… a village rejoices, for it has regained its long lost idiot.
I don’t want to write another mushy post about Obama. Others have blogged longer and waxed more poetic about what the day means to them, and I don’t want to belittle their contributions by trying to force a contrived post about What Obama Means to Me.
Instead, let me share a reminiscence.
Cairo, July 2003.
It was my first trip back to Egypt since I had lived there in the mid 1990s, and I had just been ripped off in one of the most obvious schemes imaginable. The young man who had waited on us at the restaurant had claimed that I had given him a 50 piaster note instead of a 50 pound note. I knew which I’d given him, and I knew he was holding out for more money. I knew that the problem was that my companion and I had started counting our remaining Egyptian money after paying the bill, and that we’d neglected to tip him anything, and he was angry that we had so much and couldn’t spare an extra pound or two for him.
I was pissed and embarrassed at myself for having fallen into the trap, and no amount of screaming in English or Arabic seemed to be making a damned bit of difference. I knew why he did it, but I was angry anyway.
I had to go back to the hotel. Heidi, one of my colleagues on this lengthy multi-country business jaunt had joined me for lunch in the Khan al-Khalili, the storied marketplace in the center of the oldest district of Cairo. When I think about Cairo, I think about the area around the Khan – not necessarily the Khan itself, but the core of the city that dates back a millennia.
The rest of the group had returned to the hotel for a siesta, but I wanted a last chance to visit my favorite part of town, as we were in Egypt for barely 48 hours and I had a nearly physical need to cram in as much of it as I could. And now I was unhappy because I’d been ripped off like a common tourist.
I was still seething as I hailed a cab from the not-moving traffic on Azhar Street and Heidi and I climbed in. I told the driver where I wanted to go, and sat staring out the window.
“You look as though you’ll break the glass with your eyes, my friend,” the driver said, and I laughed. He gave a start: he’d said it in Arabic and not expected me to understand. Here began a conversation I have routinely whenever I’m in the Arab world: how it is that the khowaga, the quintessential white boy, came to know our language and our country and culture.
As is the case with many Egyptian cab drivers, he was not a cab driver by training. I’ve forgotten what he told me his actual profession was, but as we made our way through the early afternoon traffic back toward Zamalek and my hotel, he waxed poetic about many things.
It was July 2003, I was in the largest Arab capital, and my country was still in the process of bombing Baghdad.
The driver asked me where I was from, and I didn’t hesitate about telling him I was American. Even in the darkest days of the past eight years, when we joked about changing the translation in our survival Arabic guide of “I am from America” to “Ana min Canada” I never lied about where I was from.
This day, my cab driver was in a philosophical mood. “Your president lies,” he said to me. “He said that the reason your armies were in Iraq was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Saddam is gone, and your armies are still there. Why? What is the true reason?”
“I don’t know, ” I said simply.
“This man is not good for your country,” he went on. “All peoples around the world, they felt sympathy for your country in Eylul [September]. We wept. I have family in America. I felt as if these planes were hitting me! But now, we are all so angry at America because of what they do in Iraq.”
“I know,” I said glumly.
The driver looked in the mirror, eyes twinkling, and shook his head. “Do not take it personally, my friend,” he said. “After all, we did not vote for our president, either.” This man, from a country that never had democracy and has even less of it now, was reassuring me, supposedly from the shining example of what democracy is supposed to be. Although he meant it as a reassurance … and partially as a joke … it’s something that I’ve never forgotten. Had we really sunk that low?
Yesterday, when I sat around the conference table at work and watched the new president address the nation–and I thought it was an appropriate speech; it may not go down in history as one of the greatest speeches of all time, but Obama said what we needed to hear–I watched with colleagues who’ve found themselves in similar situations. I thought about all of the times since 2003 I’ve been in the Arab world. Arabs love to discuss politics, but I’ve refrained. I have no idea what my country is doing, and I can’t explain it, and I don’t want to defend it.
Barack Obama has been president for a little over 24 hours. So far, with each executive order, I’ve felt my gut unclench a little more. Sure, he could turn out to be ineffective. He could be a flash in the pan. The next four years could be marked by economic stagnation and turmoil.
But we elected him. And I’m proud of that.
