February 10, 2011
Brian Williams
What is obvious to everyone but Brian Williams, in spite of our heartfelt “conversation,” is that there are a multitude of factions and desires. Like every mass, it is made out of particles. There is no “pro” anything beyond the very broad hopes to immediately get out from under a dictator and get employed.
Brian Williams seldom mentions the astounding degree of unemployment which is rampant throughout all Egypt’s classes. Most ominously, it is officially 10% but more like 30% among even the professional and doctorate classes. Brian Williams never considers that unemployment in his own United States, following the traditional unemployment model and not the one which counts McDonald’s employees as welders, is approximately 25% on any given month. Brian Williams has not once queried what immigration and overregulation on a massive scale can mean for the citizens of the target country in terms of getting a job, even for the $50,000-a-year college-degree-holders.
Brian Williams is a sensitive soul. Brian Williams doesn”t like those types of questions or especially the harsh analysis the answers provoke. Brian Williams enjoys fairy tales and, one presumes, has polka-dot pajamas and sleeps under a unicorn-bedecked bedsheet.
Everything for Brian Williams is starkly black and white, those dusky Egyptians in the streets notwithstanding. Everything is either pro or anti. There is freedom and oppression, and according to him the United States has always supported freedom (though during his “conversation” he never discusses the precise origins of Mubarak’s billions). There is the just-landed Austrian emigrant who will fix everything, whether or not the everyday Egyptians like him, trust him, or have even heard of him before.
There is much to lament during the Egyptian crisis, including its people’s desperate suffering. As for Brian, I almost feel sorry for him, wrapped up in an existence so pathetically pathological that I suspect even he does not suspect how ludicrous is his personage.
Throughout it all, I save a tiny bit of pity for myself. I have heard this tired script before from so many nations throughout the world being breathlessly read by crusadingly pompous men with crooked faces. They never alter a word of their lines. Or their lies. And it is all quite stale.
It remains to be seen what will result in Cairo, but as Nero is said to have said, “Whatever comes next, let it be wonderful, let it be horrible, but at least do not let it be boring!”
