LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN – FORWARD

WASHINGTON, D.C. – I've been avoiding this piece for a while. But after all that time abroad, all those countries visited, all those friends made and a very successful process of "Irishification" undertaken by my Irish friends over the past five months, I nonetheless find myself back in my long-time favorite coffee shop in the American capital with a drip coffee on the table next to me (beats the holy shit out of Nescafe!), an American flag on the wall to my right, the Jackson Five on the stereo and the summer issue of The Oxford American in my rucksack. Or is it backpack? And there I was thinking I'd re-Americanized…

Indeed, that will be the subject of this last post on "American, Abroad" – what's the relationship between my American-ness and my abroad-ness? If it's true that you can't go home again, that must be even more so the case when your first extended trip outside of North America is an odyssey of nine months, fourteen countries, two-plus new languages, tens of thousands of miles/kilometres flown/driven/walked/ran/cycled/swum, dozens of new friends and umpteen life-changing experiences. In other words, my "year" abroad might better be styled as "two lifetimes." It certainly feels like that long ago that I packed everything I thought I'd want for the next nine months into a couple of bags and drove to Logan airport to catch an overnight flight to Istanbul. I waved good-bye to my parents and walked to the gate without looking back – somehow I knew that I was bound for something good.

And oh, how good it was. Those of you who've been reading my oft-neglected blog have gotten some of the year's tableaux; as a quick re-cap, I'll highlight that I lived a ten-minute walk from the ocean for nine straight months; got to see Syria just months before it blew up; celebrated Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner in Turkey, Christmas with friends in Antwerp and Easter in the piazza of St Peter's Basilica; swam every day in Alanya; completed the toughest mountain walk in Ireland; backpacked the tallest mountain in Ireland with my best friends; watched every episode of Father Ted at least once – and then saw star Ardal O'Hanlon perform stand-up; spent a weekend in an Irish-speaking village; taught English in a Turkish primary school; grew a beard; went Nessie-hunting on Loch Ness; and made absolutely the most amazing friends during both semesters. To paraphrase one of them, I was so, so lucky. It's true, and I'm incredibly grateful for everyone, everywhere and everything that contributed to making this year what it was.

But now that I've mentioned the good stuff, I want to try to draw some lessons from both of the societies that so generously hosted me these past nine months. Thinking back to my "two visions of the future" post, I stand by all of the assertions I made then at the beginning of my Irish semester. The Turks have a roaring economy and a dynamic culture to match; they actually believe they're going to "win the future" without their prime minister having to exhort them to do so in his speeches. Europeans, for their part, have a highly-developed social and global conscience and cosmopolitan cultures to go along with that; in a couple of generations, they have united the perennially war-torn Continent into a near-borderless, single-currency Union that is striving to be worthy of the appellation.

Fair play to both. But for all their respective strengths, it is vital to bear in mind the shortcomings of the Turkish and European systems and learn from them. For their part, the Turks have an overheated, fundamentally unsound economy and a less-than-perfectly-free government. They might have come through the global recession in good shape, but their bullish economy does not appear built to last and is now the subject of some worry from officials at home and abroad; meanwhile, their fascinating and rich culture has far from solved the Islam-and-democracy conundrum once and for all. Turks are far better off than Syrians, to be sure, but I would not be shouting from the rooftops of Arabia for revolting Arabs to seek to replicate Turkish government and society.

And then there's Europe. Now, I admire many things about Europe and think that – at least on a surface level – the Europeans have a lot of good ideas and get a lot of things right that Americans aren't as quick to accept. That said, I think the greatest moral, political and cultural threat to Europe and the European project are the unacknowledged fears and hatreds of its less-cosmopolitan quarters. The U.S. has a ton of dirty laundry and an increasingly vocal know-nothing/isolationist/racist sentiment, but we generally do a better job of airing that in the public sphere than do Europeans. It's easy to think of the U.S. as having a less-than-stellar record in dealing with blacks, Indians and immigrants and of Europe as one big Sweden of human rights, social democracy and universal health care, but that's an incredibly dangerous over-simplification.

Europe, for its part is – to coin a term – a tree-house society: a happy little club that exists a little bit above The Rest of Us, focused on promoting the happiness and tidiness of its little clubhouse. Nice life if you can get it, but the club members make it harder than is generally acknowledged to gain membership and don't especially care what happens on the ground. The whole E.U. business remains mostly the dream of the Continent's posh "Eurocrats" and lacks sufficient buy-in from national populations, most of which are understandably more focused on keeping their own jobs and social benefits than extending stereotypically cosmopolitan ideals to all. 

There's a reason America calls itself the melting pot and Europe is more often described as "cosmopolitan:" for all of the U.S.'s failings with regard to racism and protectionism, Europe is not properly a melting pot and its surface-level cosmopolitanism too often conceals a national xenophobia towards non-white/non-Christian/non-European people. At least American racists tend to be visible and vocal; Europe is not diligent enough about acknowledging and policing its most nationalistic/xenophobic agitators, and its leaders show a distressing tendency to navel-gaze and free-ride on American-provided security.

The other worries I have about the European model of social democracy – which I will be the first to admit has done tremendous good – are that it encourages nationalism and discourages entrepreneurialism and self-reliance. If citizens pay high taxes with the understanding that they will receive great social-security benefits in return, they will be understandably reluctant to loosen criteria for citizenship. More hands in the pot means less payout for everyone. On the other hand, knowing that you're entitled to an essentially livable wage courtesy of government even before doesn't exactly cultivate the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps spirit. As some Finnish friends freely acknowledged, the vaunted Scandinavian social security system actually dampens national creativity and drive to work and thus begs a free-rider problem. Be careful what you wish for, Michael Moore, because you may get exactly that.

Now, I know I'm not being perfectly fair here. "Europe," "Europeans" and "Eurocrats" are all loaded, over-general terms; my Euro-denominated Irish friends, for example, will be the first to tell you they're not really European. Europe is a lovely place and has many lovely people, what it lacks in my American perspective is dynamism and openness.

So if there is any one cultural value that undergirds America – and "American exceptionalism," if that exists – it is our unique blend of cultural openness and ingenuity. That spirit has always been our hallmark and our strength, and it's what everyone who worries about American decline is most afraid of losing. As I've said before, one of the universally-acknowledged beauties of Europe is how old and cultured everything is, but modern Europeans have been content to rest on the glories of past civilizations. The Romans didn't take over and say "Gosh, those Greeks sure built some pretty buildings and nice artwork. Let's keep the world united so that everyone can visit the triumphs of Greek antiquity." No: the Romans said "Look what those Greeks did. Let's do them one better!" Today, Europe is more in the business of preserving the past than building the future.

To my eye, America is on the fence between preservation and perseverance. We still talk a good game ("We went to the moon once!") but tend to shrink from commensurate action (that was then, this is now). W should not – can not – settle for preservationism: "Well, folks, we had ourselves a nice run there in the 20^th Century. Time to let someone else run the show." Can you imagine, less than a century from now, the Chinese minister of defense giving America the sort of tongue-lashing Bob Gates just gave the Europeans: "Come on, America, you have got to take some responsibility for your own security instead of just doing endless home-improvement projects on your tree-house and passing endless self-congratulatory declarations on human rights!"?

Not in this man's America. But I don't say that because I'm still in my old "oo-rah, oo-rah!" mindset of previous years. I refuse to accept climbing up into our own tree-house while telling ourselves we sure did good by winning WWII and putting a man on the moon, didn't we? But I also refuse to accept our own strand of destructive navel-gazing, the messianic/apocalyptic rhetoric of the hard-core exceptionalists who thump their Bibles and blather that America is the city on the hill, the last best hope of freedom in this world.

Because we're not. We do certain things very well, but we're as full of shit as every other people and country on the face of this earth, and it's about damn time we started taking ourselves a bit less seriously because no-one else really does. We have our own problems here, chiefly our completely unsustainable economic and social models, which we doggedly pursue to the great detriment of the Earth and the world. In many ways, we're at least as bad for buck-passing as the Eurocrats: making and shipping all of the "Made in China" crap that fuels our perpetual-growth economic myth-model is helping neither our carbon footprint nor the global freedom of which we are supposedly the great beacon and final arbiter. As the economist Tim Robertson points out in his TED talk on the no-growth "happiness" economy, we buy shit we don't need with money we don't have to make impressions that won't last on people we don't know. And we've let that system get "too big to fail."

