Richard at American Leftist pointed me to Lenin’s Tomb, from which comes this excerpt from his excerpt.
I say Egypt could be the next Venezuela — it would be more accurate to say that it would be far, far more significant than what is happening in Venezuela, much as one admires the popular movements and the political leadership shown thus far in that country.
The reasons are obvious: the overthrow of a pro-imperialist dictator subsidised by $2bn dollar donations from the Washington treasury each year, on the back of a massive wave of labour strikes and uprisings, would lay the grounds for a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East that no neoconservative would appreciate.
If Lenin’s predictions are on target, Bush actually could wind up in the history books as the man who brought democracy to the Middle East — although not at all in the way he imagined.
The thing that Bush and his neocon enablers can’t get their heads around is that free elections don’t necessarily lead to pro-western and pro-business capitalist regimes. Look at Hamas. Look at Venezuela. Look at Algeria. On and on.
In one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels the hero is warned by his friend and mentor Meyer Meyer not to make the mistake of thinking that other people are basically pretty much like McGee, only with different faces.
This sounds too obvious to be worth saying, but in fact it’s a mistake that most of us make, most of the time. It explains why Bush thought Americans wanted him to gut Social Security; it explains why I thought Americans would gut Bush in the 2004 election.
I've been surprised that Egypt hasn't blown up before, but I wonder--and can't tell from the article--what's expected to emerge as the country's future.
I was rather fond of the pan-Arabists (maybe because I don't know enough about them), and I'm forever sticking up for the Ba'athists, but the odds in the Middle East seem stacked in favor of their Jerry Falwell equivalents.
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on April 6, 2007 10:05 AMGood to hear that Travis McGee is still alive and kicking ... :-))
Hope he'll meet Tom Bethany some day. Together the might change the world.
MacDonald had a lot of wisdom and put a good bit of it in both McGee and Meyer's mouths. The plots of the McGee series books are almost incidental to the conversations and musing of the characters. I re-read them every 5 years or so. By the way, Meyer's full name is G. Ludweg Meyer or something similar. Meyer Meyer is a character in Ed McBain's fine 87th Precinct series. We lost McBain just recently
Posted by: wetherman on April 8, 2007 6:06 PMAnd so which color of title was this particular Travis wisdom tidbit lifted from?
Actually, the voters did gut Bush in the 2004 elections, according to the exit polls.
Posted by: farang on April 9, 2007 10:15 AMOf course you're right about Meyer Meyer, Wetherman. I've had a mass die-off of synapses over the years. I've reread one or two of the old Travis McGees over the years myself, and always been struck by the number of notions, ideas, nuggets that I had retained without knowing exactly where they came from. One of them was the one I cited, Farang, but damned if I remember which book it was from. The info is probably written to my hard drive somewhere, but the directory is garbled.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on April 9, 2007 10:53 AM