Take flight, and bid your little kids farewell. Travel to the mystical, magical, dry lands of Sinai, where good and evil greet you with the same face and the same smile. Stand where the rivers of life have gone dry and the rivers of blood now flow. Twenty Egyptian officers and soldiers gone at the hands of idiots who strive to make a point with death. Pass by the tanks stolen by Jihadi Salafis, and the apache birds piloted by Israelis that shot them down, all the while the ruling heads of Cairo still live in denial, not able or willing to confront the reality of their situation, while an old dog sits, looking sad, pensive and alone, reflecting the mood of an entire nation.
Explore our magical skies, and try to avoid getting shot down by stray bullets that are being shot by neighbour to kill neighbour, all over this blessed land. Two families in Alex engage in street warfare, and the news of the apartments getting burned raises more eyebrows than the news of the human casualties. A smug and cursed cornice that hasn’t seen its share of blood in a while sits back and enjoys the Dickensian scenes of the attack by the Ramlet Boulaq denizens on the Fairmont Hotel, with the police showing up with their uniforms off, wearing wife-beaters and double strapped guns, mimicking Hollywood action fantasies, with tear gas canisters and cars on fire give the whole thing an apocalyptic flair. A village in Upper Egypt turns against itself over a burned shirt and conflicting prophets, enacting a scenario that repeats over and over, while what must be a case of collective amnesia causes people to act shocked and wonder what went wrong. Never stop your flight to look, because soon enough, you will see something similar, and if you have seen one you have seen them all.
Pass by the city of the sun, where the President who hails from a secretive and old Islamic order is fumbling on cameras, offering no sense of comfort, confidence or inspiration to a nation in worry, who have sat there and watched him pardon friends and holy warriors not much different than those who have caused the carnage in Sinai, while leaving other innocents in jails to rot. His day started with communiqués from brownnosing governors who were congratulating him over the anniversary of the Badr battle, and plans to grace TV for the last ten days of Ramadan, to talk to us about religion instead of actually doing his job. This piece of news wrinkles the jittery nerves of his opponents, who are convinced that the country is heading towards Iran due to such shenanigans, all the while totally ignoring that the country is heading in a completely different direction that is entirely Godless.
Land on the branches of a tree and watch the streets getting filled with drug dealers operating in impunity, and lost boys believing their weapons make them men. Observe while an entire street culture comes out of nowhere, with its own language, music, dance and rituals, like a rising tide that will flood the country and flush it from years of synthetic and borrowed overproduced trash. Say a prayer to those young street warriors who no vice police can control, and for the souls of those well-meaning bearded ones who will try and find it their end. Recognise that you are living in the greatest days of history, and that you are witnessing something truly remarkable, if you can accept the horror that comes with it.
The Americans always said that an armed society is a polite society, but that notion is being challenged by the sons of pharaohs who are now armed to the teeth and who do not intend to be polite any time soon. While intellectuals sit back and argue that they are smarter and know better than to bear arms themselves, you recognise that in any battle between ten astronauts and ten cavemen that the cavemen will always win. That’s the history of civilisation, where the barbarians were always at the gate, on both sides. You sit back and think: Screw you Gabriel García Márquez, you could never write anything as insane as what we are going through as a country right now. We are making history, again, despite our deepest and most sincere wishes not to, or at least not like this.
Oh well…
I am getting a gun. I suggest you get one too.