So here it is, my great synthesis of Europe and America: in the words of Lincoln, we need to appeal to "the angels of our better nature" on both sides of the Atlantic and fuse American can-do dynamism with European realism and social conscience. Whatever paternalistic patience I might have harbored for the know-nothing, isolationist fear-mongering of today's Republican Party is gone now, as I learned watching the Republican debate last week. To tell obvious lies with a straight face on national television and to impugn President Obama for being "too European" and too willing to engage with the rest of the world should be a capital crime. Why is no-one willing to stand up to these merchants of fear and disunion? Americans, insulated by friendly-ish neighbors and oceans, have always had an isolationist streak, but it is insulting to everyone's intelligence to pander to it, much less to make isolationism/know-nothingism a measure of ideological purity for a presidential candidate.

Though I certainly don't try to withhold my own personal biases and opinions from this blog, I have tried until now to keep from being too overtly partisan in this space. But in no uncertain terms, I will now say that if being a smart, engaged, socially-conscious, moral, realistic person with a vision for the betterment of the United States as a country and as a member of the world community makes my president "too European," give me that president over one whose foreign policy "experience" can be distilled to "I can see Russia from my house!" To be fair, I have tremendous problems with President Obama and the Democrats – spinelessness, lofty words backed by precious little action and European-esque navel-gazing, to name a few big ones – but I can at least respect someone who recognizes that America can and should improve at home and abroad and has got to do a better job of being a global citizen. That doesn't make us soft. That gives us tremendous soft power, and in these days of recession and military over-extension, soft power is gold.

So yes, America, it is time to "put away childish things." Put away the religio-reactionary template of the conservative. Put away the know-nothingism and isolationism and fear-mongering. Put away lying and "truthiness." Put away the go-it-alone, exceptionalist, "man on the moon," WWII-inspired rhetoric and start acting in the world's best interest. Put away the deadly fallacy of perpetual growth. Put away unsustainable environmental, nutritional and population practices. Put aside knee-jerk, masturbatory, fawning media coverage of people and ideas that aren't actually newsworthy (this means you, Sarah Palin, climate deniers and everyone who thinks that tornadoes happen because God is angry at gays/Jews/Muslims/Obama/blacks/evolution/abortion/sharia-law-in-America). And most of all put away elected officials (or anyone else) who scores points by acting like a four-year-old and insisting that if we deny facts like climate change loudly enough, they will go away. Such behaviors only serve to kick problems down the road to future generations in America and throughout the world, and willfully screwing up the future is about as un-American a behavior as you can get.

Let's instead have an adult conversation in this country for once. Stop the yelling, stop the lying, tell partisan zealots of any stripe to feck off, and actually sit down and apply our famous American ingenuity and democracy to the great problems that face us. How to start getting carbon out of the environment? How to get everyone fed in a way that doesn't kill the planet or ourselves? How to solve the population crisis? How to move forward towards a sustainable ecological and economic model for the future? How to find happiness instead of the vapidly virtual "connection" of materialism and hundreds of Facebook friends without a single relationship?

As plenty of people smarter than I have noted, facing any one of the above issues would be daunting; seeing so many bills come due at the same time is going to require the most revolutionary global adaptation every undertaken. And we'd better start now: if the world doesn't get together and start tackling this stuff, there will be Malthusian hell to pay. As things currently stand, Republicans are pandering to the richest .01% of the population and peddling "the soft bigotry of low expectations" (in George W. Bush's own words!) and dreams deferred to the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Democrats have so thoroughly ceded control of the American political narrative that they merely split hairs with Republicans about which visions/tenets of New Right conservatism to follow rather than presenting a genuinely alternative agenda. To "win the future," we're going to have to re-imagine America, and both parties are shamefully and woefully devoid of new ideas.

I don't have the answers. Don't pretend to. But I'm not willing to accept that we as a nation and as a species can't face this most monumental and existential of challenges and not pull through it. As a personal challenge, I'd encourage everyone to take a page from the modern revolutionary playbook and start putting the internet to good use. There are loads of brilliant people out there with great ideas on everything from population to food/agriculture to health care to no-growth economics and the "happiness" economy, and it's vital that we be paying attention. Try spending 20 minutes to an hour every week searching for and reading some kind of alternative news source on a topic that interests you or, better, one that you know nothing about. Listen to TED talks. Find out what a "CAFO" is and what it means to you. Google the ingredients in your Diet Coke. Get to know Tim Robertson, Jared Diamond, Carl Safina and Michael Pollan. Sign up for a new weekly email from Utne, Mother Jones, Longreads.com, or some other cool site neither you nor I have ever heard of. Read a book about the financial crisis. Ask yourself, "Who is the president of Yemen and which country is he in today?" (Hint: it's not Yemen.)

Michael D. Higgins, an Irish politician and intellectual, said that "The conservative can exist in comfort only by averting his gaze. To choose to know is to risk being presented with a dilemma. That dilemma, put simply is that, once one knows, you can from that moment, only life in the bad faith of guilty silence or act." With the internet putting the majority of human knowledge at your fingertips, you're averting your gaze these days if you're getting by on only the front page of your local newspaper or even less. Even if you and Google really don't get on, there are plenty of books out there that cover this stuff in even more detail than blogs. Maybe it's my inner European talking, but I'm urging you to challenge yourself. Get out there, get pissed, and then get ahead by getting as smart as you can.

And don't keep it to yourself, either – once you choose to know, you have to act. Share some links. Start a book group. Log out of Facebook and call a friend. Better yet go have coffee with someone and compare notes from your weekly "knowledge sessions." Trust me, if one of you reads up on farm subsidies and the other reads up on the financial system, you'll have a great conversation and leave that coffee shop loaded for bear. Goodness knows this country needs to be doing more actual push-ups, but we also need to do mental push-ups. Learning is habit-forming. Catch it!

So that's that. I'm back and I'm not averting my gaze. Call it intellectualism, call it Europeanism, call it Beltway-insiderism, call it cosmopolitanism, call it the hubris of thinking I'm well-travelled after visiting just over a dozen of the world's 193 independent states. Whatever. I'll choose to ascribe it to seeing that there's a massive big world out there and realizing that every School of Foreign Service/Culture and Politics instinct I've got is telling me it's a pretty cool planet we live on and we'd better get serious about making it a better one. Climbing up into our tree-houses and pulling the ladders in after us isn't going to help anyone. To lift a line from Angels in America, "the world only spins forward." Let's roll with it.

***

A note on the title: I shamelessly stole Let the Great World Spin from Irish-born novelist Colum McCann's wonderful book of the same name. It is required reading. The idea that "the world only spins forward" came to me from a speech by Wellesley High School teacher Adam Cluff, given at WHS commencement June 2010.

Progress in Egypt?

Sounds like Nicholas D. Kristoff's favorite sign-holder in Tahrir Square might finally be able to give his arms a break. The man, who has been holding an anti-Mubarak sign reading "Leave already, my arms are getting tired!" may finally get some relief if this afternoon's report that the Egyptian army is stepping in to put Mubarak on a one-way magic carpet ride out of office are correct. Wouldn't that be nice?

Just when it looked like America was getting a bit bored with the situation in Egypt and things might have been taking a turn back towards the subtly autocratic, the protesters gave it one last effort and the Egyptian general staff -- long seen as the kingmaker in this crisis and likely on the side of the protesters -- seems to have decided to give Mubarak the hook. The obvious question is, What now?

One option is that power be transferred directly to Omar Suleiman, the former military man and recently-appointed vice president (read: protester consolation prize) of Egypt. This could bring real change or, more likely, plus ca change. Maybe Suleiman is really a softie with the interests of his people at heart. Who knows? The thumbnail biography that has emerged of him over the past few weeks, however, argues that he's a dyed-in-the-wool professional Mubarak minion. In some ways, it doesn't matter: a decision by the army to simply hand power to a new face would be a bait-and-switch move completely contrary to the spirit and demands of the protests. If, as Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, claimed, "all your [the protesters'] demands will be met" today, promoting Suleiman won't wash. The protesters know who's who and what's what; I strongly suspect that such a back-door move would not convince many people to pack up and go home from Tahrir Square.

