AS REX RYAN IS TO FEET:

Game Over: The United States Must Abandon Its ‘Stability’ Fetish (Ann Marlowe, 2/01/11, World Affairs Journal)

Meanwhile, the watchword among pundits — many with as little experience of Egypt as I have — is “stability.” It’s an interesting word, that seems to have gained currency in political affairs only in recent decades. It is notably ill-defined; is Italy unstable, for instance, with its rapid changes of government, or France? Is a country with one government for decades but a roiling insurgency “stable”?

The official American fetish for “stability” in other countries translates as often as not into support for dictators or men who we help make into dictators, like Hosni Mubarak, and in a milder way, Hamid Karzai. The kind of “stability” we favor always seems to emerge from the barrel of a gun, not from a people working out its destiny in the rough and tumble of politics, as our country did. Our revolution began with shouting mobs, too.

To our credit, it seems we supported one Egyptian dissident, enabling him to travel to an opposition meeting in New York in late 2008, in the last days of the Bush presidency.

On Sunday, Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei joined the crowd at Tahrir Square; he was charged by the opposition’s central organizing group, the National Coalition for Change, with negotiating with Mubarak. The National Coalition includes the Muslim Brotherhood, but these protestors don’t evoke the past, the 7th century that Islamic jihadists want to restore.

Watching TV, I was struck by the presence of what seemed to be Egyptian hipsters — in rapper-style clothes — and by so many Adidas track suits and current street fashions on young Egyptian men. I didn’t see one male protestor in traditional Egyptian garb. There were women in black abayas and some with face veils, however; these have grown more popular in Egypt in recent years. Then there’s the sign that’s become a trademark of the protests, “Game Over,” which gained currency from video games.

The protestors stand more for modernity than for a return to the Caliphate of yore. And modernity is — dare I say it? — unstable. Our fetish for authoritarian “stability” is self-defeating. We want to see open societies in the developing world — and these grow from cultures steeped in modernity, with long traditions of freedom of speech and the press. They are not nurtured by repressive, kleptocratic police states.