory (Baddeley and/or Schwartz), we would see that the generic AP approach to Psychology is hopeless.

The fundamental texts for the English language are the COBUILD grammars, intermediate and advanced. It is also important to have an official high school corpus dictionary, such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English with its powerful CD. Language, of course, is an important subject in Cognition. Within the Psychology "community" (APA etc) the "idea" of how to teach English is absurd. A Psychology department would be likely to offer "The Academic Writer's Handbook" as a substitute for all the advances made in the corpus revolution in Linguistics in the past twenty years.

Young people might think that this disarray is just normal churning and obsolescence, and that you can't do anything about it. However, if we were to track the activities of the FBI, we would note routine incompetence (in 9/11), and even today, at a level that indicates training is too inept to count for much. (I was not at all surprised to receive a despairing e-mail from a professor at Marine university indicating that American universities are so mired in curriculum conservatism that it is impossible for them to be truly reflective about their practices.)

If terrorists were to decide to take out Yale, Harvard, or Princeton with a dirty bomb, it is quite possible that the stumbling FBI would just miss obvious signs, or fail to collate information. The FBI would not then revolutionize practices in psychology in its training. It would just expect the young people of Princeton, Harvard, or Yale to pay the price for its inept mindset. What prevents the FBI from teaching the books in Psychology and English that I have mentioned? Nothing. Just abrasive indifference to duty.

It used to be that young people could graduate from university and look for a ready-made role in society. But the world has changed forever. The youth will have to create systems so that when a CIA/FBI training/education pathology has been identified, the disorder will be overpowered in a timely way. Anyone who did a close reading of "Class 11," the shaky and inconclusive book on CIA training, would be amazed at the dullness of intellect that goes into such programs.

That systems now exist for decisive policy/practice corrections must be seen as a dream. I think that it would be extremely creative of Ivy League students to develop www.ivyexpress.com. I would certainly read it religiously. The UK Guardian, The Australian, and WSJ would be decent design models.

[Clayton Burns]

We should never underestimate the role of the uncanny:

["Violence has surged in Zimbabwe with reports of mob attacks, death threats, politically motivated arrests and at least one shooting ahead of possible elections, civil rights groups claim.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims youth militias loyal to Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party are 'running amok' in poor townships, and accuses the police of siding with the offenders.

Analysts regard the upsurge as a warning sign that Mugabe is gearing up for elections, possibly as early as June, and fear a repeat of the 2008 polls in which the MDC says 253 people died."]

What a synergy. The failure of the "international community" (such a shabby phenomenon as it is) to establish a world court of governance to charge and depose Mugabe sent a powerful green light signal to the dictator of Egypt: "Murder your citizens with impunity."

In turn, the Egyptian dictator's murderous contempt for the citizens of "his" country is having a blowback effect in Zimbabwe: "Go to it and kill with impunity." A perfect storm of incompetence, in governments, think tanks, and university programs.

It is never too late, obviously, to depose a dictator. With or without a world court of governance, the "international community" (if we want to abuse the English language) should move now to deal with Mugabe permanently. In very rapid order, it should be Egypt's turn. A final dirge for a dictator.

There is only one appropriate message for such criminal dictators: make your will and prepare to die.

Any military assistance to Egypt from the USA should be stopped and the payments for the past five years should be recovered by force. The USA has helped to create this mess. The President should have the courage to end it. Is he a man or something less than a man?