Another option is for a provisional military government to take over. Obviously, this option could play out in a few ways, the best case being that the military takes over, cleans out the old regime, sets up elections, and disappears into a happily democratic background role. Or the generals could take "provisional" power, develop a taste for it and make it permanent -- new packaging, same old Egypt! Option three would be for Egypt to go the way of Turkey, as I detailed a couple of posts ago: the army steps in, takes power, then steps back enough to allow a civilian to stand in front of the controls but without the army ever really letting go of the levers of power. Clearly, the first is the best-case scenario, the second is the worst and the third could persist for a long time without ever proving itself good or bad (Turkey has done so for 90 years and counting).

The last and least likely outcome is that the Islamists swoop in and turn Egypt back to the 14th Century. Unless I'm reading the tea leaves completely wrong -- and the rest of the Western press is equally fleeced -- this will not happen unless something goes drastically wrong. Since this revolt began, the Muslim Brotherhood has been caught in a comedy of errors and has usually appeared just as out of step as the White House. The Brotherhood has persisted under the conditions fomented by Mubarak's repressive regime because it, like most other Islamist opposition groups in horribly downtrodden Arab countries, was designed to persist as the other side of the coin as the equally-persistent regime. Such organizations are escapist and self-indulgent of Arabs' learned helplessness, created in the absence of real alternatives and under the assumption that the regimes they oppose will continue in perpetuity. They are not merchants of good old "hopey-changey" messages so much as they present some kind of alternative (essentially anti-regime and by extension anti-Western) "agenda" or "ideology," make themselves out to be the only true Muslims in the game, and then play up their repression at the hands of the government to show how evil and un-Muslim it and its Western backers are.

That kind of trope works as long as everyone accepts the status quo and plays his part: the Great Satan funnels guns and money to the apostate authoritarian in charge, the local ruler kowtows to the Great Satan while he runs roughshod over his people, and the people accept that such is life in their bass-ackwards corner of the world and there ain't a damn thing they can do about it.

The one constant in the above danse macabre is that everyone agrees that democracy was and always will be completely out of the question; the choices are between the dead-ended policies of the Western-backed autocrat or the equally dead-ended ideas of the local Islamist crowd. The one thing no one expects to emerge in that situation is a massive popular revolt demanding real democracy and directed by young, educated people putting technology to work for them in organizing the resistance. That, of course, is what finally emerged in Egypt in the past few weeks, and look how fast it went from challenging the status quo with a really new idea to -- probably -- toppling the old regime. Let that be a lesson to both autocrats and Islamists that democratic politics will always out-poll draconian ones when people can really express their wishes.

But let that further be a lesson to the United States, which has gone straight back to its bumbling, stumbling ways. From expressing support for the Mubarak regime at the outset of the crisis to today's report in the New York Times that "The White House was scrambling to keep abreast of the developments," we haven't exactly been championing democracy throughout. "'We’re going to have to wait and see what’s going on,' President Obama said in a surprise stop at a small lunch spot in Marquette, Mich.'" today.

Are you kidding me? The Egyptians aren't sitting around saying they're "going to have to wait and see" what this whole Tahrir Square business creates. More importantly, however, neither are they going to "wait and see" what the U.S. ends up saying about whatever outcome they get. We don't have a lot of say in what is going to happen to begin with and it's probably pretty safe to say that we will express some kind of support for whomever ends up in power (it's not like we're going to go out of our way to piss off Israel's new neighbors, anyway). Just as Egyptians have been saying all along that they do not want the Brotherhood to take charge, they have likewise been saying quite adamantly that they do not want the U.S. trying to meddle in the protests or their outcome. The best and only acceptable role for the U.S. to take, in their view, is to offer some genuine cheerleading for genuine democracy. Otherwise, we are to stay the hell out of the way.

It is time for the administration to take a listen and, like I said last time, either shut up completely or get cheering. Enough "wait and see" BS -- either say something constructive or don't say anything at all. Stop hemming and hawing about the Brotherhood: they were one of earlier Islamist organizations and al Qaeda do trace some of their ideological heritage to the early Brotherhood, but the pupils have long since outstripped the tutor in extremism. The Egyptians will have to figure out for themselves what and how much of a role the Brotherhood has in the future of Egypt; if the 20-something techno-wizards currently leading the charge toward democracy have a say in the formation of post-Mubarak Egypt, it is most likely that the Brotherhood will find itself pretty well frozen out.

In addition to the rather glaring hypocrisy of pussyfooting around a democratic initiative, there are two other crucial reasons why we need to get this right, and get it yesterday.

First, speaking of al Qaeda and its ilk, Usama's worst nightmare is a legitimate Arab democracy. Remember, al Qaeda, like the Brotherhood, is predicated on the idea that short of a total victory of its own agenda, no real change is coming to the Arab world anytime soon. Reactionary merchants of death only look attractive when they claim to be fighting against obviously corrupt totalitarian puppets of the West and handing out free tickets to heaven for those who die fighting these "near enemies." Think about that: we, the U.S. and the West, back rulers so crooked as to make Usama's version of "Islam" and "government" look like a legitimate alternative. If some Arabs actually manage the unthinkable and create a working democracy, Usama won't look so hot anymore. His whole shtick is based on being the only Arab with enough cojones to spit in the eye of Uncle Sam and his local goons. If one of those goons were to fall and be replaced by an Arab republic that wasn't an oxymoron, trading autocrats for ibn Taymiyya and sharia suddenly wouldn't seem like such a brilliant idea.

Secondly, and most importantly, the Egyptians are not going to wait for the U.S. to "wait and see" what it thinks about democracy. This is our huge gut-check moment in the Arab world: either we get ahead of the game on this one, polish off Obama's Cairo speech and sound the trumpet for democracy, or we get written off irrevocably as the hypocrites too many people there think we are anyway. If we haven't lost all credibility yet, it seems this would be the moment to make hay: with news that Mubarak is headed out, what safer moment are we "waiting and seeing" for to come out in favor of democracy?

The stakes are especially high with this crisis since the leadership are so young: if we screw up now, the 20- and 30-something Egyptian and Arabian democrats are not going to forgive us for it, and we will have consigned the Middle East to backwardness and apparently insolvable stagnation for another generation or more. If we can't manage a vote of confidence for Egyptian democrats now, do you think they are seriously going to give us an inch next time we invite them to Camp David to plot out the latest "roadmap" for peace with Isreal? Of course not. Any bridges we haven't burned with the up-and-coming generation in the Middle East over the past decade can be easily torched by inaction, hedging, or continued hand-wringing over the fate of Mubarak and Co. on the part of the U.S. right now.

Finally, bringing these last two points together, it is time to recognize the cognitive dissonance of supporting Mubarak-style thugs for fear of Islamists. The bottom line of my last two points is this: the inexhaustible fuel of the Islamists is our support for the Arab autocrats they resist. In short, we are funneling billions of taxpayer dollars in weapons and cash to bolster unsavory people against an enemy that is created by our very counterstrategy. The biggest stakeholders in the status quo are: 1) Usama bin Laden; 2) the toads we prop up against him; and 3) American arms manufacturers. We continue to support the dead-end status quo, they win. We unequivocally throw our lot in with the democrats and help nurse a new socio-political model to life in the Arab world, they lose. Which would you prefer?

Here's hoping the U.S. government takes 15 minutes to read the Declaration and the Constitution (no, John Boehner, not on the House floor again) and gets inspired to come up with a policy position that makes sense for once.

More on the Middle East

Hello again from the land of eternal winter (Hibernia, the Roman name for Ireland that seems quite appropriate to this week's weather). Here's your weekend edition, with a few picked-up pieces and interesting tidbits on all things Middle Eastern, Irish and American...

--In his online column today, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow sets out a very interesting chart comparing various "Revolutionary Measures" (democracy indices, household food spending, internet penetration, etc.) in the Middle East, North Africa, and the U.S. for comparison. Things to note: the U.S. has the highest income inequality rating on the board (45 on the Gini Index), five points higher than Egypt, 10.6 points higher than Tunisia, and half a point higher than Iran. Turkey is one point higher than Egypt and 6.6 points higher than Tunisia in income disparity; moreover, its regime type is listed as "Hybrid" and has a 5.7 (out of 10) democracy rating on the Economist Intelligence Unit scale, which is only 2.6 points higher than Egypt. Granted, Turkey leads the field in the Muslim world, but even Israel's "flawed democracy" regime clocks in at a 7.5. More food for thought as we keep reading about how the Muslim world should emulate Turkey.

