“You Never Know.”

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

 

The Elementary School Shooting in Minnesota

 Heartbroken, and terrified, about this elementary school shooting in Minnesota. The two children who died were exactly the age, 10 and 8, of my two elementary grades grandchildren. Like them, they must have been excited to start the first school week, planning the night before what to wear that first day, what lunch to pack, what accessories to attach to their backpack. I try not to imagine what their parents and grandparents are feeling right now, because I can imagine it all too well. I pray no one repeats in their presence the mantra “guns don’t kill people.”  Cars don’t kill people, and we regulate the hell out of them.

The thing is: guns are the weapon of cowards, the weapon of impulse. And especially and most dangerously, the weapon of our time. The weapon of the delusional loner who spends hours in front of violent video games and loses his sense of reality. Violence in our reality-bending age is disassociated from reality. The twenty-year-old who went to the school with murderous intent had a hand gun, a rifle, and a pistol. Could he have attacked seventeen children and killed two if he had only a weapon, like a knife, that required close body to body contact? 

Confessions of a Dante Dilettante

 Confessions of a Dante dilettante: I’ve dipped into Inferno over the years, fascinated to discover how Bosch’s triptych might have been influenced by Dante’s trilogy. But the awkward translations to English were discouraging, until I was recently introduced to a flowing, fluent verse translation that manages to preserve Dante’s terza rima. By Angelaurelio Soldi, a poet and native Italian speaker.

“Enemies of the People”

                    

“The Enemy Within.”

 “Enemies of the people.” When I hear these words I have an atavistic reaction. I grew up hearing those words applied to my family and others like them. At school, I had to study a textbook that mentioned my family, by name, as “feudalist, capitalist oppressors of the people.” I grew up in Nasser’s Egypt, where my family was targeted on account of its political prominence and large landholdings. President Nasser, faced with setbacks internally and internationally, followed the playbook of autocratic regimes throughout history around the world: he deflected public discontent by accusing “internal enemies” of being responsible for the failures of his own regime.

 The other imperative of such regimes is to silence dissent. That is done by installing a pervasive atmosphere of fear and distrust. In Nasser’s Egypt, even between parent and child in our own bedrooms, we whispered. People were arrested and disappeared into prison for years or months for a random remark. For fear to effectively paralyze dissent, for autocensorship to work, repression must be both ruthless and arbitrary. No one feels safe. No law can protect you. The power of the ruler is absolute.

It was Nasser’s Egypt that I fled at the age of twenty. Later, when I immigrated to the United States, over forty years ago, it was because my husband and I wanted to raise our children in a free country where they would never know that fear. For us, America was the land of freedom, of justice, of laws and due process.

Today in America, I cannot believe that I am hearing the same words, watching the same playbook. “The Enemy Within.” “The Deep State.” The xenophobia. The crackdown on dissent. The emasculation of the legislative and judiciary branches. The flaunting of the courts. The intimidation of the media and the persecution of universities, those two bastions of independent thought. Using the formidable powers of the government to concentrate all power and influence at the top, in the hands of of a handful of men.

How does ambient fear succeed in silencing dissent? Even someone who does not feel vulnerable in their own right might fear potential repercussions on a family member or friend, for example the son or daughter whose career might be negatively affected. No one feels safe. The secret to universalizing fear as a deterrent is arbitrarines in the application of repercussions: surely the young student at an elite school, a permanent resident who came to the U.S. from South Korea as a child of seven, surely she had every right not to expect to be arbitrarily hunted down by ICE for deportation simply because she participated—not even led—in an anti-war demonstration. The intention is to teach the lesson that no one is safe.

And today, just as it was with Nasser back then, as with any charismatic leader, there is an irreducible core of true believers who will see no evil, bear any price, countenance any outrage, because their leader can do no wrong in their eyes.

But this is the one optimistic note I will strike: as with Nasser, as with Stalin, as with all-powerful cult figures throughout history, the secret is that the emperor has no clothes. When Nasser died, it was all of a sudden as if a pall had been lifted, a strait jacket had been released. It took his successor Sadat only a couple of years to turn the ship of state around in the opposite direction and undo everything Nasser had done over nearly twenty years.

Trump has only been in power for two months. This is still America. There is still time, before fear is completely installed. There are still laws, there are still pockets of free speech. This is still America. Let’s act like it.