laura.fo

This video is excellent. At almost 24 minutes I know it can't compete with memes and lolcats, which makes me reluctant to even post it, but — related to what I was saying yesterday about Facebook activists, and how America is viewed as neutral to the point of cold in the foreign press — I think it gives a good picture of why American rhetoric about "democracy" rings so hollow in a country like Egypt. We in the U.S. hear "America supports democracy abroad!!ELEVENTY!" so much that it's become a cliche, so much that we assume the government must be just killing themselves doling out of democracy instruction booklets around the world. We complain that their reality doesn't match their rhetoric, but that criticism concedes half the argument — it assumes the rhetoric, at least, is there.

It's not. In Egypt all the American rhetoric about democracy comes with so many caveats and explanations of what's meant by the word "democracy" — explanations Egyptians hear and Americans don't — that no one sees it as 'America failing to live up to its promise' or anything so forgiving. The issue here isn't rhetoric without teeth: it's that no one has been promised democracy in the first place. They've specifically been told that the U.S. will not be promoting democracy if it threatens to come at the expense of stability. Meanwhile American foreign aid dollars are the only thing holding up Mubarak's regime.