--Interesting that the elected and unelected portions of the GOP/Tea Party/Angry Reactionary coalition have been so quiet on Egypt. Mother Jones and the Times speculated last week that the GOP is so focused on blocking Obama's domestic agenda that it simply can't be bothered to comment on the Middle East; some articles went further, citing Republican leaders (usually of the behind-the-scenes variety) who said the administration had been handling the situation pretty well and who wanted to stay out of it so that America could speak with one voice on the crises. Notably, Speaker John Boehner was quoted both for and against the "unity and quiet" thesis, falling into line late in the week but earlier being quoted as saying that he wished Mubarak would remain. Memo to the Tea Party and those who kowtow at the "Don't Tread on Me" flag: democracy was pretty high on the priority list of those infallible Founders and their Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson (aka the U.S. Constitution). Read the lesser-known and slightly hysterical second half of the Declaration and replace His Majesty with Mubarak and see what happens. Just sayin'.

--Everyone should read this article by Mother Jones' David Corn, in which he interviews a disgusted David Stockman, architect of the Reagan tax cuts, on the GOP's fetishization of a misremembered/misinterpreted version of those cuts. According to Stockman (who comes across as a little slimy, it must be said), even the Gipper understood that you had to cut spending alongside taxes and the Reagan cuts--which were originally opposed by congressional Republicans--were only meant to be temporary (they were eventually recouped with tax hikes). Stockman maintains that his and the Reagan administration's fiscal policy was a mistake and lambastes today's GOP for taking "the wrong lesson" from the Reagan years ("that big tax cuts are economic magic") and turning it into untouchable doctrine. He hasn't gone blue yet, but he was "horrified" at George W. Bush's economic policies and publicly argued that the Bush tax cuts should expire.

--Employing a perfect-in-the-glow-of-hindsight version of Reaganomics sounds a bit like reading a cleaned-up version of the infallible Constitution on the House floor to open this session, doesn't it? For Michele Bachmann to claim that the Founders did their best to get rid of slavery -- despite owning slaves and in some cases being especially, ahem, fond of them (just ask Jefferson's Sally Hemmings) -- in this, the 150th anniversary year of the start of the Civil War, is disingenuous at best and blatantly disrespectful at worst. First, read a history book (just not one of those newfangled school textbooks that puts forward the "happy slave" trope). Then, read the Constitution -- all of it (yes, the amendments are part of the Constitution). First of all, it was amended. Secondly, note that blacks got the right to vote before women (Bachmann could not have entered a ballot booth, much less been on the ballot, until 1919). Third, note that there are two amendments that abrogate each other (18 and 21, of Prohibition fame). Fourth, recall that those infallible Founders couldn't shoehorn the Bill of Rights (including the precious Second Amendment) into the original document and had to go back later. Perfect? Infallible? You tell me.

--Remember how incensed everyone was when the Chinese forcibly spruced up Beijing for their Summer Olympics? Apparently the good people of Arlington, Texas, don't: City Council passed an ordinance in December outlawing panhandling within a pretty wide radius of Cowboys Stadium, home of tonight's Super Bowl XLV. As a local advocate for the homeless -- and there are plenty of homeless people in Greater Dallas -- wryly noted, it's pretty ironic that we push out the poor to welcome those (the players) who grew up in poverty.

--I like the Steelers to get one for the other thumb, 27-24.

--I've been in Galway for a month. Wow. As usual, it's still simultaneously brand new and old hat. Four months to go, and suddenly that doesn't seem very long if they go as fast as this month did...

--Finally, a thought on language: this first occurred to me last semester as I struggled to learn Turkish, but I think the power of learning language can't be overstated. Let's face it: the whole world knows English. There are few places left where I couldn't find someone who speaks my language; many countries (including Turkey) begin universal English education in primary school. Ireland is the same in many ways since almost everyone here speaks English, yet it is different because English is the colonial language here. As much as it was nice to be able to speak a little Turkish to get by and feel connected to the place I was living in last semester, I actually feel even more urgency with learning Irish than with Turkish. Why so? Ireland has a long and complicated relationship with language and culture, with the situation today being that hardly anyone speaks Irish here anymore outside of the Gaeltacht areas. (Galway is on the edge of the Connemara Gaeltacht, one of the biggest in the country.) Between the Famine and the English-language-only instruction in schools under British rule, Irish was pushed to the brink before the Gaelic League and cultural nationalism took off in the early 1900's.

These days, the language is making a little bit of a comeback, particularly in the west. And that is one of the reasons I'm so happy I chose Galway: NUIG is bilingual by charter, with a vibrant Centre for Irish Studies and the Acadamh na hOllscolaiochta Gaelige (Irish department). My two hours of Irish class every Thursday morning are my favorite class, and I'm desperate to learn as much of the language as I can before I leave. Not only is Irish an interesting and beautiful language (though not an easy one!), but it is a piece of my own heritage and an intimate part of this place. Many people predicted before I left that it would be nice to go back to speaking English in the spring, and it has been in some ways, but I'm actually a lot more interested in picking up Irish. Thanks to the British, everyone here now speaks English and there is absolutely zero expectation that anyone -- especially Mhic Leinn on Iasacht (visiting students) like me -- know two words of the language, but there are enough Irish speakers in and around Galway to make Irish occasionally useful in daily life (buying eggs at the market, say). And they are invariably surprised and impressed that an American would go to the trouble of learning Irish.

Two weekends ago, I went hiking in Connemara with the Mountaineering Club, my usual Sunday activity. Walking back up the road to the pub at the end of the hike, we passed a sign reading "An Gaeltacht" (the Gaeltacht) on the side of the road, on which someone with a sense of irony had spray-painted "RIP." A small but memorable bit of social commentary on the state of Irish and Irish-speakers in Ireland today (minimal and marginalized, respectively). The Gaeltacht areas are dying due to lack of economic opportunity, and English -- as it was before independence -- remains the de facto language of progress, so Irish speakers are fleeing the Gaeltacht for the cities and/or other countries as their homes suffer even more than the rest of Ireland in the economic crisis.

As my Irish professor pointed out at orientation, to understand how a people think, you have to understand their language, and the language of Ireland is Irish, whether spoken or simply evoked in modern Hiberno-English. Just as in Turkey, learning the Irish language itself is much more important than simply picking up a slang word or two or assimilating some Hiberno-Englishims into my vocabulary. It is a very powerful and humbling thing to leave the sure footing of English and step onto someone else's linguistic home field, where I distinctly do not have the advantage. Thankfully, the Irish, like the Turks, are usually tickled by and willing to work with a new learner of their language. As such, I make an effort to use Irish when and where possible, and take advantage of people's willingness to play along, for example by inserting English words into Irish sentence structures when I don't have the Irish word I need. We'll see what happens by the end of the semester, but for now it's a new, exciting and treasured challenge to be picking up a new language in a nominally English-speaking country. Slan!

Long Time Comin'

Mid-November, I was traipsing the streets of Rome and Florence with my roommate. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was meeting up with friends in Cairo. She reported it was crazy then--a very interesting but deeply unsettling week--but that, obviously, is nothing compared to today's Cairo.

This past weekend, my roommate from Turkey came over to Ireland to visit me and we took the opportunity to visit Dublin. I did not bring my computer along, so when I got home tonight and opened my browser for the first time since early Friday morning, I spent a solid hour engrossed in reports about what is going on in Cairo and Egypt right now. First of all, I simply could not believe how much had happened in so short a time; secondly, my overwhelming feeling was one of "There but for the grace of time were I."

OK, so I never actually made it to Egypt last semester. And who knows what will become of my vague ambitions to visit Northern Africa sometime before this wild ride is over. But having lived in Turkey and studied the political situation there so intensely for four months and even more so for having been to Syria for close to a week, I think I get at least a little bit of what's going on there. And yes, it's been a long time comin'.

