"Being America"

[Sierra Mike]

I am reading another verse than Yeats's, this one a text message on an Egyptian medical student's mobile phone in a TGI Friday's by the Nile in Cairo:

SATURDAY NIGHT PARTY
BOMBS IN WORLD TRADE CENTER
SPECIAL DJ OSAMA BIN LADEN
FLY IN COURTESY OF AMERICAN AIRLINES


Sitting with us are a young corporate lawyer and a first-year law student. The three are sisters, from an established but not eminent Egyptian family, and are fashionably turned out in tight black slacks and T-shirts several sizes too small. The medical student's pink shirt, from Naf Naf, reads "Girls Only." They are all giggling, waiting for me to appreciate the satirical phone text. When I am slow to respond, the lawyer, Ingy, takes it on herself to explain: "So, all people in Egypt admire bin Laden, because he is the one who hit the U.S. So, he is like a hero for us, rather than a terrorist."

The read more about the ever-widening gulf between America and those who seek to emulate it without becoming it, check out Being America (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/books/chapters/0330-1st-purdy.html). This story resides on the NYT site, so you'll need the GA login credentials (global13, affairs)

Bon apetit.

SM

[Coot]

The world's hunger is not exactly a compliment, and we should not take it complacently. We are loved, desired, and resented, often in one breath. Life is full of injury, confusion, and humiliation in a world upset by vast migrations, the rise of huge cities only fifty years old, and the collapse of social orders to which people belonged for centuries and millennia. Resentment and hurt, like aspiration, run to America: the country that offers to the mind and heart everything that real life denies the hand and mouth. This is not a question of what attitude we deserve. Admiration and resentment have always attached themselves to the powerful, the successful, the visible.

Affluent Arabs, emulating on the one hand and vilifying on the other. A culture, not so much on a collision course with its past as much as it is on a rationalization binge.