Watching the pro-democracy upheaval in the Middle East is an uplifting experience. When Tunisia alone was convulsed with populist protests, the story seemed quaint and remote. When the protestors succeeded in toppling the reigning despot, it was hard to suppress a little “Good for them!†cheer. When neighboring countries’ leaders, employing virtually identical systems for staying in power, began looking about nervously, the story began to get interesting. And now that Egypt is grappling with the same democratic protests, well, “Friends, it may look like a movement,†to quote Arlo Guthrie.
Inspiring though it is, I find myself envying these countries—just a little bit. As the US, shining beacon of democracy, surrenders its freedoms to corporate interests and the terrorist witch-hunt, nations we traditionally look down upon as tin-pot dictatorships are putting us to shame.
Take Al Jazeera, for example. Initially, it sounded to me like a shill for Arab nationalism, but the more I listen, the more it seems to offer good journalism, sounding nationalistic only in the same way and to the same degree that the New York Times offers a Amero-centric (or New York-centric, or even Manhattan-centric) perspective. It takes its adversarial role towards government seriously, seemingly more seriously than American news, which increasingly merely reports he-said/she-said press releases from conservatives and liberals, because that’s cheaper and easier than finding out which side is telling the truth. Our journalists may still aspire to be Woodward and Bernstein, but Al Jazeera is actually going out and doing it, while the bylines of our press increasingly read Murdoch and Zell.
Or take voter turn-out. During the Bush administration, we read about plucky Afghanis traveling hundreds of miles to vote, risking murder as they did so, while here at home, we had stories of citizens (cough) complaining “I don’t like either of ’em, so I’m not voting.†And, disturbingly, stories of our own brown-shirt wannabes hanging around polling booths and intimidating minority voters.
Or take the way reform-minded protestors of Middle Eastern countries are pushing for education: teachers independent of the regime, professorships awarded on merit rather than cronyism, wider availability of public education. As we use our budget crisis as an excuse to dismantle public education in America.
The envy can only go so far: one mustn’t lose sight of the relative state of affairs in the excitement of witnessing the direction in which they’re changing. On a scale of zero to ten, where zero is the kind of cultish Big Brother hell North Korea resembles and ten is a full participatory democracy such as can hardly exist outside of small frontier communities, the US may be in a sixty-year slide from 8 to 6, while democratic protestors in the Mideast might be struggling to work from a 4 up to a 5.
Still, it’s hard not to wish we could share in some of that fervor for democracy that is supposed to be the American national hallmark. Institutions, like a free press and a universal franchise and public education, that underpin a viable democracy are precious elsewhere because they can’t be taken for granted. Peoples that only recently won the vote will fight to retain it. Peoples expressing a new-found freedom of speech will fight to exercise it. Sadly, here in the US, we take such freedoms—and the responsibilities that attach thereto—for granted. And we’re losing them in consequence.
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