Like too many of its neighboring (largely Arab) governments, the Egyptian regime has long been amongst the most repressive and democratically backward in the world. As anyone who has been even cursorily glancing at any serious front page(s) lately should know, President (for life) Hosni Mubarak's regime has been keeping a tight lid on the country for 30 years and pursuing the so-called kleptocratic practices that we in the U.S. so often decry in Russians and assume are inherent in Arabs. Whether or not shitty government is coded into the Arab genome is beyond the scope of my real knowledge, but I'll happily go way out on a limb and guess that it is not. My impression is that the whole area floundered into the modern era with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (remember them?) only to be beset by the slippery issues surrounding oil production. That said, it must be noted that North Africa (including Egypt) is Arab but not really oil-producing; the downside of this situation being a regime just as repressive as any of the real OPEC fat cats', but with the upside--if it is that--of a legitimate possibility of regime change, if for no other reason than the purely cynical one that the U.S. and allies can risk the collapse of a totalitarian "ally" against terrorism in a way that they cannot do with a major oil supplier.

On leaving Syria, I was convinced that the regime there was unsustainable. By far the least democratic place I have ever experienced, I was deeply troubled by the twisted and "quietly ferocious" form of state-socialist government I encountered there. Syria is another Arab country with all the problems of its neighbors and--like Egypt--none of the obscene oil riches that keep regimes in power and still dissenting opinions in the Arabian Peninsula. Turkey, too, felt like a place on the verge of momentous change by the time I left there about a month and a half ago. As had been the case in the Arab world (of which Turkey, importantly, is not a part) before a Tunisian vegetable-seller reached the end of his rope, Turkey had the feeling of place that was going to (and needed to) undergo a serious social reckoning between its longstanding competing social, political and economic interest groups. Add the potentially-explosive ingredient of Islamism (more vibrant in Egypt than Turkey), and the situation seemed quite precarious indeed.

It should go without saying that this is a genuine Moment in the history of the Arab and Muslim worlds (again, not coterminous). The Big Question of the past decade has been, Can Islam and Democracy coexist? (Or: WTF is it with these Arabs/Muslims/Middle-Easterners/Central Asians, anyway?) In the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian rebellions, I read a number of commentaries that encouraged Tunisia to go the way of Turkey in marrying democracy and Islam. I would caution writers and rebels to be wary in hoping for the advent of little Turkeys throughout the Arab/Muslim world. To laud Turkish democracy, religious affairs, and especially Turkey's ways of squaring the two, as exemplary for all other Muslim nations is to fall under the spell of a shallow appreciation of Turkish history and politics. As Colin Powell used to say, those advocating the spread of the Turkish system should "be careful what they wish for, because they might get exactly that."

If Turkey is a 99% Muslim country currently celebrating 90 years of democracy and a rapidly-increasing global stature, why should Arabs now in revolt or thinking of revolting be skeptical of the Turkish model? The first reason has to do with the unique circumstances of the creation of the Turkish Republic: Turkey emerged in the wake of WWI with a civil war that had been begging to happen for a long time and finally found its moment as the Great Powers caught their collective breath after the Great War; further, Turkey happened in large part due to the singular influence and leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, its inimitable and still-revered founder. As many of the same articles that prescribe Turkey for Tunisia note, there currently appear to be no leaders-in-waiting with the vision, ambition and strength of personality of Ataturk. There is a reason the man known as Mustafa Kemal Pasha took the name "Father Turk;" I do not know of any "Father Tunisia" or "Father Egypt" waiting in the wings in either country right now.

Secondly, Turkey does not enjoy a truly democratic democracy. Its version is light-years ahead of that operated by Egypt's National Democratic Party or the recently-deposed Constitutional Democratic Rally Party of Tunisia, yet it is far from perfect. The army--viewed since Ataturk's day as the vanguard and guardian of democracy--has not, in the 90 years of Turkish independence, seen fit to actually leave democracy to the people. In that time, it has staged no less than two full coups and three "soft coups" in which the civilian leadership was not actually deposed; though still highly-trusted and seen as a force for democracy, by virtue of remaining either at the controls or at least in the control room of Turkish democracy to this day, the Turkish Army remains a concealed but nevertheless significant obstacle to true democracy in Turkey. Thankfully, the armies of both Tunisia and Egypt have so far stayed out of politics and more or less on the side of the protesters; arguing for those countries following Turkey's lead would create a logic if not a mandate for military government in the name of democracy in each. Much better that people like Mohamed ElBaradei lead transitional governments than that the generals seize the moment.

Thirdly, Turkey has, to the cursory view, succeeded in getting Islam and democracy to coexist. The problem is that Turkey's success, such as it is, has come by means of incredibly strict secularism laws that have in some ways buried the issue of Islam in politics and public life and created a secular-nationalist religion of the state in its stead. As the world waits with baited breath to see what role the political Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt have in those countries' present and future democratic (?) iterations, why root for the Turkish outcome, which seems on the verge of a great reckoning anyway? Since coming to power, the vaguely-Islamist Justice and Development Party currently leading Turkey has generated a serious national soul-searching that has brought the country face-to-face with its legacy of secularism (initiated by Ataturk and thus infallible in the eyes of many) and the undercurrent of political Islam and popular expressions of religion that, it seems, are still in tension after all. Turkey has not solved the apparent problem of democratization/modernization in a Muslim country so much as it simply wrote political Islam out of the public sphere. Now that Islam is creeping in--and especially given global views of Islam today--the issue buried by Ataturk is rearing its head with a vengeance today. Turkey itself is going to have to determine if and how to fit the square peg of Islam into the round hole of pluralistic democracy--it therefore makes no sense to encourage Arab nations to essentially duck the issue as Turkey did. At least for now, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seems quiescent and willing to negotiate and work with ElBaradei to create a transitional government, why not encourage this kind of self-starting democratic behavior on the part of a notoriously conservative and militant Islamist organization?

So if Tunisia, Egypt, and whatever other Arab countries go next are not to follow Turkey, what should they do instead? What if they did become little Turkeys--isn't the devil we know better than the one we don't?

Not only is rooting for (or even actively encouraging) such an outcome not better, it is simply not right. First of all, meddling in the first truly popular democratic movements the Arab world has seen in a long time would be undemocratic on the part of the U.S. and/or the West, should we attempt it. Secondly, the people involved have been quite firm in stating that they do not really want anything more out of the United States right now than verbal support for democratic processes and outcomes; in other words, kingmaking, advice, money, and most especially weapons are not wanted right now.

That brings us to the second reason we need to hope for and encourage more out of the current Arab revolts than simply copycatting of Turkey. Frankly, America has not done well by these countries or had particularly healthy relationships with them in the past, so they are not in the greatest rush to see us step in now. Furthermore, we all saw how well not listening and instead barging ahead got us in Iraq and Afghanistan; we have neither created democracy nor won a lot of brownie points with the Arab and Muslim worlds for all of our efforts in either place. Most of all, the best thing we can do to recover some of the credibility and democratic/moral legitimacy we sacrificed in Iraq right now would be to openly encourage democracy in Tunisia and Egypt. I mentioned the unhealthy relationship we have had with these places of late; in real terms, this has meant the U.S.'s support of these very undemocratic regimes for fear of Islamists and their doing our dirty work for us. Specifically, we have long been the armorers of Arab despots against their citizens, a favor they have returned by employing on U.S. prisoners the torture techniques they have developed by use on their citizens. Every time you read about or see someone getting shot in Egypt right now, consider that the shooter's weapon, ammunition, and training (if he is a soldier) are all made in the U.S.A. The same holds for many of the tanks on the streets, the fighter jets that buzzed Cairo the other day, and the tear gas canisters used by riot police.

In conclusion, my view is that we, the United States and other leading democracies of the world, need to take this opportunity to put our money (and our mouth) where our mouth has been for so long. It has been obvious for so long that the Arab world was overdue for democratization and that, when it came, it wasn't going to be an easy process or a pretty one. Now that it or something like it is upon us, we would do well to offer the loudest support for true democracy in the region that we can. If, as currently seems to be the case, we are unwilling to say much more than that we have the situation under observation and would like peace, democracy, and McDonald's to reign happily ever after, then our loudest vote of support for democracy would actually be to just shut the hell up. It might even be the most prudent--we're on touchy ground with many Arabs and Muslims these days, and if we learn to listen twice as much as we talk, our standing might go up dramatically. We would also reduce the chances of putting our foot in our mouth: we're currently hedging our comments so much because the outcomes of all this in the near and long term are so uncertain; saying as little as possible now means proportionately fewer chances of supporting a regime that either is or gets ugly.

