perpetrating a Timisoara-like mineriad of bussed-in thugs, exposing a potentially ugly side of the conflict that draws on deep-seated rifts within Egyptian society. And while the army was afforded great respect and room within which to operate, relations with the pro-democracy movement seem to have broken down. What has really been overthrown, now, is the dominion of politics itself wherein opinion, supreme above all, was, as the Duke of Venice says in Othello, the “sovereign mistress of effects.”
But if this is the case, then it is no use for a writer to gnash and rend in the face of this shift. For to navigate such chaos is simply to adapt and move on to where the landscape exhibits the change most signally. And if the tectonic terms now being deployed by theTimes are anything to go by (“Protests and Clashes Shake Arab World”; “Sudden Split Recasts Foreign Policy”, which was changed from “Sudden Rift…”) then perhaps this can be written as the story has changed. For in the pro-democracy’s struggle to handle the violence that is always somewhere in any given society, we can see that, before it even seems to have gotten itself written, the pro-democracy struggle is over. Or rather adapted and moved on to where the landscape exhibits the change most signally. For now we are seeing no longer a pro-democracy movement, but actual little-d democrats, a collective political conscience forming, taking shape in front of the world’s eyes (and now truly meriting full US support) as it combats the violence being thrown against it, literally learning to live with those imperceptible shifts that are what it means to govern themselves, for themselves, by themselves.
Welcome to democracy.
US Hegemony and the crises called Egypt.
