There was another game of Risk last night after many nights off. Risk always leads to scattered political points as we’re taking over the world. Last night an Egyptian friend of Adam was explaining how the best government was still a benevolent dictatorship. I asked isn’t that an oxymoron, and he said no, one person can keep the interests of everybody in mind, with those interests being food, shelter, and money. Some of his main points: instead of charging Egyptians 200% for every car purchase (if you buy a car for $50,000, you pay the government $100,000), the smart autocratic government would provide adequate healthcare and decent, universal education. Instead of cronyism and corruption soaking up all the government’s funds, the money would go to hospitals: the ones in downtown Cairo might look bad, he said, but go out of the city, to the Delta or the desert, and see how the felaheen get their healthcare — in a filthy room without bed-frames, mattresses on the floor, if at all.
Egypt and its people have been regressing, he said, stuck doing things inefficiently and in a decaying pack-mentality (Nasser’s Free Officers, the purging of intellectuals, scientists, and engineers for nationalists in key ministries, the wasting of water resources by building into the desert), and so the response to this level of society has to be dictatorship, but a smart, benevolent one (that is, none of the type of the past half century). In London, where he is a student, people actually do things on time, he said, on a schedule, and there is little to no chance that he will be driving down a highway near his house and have to avoid a truck barreling down the same side of the road at him. At least in England, that truck driver would be off the road for years if he drove the wrong way down a highway, and he’d be a shock story on the evening news. You just don’t do that, he said, you don’t drive your truck down the opposite side of the highway, except in Egypt.
He was speaking with the political confidence I’ve seen in prep-school Americans with presidential aspirations and his education and status in Egyptian society was clear. That he so was articulately advocating an authoritarian government — a smart one, yes, but a heavy hand still — is not only the kind of thing "birth pings of the Middle East" American think-tanks wouldn’t want to hear (or would they? after all, who props up Mubarak?) but the sort of muddied social theory that reveals to me a different Egypt that what I might learn in American history classes or pages of the American press. Nasser might have been a leader of ideas, the uniting Pan-Arabist cherished in memory and mostly lauded in history books for leading Egypt and the Arab world. But he also brought in a new era of cronyism, and Egypt in 2006 operates on his legacy.
If you start a business in your apartment and hire the boab (doorman) to run it, the friend explained, and then that boab fills the office with all his friends in the neighborhood who are boabs, that’s bad business, right? It will ruin the business over time. He did not critique Nasser or his successors because they are dictators, plainly, as many Americans might hope; he critiqued them because they were crooked, swayed by ideology and personal wealth over that of the country. But I have to think that they are one in the same.
Of course all this theory is pretty utopian. The benevolent dictator. The myriad problems of Egypt (far more than just the price of fool as highlighted in today’s International Herald Tribune by Michael Slackman), and the knowledge that democracy is not a foreign policy band-aid to stick on millions of people living under repressive, corrupt, and humiliated governments in the Middle East. They are authoritarian, yes, but in hearing the friend, the presence of dictatorship is not the problem alone. That people starve, that hospitals remain filthy, that trucks barrel down the wrong side of the highway without a ticket, that resources are wasted on car taxes over school aid, that the government employs thousands of men in Cairo as ineffectual traffic cops, paying them less than 100 Egyptian pounds a month — these are the problems. Instant democracy will not solve them, he said; will smart autocracy? If they’re products of decades of dictatorship, can a shift in absolute authority correct them?