The threat posed by Islamism, which has led us to support regimes such as those being toppled today in the past, is both a real and a delicate one. It is just as important that democracy come into being in these countries as that it be as free as possible of radical Islamist tendencies. That said, democracy in the Muslim world will not, should not, and can not be free of Islam. Islam is by nature a more political religion than we in the West are comfortable with or accustomed to; it is also the dominant religion in the Arab world and its social and political expression is going to be part and parcel of any true Arab democracy that comes into being. Turkey decided to simply ban expressions of Islam, notably the headscarf, and their recent reintroduction has caused a national identity crisis; the chances of even imposing such bans in places like Egypt in the first place are infinitely smaller than they were under Ataturk at the dawn of modern Turkey. As long as the Islamist elements in Tunisia and Egypt continue to keep low profiles and support democratic outcomes, let them. How many times have we heard a U.S. president (Bush or Obama) tell us we have nothing to fear from Islam in the past 10 years? Time to find out how we really feel.

So let's not talk Turkey. This democratic moment in the Arab world has been a long time in the making--why not make the most of it? The Turkish Republic has more or less worked for Turkey and it's more or less democratic, true, but we should really be encouraging new thinking, new democratic iterations, and new leadership in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Is it really so inconceivable that the Tunisians and/or Egyptians in 2011 come up with a fresher or better method of creating an Islamic democracy than Ataturk did in the 1920's? What if the Tunisians come up with a headscarf policy that Turks want to emulate? What if Egypt transitions to democracy without the military ever taking power? It's not like the U.S. is going to apologize out loud for our inconsistencies and screwups in dealing with these countries until a couple of weeks ago, so why not seize the democratic moment ourselves and, by word and deed, actively promote the truest and newest democracies anyone could hope for in the Arab world?

The coming days, weeks, months and years will be messy, uncertain, fractious, tense, and hopeful--in a word, democratic--in Tunisia, Egypt, and quite possibly other Arab countries tired of the same old same old. Their citizens are trying to "win the future" for themselves, and wouldn't it be a lot better if they did so by the ballot box and not with bullets we gave them?

A democratic Arabia, Middle East, and Muslim world? That ought to be a change we can believe in.

Further On Up the Road

Thoughts, reflections, and observations on the end of one semester, the beginning of another, and a move across a continent:

• ·         I have just completed a journey across Europe from the McGhee Center in Alanya, Turkey to the National University of Ireland, Galway. That's two time zones, an entire continent, and more miles than I can count. In so doing, I've exchanged my Mediterranean view for one of the Atlantic, sandy beaches for rocky cliffsides, minarets for steeples, and five calls to prayer each and every day for going to church on Sunday when I feel like it.
• ·         Despite all the apparent differences, life is still a lot more similar than I expected it to be. The scenery creates natural beauty from the same basic ingredients—ocean/sea, the shore, ships moored in marinas, and local flora—and the political and social situations in Ireland and Turkey have many echoes of one another. Both have issues of national integrity (Turkey's Kurdish southeast vs. the six counties of Northern Ireland); both have long and complex relationships with their respective majority religions (Sunni Islam vs. [often Catholic] Christianity); and both have their issues with Europe (Turkey's half-century quest for EU membership vs. Ireland's ignominious economic situation that, along with Portugal, Greece, and Spain, threatens the integrity of the monetary union). Plus ça change…
• ·         Three weeks' travel across Europe at Christmastime—particularly in an unseasonable snowstorm—was absolutely magical. I visited Istanbul, Vienna, Prague, Brussels, Antwerp, Gent, Bruges, Cologne, Dublin, Cork, Blarney, and finally Galway in that time. Family friends in Antwerp hosted me for Christmas and I rang in the New Year in my new home with a pint of Guinness in Dublin's Temple Bar district.
• ·         I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of stuff between Damascus and Galway, but Belgium takes the cake so far for best society, best-preserved Gothic/Dutch Renaissance ambience, and best quality and selection of food and drink. The people couldn't be friendlier, most speak better English (and Flemish and French) than I do, and the fusion of Dutch and French cuisine plus Trappist beer is hard to beat.
• ·         The experience of meeting up with large groups of newly-arrived Americans here in Galway can only be described as surreal. There are a few full-year American students here at NUIG, but of the people I know, I am the only one to have both been abroad without interruption since August and to have arrived in Galway from the east instead of the west. After meeting no more Americans outside of our program than I could count on one hand for four-plus months, suddenly being surrounded not only by lots of Americans but by people who have just been in the States has created actual inter-cultural experiences. Apparently, I have completely missed the evolution of "jeggings" in America and had to have that concept explained; my friends also got a good laugh out of watching me stop dead in my tracks at the sight of Kellogg's cereals in the food store when we all went shopping for the first time. After a five-month hiatus, turning the corner and being confronted with Tony the Tiger, the Cornflakes rooster, and Snap, Crackle & Pop was so unexpected I laughed out loud.
• ·         With a broad sample size in mind, I think I can say with some confidence that neither the Turks nor the Irish are really "European" in the modern sense. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad Ireland is in the EU and I think Turkey should be as well, but after seeing Italy, Belgium, and Germany in particular (and I have not even been to France yet), it seems pretty clear to me that the Turks and the Irish are not just geographically on the edges of Europe, but there are real cultural differences between them and central/western continental Europeans as well. Both countries are clearly the working-class neighborhoods of Europe, and indeed both have long been exporters of labor to the Continent. The modes of dress are also more similar between Turkey and Ireland than between either and the mainland, with the jeans not as tight, the shoes not as pointy, and the general style of clothing tending more towards the workaday than the latest Milan runway items.
• ·         One of the major points of study at the McGhee Center was whether or not we thought the EU should let Turkey in. Turkey was among the earlier prospective members (its application has been open since 1959), yet it is continually rebuffed. It is something of a truism to accuse Europe of being a white, Christian club that will of course not find room for a Muslim country; having now traveled through the EU after all that time in Turkey, I would love to see Turkey become a member of the Union and let the wild rumpus of cultural diffusion start. I think both sides could profit immensely from increased integration with the other, as the Turks could do great things for Europe economically and the Europeans could contribute a lot to Turkish culture and society. The gesture itself of welcoming Turkey into the EU would also go a long way in dispelling accusations of the EU as an inwardly-focused, civilly xenophobic Greater France. Turkey could get the Europeans off their too-high horse and Europe could help show Turkey the way to better democratic and religio-social norms. Sadly, the window may be closing on both sides as the Europeans continue to embrace former Soviet satellites with far worse socio-economic-democratic issues than Turkey and the Turks increasingly want to just move on without the EU, already.
• ·         If I had to bet on the long-term vibrancy of one, I'd pick Turkey. It is a much more "happening" place and it has the feel of a young racehorse chomping at the bit. Europe is more the retired stallion happy to be put out to pasture. Europe might be eminently civilized, but it doesn't have the same feeling of youthful energy and transformation that Turkey does. It must be said that Turkey is dogged by the twin specters of non-democratic government and religious fundamentalism; if either of these ever-present undercurrents triumphs, Turkey is lost. Ironically, I think that relaxing its rigid secularism laws might be the best thing Turkey could do right now to disarm the fundamentalists, by decoupling the ability of citizens to freely express their identity as Muslims from the legitimacy of the government. Strict secularism might have been important in the beginning to allow the Turkish state to differentiate itself both from its Ottoman past and its Islamist neighbors; 90 years later, it is time for Turkey to cultivate and embrace respect for and respectful freedom of expression. Thanks in large part to secularism and westernization, Turkey does not have the hopelessly dead-end feel of neighboring Syria, a society that is clearly spinning its wheels. That said, the government must realize that, nearly a century after the nation was proclaimed by Atatürk, allowing the headscarf back into public life is unlikely to put the country into a hard right turn towards the reactionary Islamism of the Middle East.

Forward Thinking

I have seen the future. Actually, I have seen two versions of the future: one energized, bustling, and dynamic; one slipping quietly, comfortably into the past. One feels like it is chomping at the bit, restless to break out and take charge. The other wants a cup of tea and a book of history in an armchair. One wants to be a regional role model; the other wants only to develop its own region in peace. One is Turkey. The other is the European Union. My question: Which way is America going?

But to begin from the beginning: At the end of August, I packed my bags for my junior year abroad—what was to be my first experience of more than a week outside of North America—and boarded a flight from Boston to Istanbul. So began a year that, at the halfway point, has already been the most exciting, challenging, and transformational of my life. After a two-week orientation program in Istanbul and Ankara, I traveled with my fellow students to a Mediterranean seaside town called Alanya, where we lived and studied for four months. From there, we also explored the region, traveling to Syria, Cyprus, Cappadocia, and—in the case of my roommate and myself—to Italy on fall break.

At the conclusion of the semester in mid-December, we all went our separate ways. I set off with my girlfriend on a three-week whirlwind tour of Europe, touching Vienna, Prague, Brussels, Antwerp, Cologne, Dublin, Cork, and finally Galway, where I am now settled in and beginning my second-semester studies. In many ways, life could not be much more different: I have gone from a 15-student program to a 17,000-student university; traded my five-minute walk to the Mediterranean for a 15-minute walk to the edge of the Atlantic; left an economically booming Eastern country and European Union applicant for an EU member state and one of the infamous "PIGS" countries dragging down the Euro; and finally undergone a drastic shift in cultures from a 99-percent Muslim country precariously balanced between Europe and the Middle East to a majority-Christian and English-speaking country on the western edge of Europe. Life might look a lot different now, but the differences are telling. What really separates Turkey, Europe, and—most important to me—America?

Taking some time away from America has granted me an unquestionably different view of my home country than I could ever have obtained without leaving. In my reflection on all that I have learned abroad, what has stuck out the most is that America's can-do spirit and promise of a bright today and a better tomorrow are what really make our country unique. Even if we have a somewhat loud, in-your-face, monolingual culture (from which I by no means excuse myself), Americans are—in the experience of myself and nearly everyone else I have discussed this with—almost always a fundamentally friendly and optimistic people. We might tend to know only one language, we might have a little extra bluster, we might be viewed as a bit childish, and we might not have buildings and culture that are basically older than dirt (there is a reason "European" is synonymous with "cultured/refined" in American advertizing), but I have come to see these traits as some of America's greatest and most endangered strengths.

For the basic paradox of Europe is that it is a collection of new states living primarily on the past glories of bygone empires. ("Italy is a young country," my tour guide at the Coliseum gravely intoned.) America, by contrast, is technically older than most European states in the sense that its current constitution dates back further than theirs, yet America and Americans in general have retained the energy and enthusiasm for life of the young. Our boisterousness might make us appear juvenile to others, but it is the source of our famed ingenuity and of the enduring promise of each generation to leave the country and the world a better place for its children.

To me, this is the challenge of my generation and those to follow: Will America remain focused on providing a better future for its children and their children as candidate Obama promised and President Obama often says but does not seem to do? Or will we go down the European path of keeping the 40-and-older crowd happy? The latter constituency in Europe and America votes in force to keep its entitlements and its retirements on track. The under-40's, by contrast, often cannot seem to bestir ourselves enough even to vote. Future-thinking necessarily implies responsibility and morality; I would argue that a future-thinking citizen would have thought at least twice before creating a "credit-default swap" or authorizing the Deepwater Horizon to drill.

The Turks get it. Their economy is growing, they are modernizing as fast as they can, and they want nothing to do with the IMF's money. They are convinced that their country is on the move and that there is a bright future just around the corner. Turkey is loud, gritty, and bustling, but (in contrast to Syria) has the feel of a place gathering itself for a big forward jump. The Europeans, on the other hand, have universal health care, highly refined culture, and beautiful old buildings. But their population is rapidly aging, with births significantly below the replacement rate. To a large extent, Turks are picking up the slack in youthful labor within the EU. The Europeans seem quite contented to quietly ride social democracy into the sunset, hoping above all to be left alone to develop their post-modernist socio-political project. The Turks want to take on the world.

If the EU is the future of humanity, it is eminently civilized, but there does not seem to be much "future" in it. Everywhere I have been so far in Europe has the feeling of being a living museum or perhaps a movie set: everyone plays a role, but it is unclear what anyone does. I am fully aware that there are plenty of highly successful European businesses, yet there does not seem to be the same sense of urgency that exists in America and Turkey. Turks drink a lot of çay (tea), but they bring their teapots to their construction sites; by a professor's admission here in Galway, it is no use going to anyone's office between 1 and 2 pm, the sacred tea time (different from lunch) of Irish culture. I am painting with an extremely broad brush here, but I still think the basic point is instructive: do we (America) want to follow in the European mode of going along to get along or the American mode (emulated by the Turks) of creating our own future?

 "Success is tasted sweetest/by those who ne'er succeed," wrote Emily Dickinson. Her poem might as well be the "first amendment" to the American Dream, which always burns brightest for those (often non-Americans) who have yet to achieve it. Growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, I saw plenty of those who ever succeed. The same is true at Georgetown University, where too many of my classmates have never pulled any literal or figurative bootstraps whatsoever.

Something ugly is brewing in America when we start putting limits on the American Dream. The Southwest is in the throes of a xenophobic paroxysm of hate and fear directed against "job-stealing" Mexicans, a situation that uncomfortably mirrors the EU's attitudes towards Turkey. Turks, like Mexicans in America, have long been a source of cheap labor in Europe, largely overlooked when times are good but railed against in times like these when they are accused of "stealing" jobs that most Europeans, in their more honest moments, will admit they did not really want anyway. After seeing its membership application rebuffed for a half-century, Turkey is now strongly considering moving on without the EU. And why should they not? They rebuffed IMF loans, weathered the storm of the financial crisis, and are tired of reading between the lines of EU progress reports that they still are not white or Christian enough for the EU family.

Combined with my experiences abroad so far, my reading of American history argues that we are at a crucial turning point. Our culture, history, and social contract are all predicated on the promise of a brighter tomorrow. From the Pilgrims to the pioneers, from the Founding to the 21^st Century, the underlying goal of America has been to provide each generation with a better future. At this point, we—and I would argue that "we" are really my generation and those younger than us—are faced with a choice: do we want to go the way of Europe, celebrating our past and making life comfortable for the present and past generations, or do we want to get back in touch with the idea that it is our responsibility to manage the country that is our birthright in such a way that our children and our children's children may make it still better?

I am nobody's partisan. I have tremendous issues with both major political parties and most especially with the rapidly-deteriorating tone and tenor of American political debate. Fear-mongering, lying, and playing to the lowest common denominators and fringes of the fringes on both sides is nothing short of shameful. Rather than looking to either party for salvation, my most fervent wish is that we, the 20-somethings and younger generations of America, get our act together, make our voices heard, and start taking responsibility for ourselves, our nation, and our future.

President Obama's anecdote is right: "they" did drive our country into the ditch. But "they" are not any one party or ideology so much as a generation of politicians out of ideas yet desperate to keep its hold on the wheel. Maybe it is time to enlist the help of younger and stronger backs to pull the car out of the ditch and clearer eyes to keep it on the road.

Letter From Damascus

DAMASCUS, Syria — We’re on the road out of Syria, taking the bus through the hard, sun-baked landscape that the Crusaders we’re studying crossed on foot and horseback. It’s quite a bit faster and easier on an air-conditioned bus with plenty of rest stops along the way. Most importantly, we’ve got a fridge full of bottled water and enough Imodium AD to lock up an elephant for a month. Thankfully, no one has been in dire intestinal straits so far; it would be really nice if that trend holds during and after our return to Alanya, when my beard can get trimmed and we can stop being so petrified of tap water and most foods.

The past 10 days have been fascinating and challenging as we’ve moved east and then south from our little tourist town on the seashore through the increasingly conservative and Muslim eastern regions of Turkey and then into the Syrian Arab Republic. From beginning to (nearly) end, we have observed a tremendous amount of variations and apparent contradictions in the political and religious theories and practices of the places we’ve seen.

Politically, there are two crucial differences between Turkey and Syria that make themselves immediately apparent. First, the cult of personality surrounding the political leadership is creepier than in Turkey because the cult in Turkey is centered on Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who has been dead for somewhat less than a century, while the cult here concerns the current president and his late father, the previous president. Being stared at by pictures of an icon of the state is weird in both places, but the Big Brother feeling seems stronger when the man staring at you is currently The Man. Atatürk worship, by contrast, feels more like the usual veneration of a “founding father” on steroids.

It’s also notable in this case that the current president, al-Bashar, succeeded his late father as president (for life) under rather unusual circumstances. The previous president had a couple of sons, but did not groom al-Bashar to take up the mantle of the office. Instead, al-Bashar’s brother—by most accounts a thug—had been a lock to take over for his father in due time. The untimely death of this thuggish brother put a serious wrinkle in the plans, however, so the leadership was faced with a choice between al-Bashar, then working as an optometrist in London, and a cousin at least as thuggish as the original choice. It was decided that the family name should be prioritized over thuggishness, so al-Bashar got the call and was elected president (effectively for life) by a 99% margin upon the death of his father.

These days, an official portrait of al-Bashar stares down at all and sundry from walls, car windows, and every other place you can think of. Looking at these pictures, I have gotten the distinct impression that the president looks quite unhappy in all of them, especially those in which he is dressed up in military uniforms. Whether gazing seriously from his dress uniform or sporting fatigues, aviator glasses, and a scruffy beard and looking through binoculars (at a border station?), President al-Bashar does not look like a happy camper when he is forced to play soldier for propaganda reasons.

This brings up the second major difference between Turkey and Syria: where Turkey is a heavily-militarized state with a big inferiority complex, Syria is a police state with an inferiority complex so severe as to dwarf Turkey’s. In Syria, there is a cop on every corner, beckoning drivers on through green lights and stopping them at red ones. Then there are the other policemen with different shoulder boards who man sentry booths and/or stand around watching the world go by; these are still not as scary as those who wear plain black fatigues and casually wave AK’s at the world. Still scarier are the cops you don’t see but know are out there, watching your every move.

So strict is Syrian security that there are significantly fewer weapons visible on the streets here. In Turkey, it seems like everyone from the official soldiers, jandarma, and police forces to the lowliest rent-a-cops at museums and such, is carrying—and often with a distressing disregard for basic weapons safety. In Syria, those who do carry—openly, anyway—are equally casual in their methods, but they are much fewer and further between than their Turkish counterparts. The power of the police state is such that there is simply no need to arm the traffic police with anything more than little orange-and-white-striped PVC batons to direct cars with. The real enforcers are the guys with no ID’s but pistols in their pants who will spring into action at the first sign of trouble, and everyone knows they’re out there.

As tourists, we knew we were being watched closely at all times, but the police presence was not terribly intrusive on our experience of Syria. This might be a country that lists about a dozen different versions of “911” on signs at major intersections so you can call not just “the police” but the appropriate kind of police to suit your needs (civil, traffic, military, etc.), but all those cops are more concerned with protecting Syria from us than protecting us from Syria. Much more impactful on our day-to-day experience were the social and religious mores of a much more conservative and less secular Islamic state than Turkey.

For the first time this semester, I really, truly felt like a foreigner in Syria. Turkey felt different, but still like a secular, Westward-looking, prospective EU member state. Syria, for reasons of language, culture, and religion, took me aback in ways that Turkey has not. For the first time, I was so aware of the gender differences in (public) society that it felt truly oppressive even to me. Many of the girls in the group found it nearly unbearable.

Whereas most Turkish mosques will ask that women dress respectfully and cover their heads when they visit, the Syrian mosques we visited had stations out front where they handed out drab full-body coverings to all non-Muslim women who wanted to enter, regardless of how much they had covered on their own. Once inside, too, things felt different, as various guides conflictingly demanded that our girls go to the women’s side because they were female and to the other side because they were not Muslim. Eventually, the non-Muslim side won out, but the experience on the way in had already cast a pall over the visit before it had really even begun.

One of the strangest parts of the gender divide was the apparent contradictions it produced. One night, walking home from supper, we saw a woman with a black shroud covering her entire face playing with something with her hands under her veil. After a few moments, we realized that she was texting, showing an odd juxtaposition of the 10^th century and the 21^st.

Everyone was also struck by the phenomenon of “indoor fashion” that has been produced by the covering culture. Almost every other store displayed X-rated lingerie of every variety imaginable in its windows, as well as skimpy, sequined, brightly-colored dresses and skirts. Outside most of these stores would be a cluster of fully-covered women, gesturing and apparently talking about the styles that appealed to them. More often than not, there would also be a few men inside, picking out some new private-sphere wear for their wives. Even the Muslim Barbie-doll equivalent we saw in the souq (bazaar) came dressed in her burqa but accompanied by what the packaging described as her “indoor fashion:” a shiny, sheer and skimpy little number that must mirror what most of the covered women we see on the streets wear inside their homes.

This dichotomous fashion sense seems to point to a vicious circle generated by the religio-social mores of the society. Women are told to cover because men are simply unable to control themselves in the presence of exposed female flesh, which both provides cover for the men to be almost nastily aggressive in their looks at our un-burqa’ed girls and forces the women to feel like they have to distinguish themselves beneath their burqas because they all look exactly the same on the outside. For married women who can no longer even make up their faces, the big fashion items are shoes and handbags to help differentiate themselves outwardly (imagine trying to pick your mother/sister/wife out of a crowd of fully-covered females) and lingerie to feel unique and sexy underneath their shrouding.

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All of that said, Syria wasn’t all bad and I’m certainly glad I saw it. On a basic level, we’re all pretty strung out from all the time in buses and moving from hotel to hotel, but—knock wood—no one has gotten sick so far and the Syria trip has a reputation for decimating McGhee Center students each year. On a more involved level, we have seen a lot of interesting things that have both challenged us and helped to put our other experiences in perspective.

Though Turkey is 99% Muslim and is an undeniably a Muslim country, it really has not felt overwhelmingly “Other” so far, and this trip to Syria has really driven that home for me. Favorite Turkish catchphrases like “secularism” and “Turkish Islam” mean a lot more to me now that I’ve glimpsed some of the alternatives that Turkey is trying so hard to differentiate itself from. This became especially apparent when our program secretary, a Turkish woman, came to join us for the last few days of the trip and kept mentioning how happy she was to live in secular Turkey, where she is free to dress, act, and worship (or not) almost entirely as she pleases.

Syria also gave us an important perspective on the relative economic fortunes of Turkey and the Arab world. While both countries make fairly extravagant claims about all the developments they expect over the next five, ten, twenty-plus years, Turkey’s claims feel much more realistic in comparison to Syria’s. Our hotel might have been across the street from the imposing Four Seasons Damascus, but the group’s overwhelming impression of Syria was of an economically depressed, socially immobile country. Turkey feels like a nation of people that are individually and collectively pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become a regional and even global economic and military power, but Syria has a very dead-end feel to it, like a small town that almost nobody gets out of.

While it’s obviously not excusable, the rage Arabs are often purported to feel towards America and the West becomes at least a little more understandable when you see how little their societies have to offer them. As one of my professors pointed out, once the oil money dries up, these states won’t even be able to provide the socialist benefits they now do to keep their citizens quiet. We saw how long the lines were at the state ration stations for rice and sugar; when those goods dry up, will the cult of personality surrounding the political leadership be strong enough to hold the country together?

Finally, there were some things in Syria that were just plain cool to see. We visited one of the three Aramaic-speaking villages left and got to visit the Convent of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, where we heard the Lord’s Prayer said in Aramaic, the language in which Christ first spoke it. It was also surreal to see statues of the Virgin and churches and other Christian sights labeled in Arabic, as everything in that little village was. Arabic might be the language of Syria, even its Christian parts, but it’s still a little mind-bending in a post-9/11 world to read and hear it in a Christian context when all that is Arab/Muslim and all that is Western/Christian are so often depicted as being diametrically at odds.

Also, as the land of the Crusades, Syria has some really exciting castles and citadels and other Crusades-era things to see. That was part of the reason for the study tour in the first place, but seeing the Krak des Chevaliers (where I gave a presentation on the Knights Hospitaller) is a very different experience than reading about the castle in a textbook. We also got to see the tomb of Saladin, whom we’ve read so much about and whose name still resonates strongly in the Arab world today.

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And now we’re back in Alanya, complete with beards, scarves, and daggers galore. The weather is a bit cooler and cloudier than it was a week and a half ago, but the sun is peeking through and the sea looks inviting. It’s good to be home; suddenly Turkey and Turkish (the people and the language) seem even friendlier and more familiar than they did before. Everyone’s glad to be back, except for the looming reality of all the homework we’ve ignored for 10 days. Oh well, off to Cappadocia with my friends on Thursday…