Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIt probably keeps me unemployed.
Raised in a library, a prince among bookworms, I probably have some talent for melding fictional possibility to the extant realities of individual states of affairs: to wit, when I was teaching English, I gave many a student better stories about themselves than they had fashioned for themselves.
In my previous criticism of Pakistan's former Prime Minister Bhutto's possible reappearance on the state's political scene, which I would see as likely to be used to confirm conservative Islam's expectations about secular leadership, I neglected the better story that may start with Ms. Bhutto's formidable academic, aristocratic, international experience.
If Bhutto's people have been meeting with Musharraf's people, as the flimsy reports go, she has career and personal options far more delightful to contemplate than another round as Pakistan's prime minister. She's as free as I am to enjoy the passing parade, but she's far more empowered to found a library, a research institute, a development organization; she's positioned as she has always been to get behind women's rights movements in Islam, to speak out against incision, honor killings, and stoning; to support secular or theological theorizing on Islam in the modern state.
Lyndon Johnson, an extraordinarily ambitous American politicans cum President, may have said what many leaders might wish to on any given day in their trials: ""I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President." [1]
Autocratic regimes--real ones, not President Bush's as much as his critics might propose, not General Musharraf's whose bloodless coup produced no civil war--gather power and privilege until swept away by forces larger than themselves; democratic states, quite to the contrary, regularly cycle through those in power--the top job in the United States comes with a four-year guaranty and a four-year extension should the incumbent win re-election--and most certainly confer on winners as many headaches and heartaches as privileges.
Magical thinking in all of our heads, this waxy sense of identity and self-appointment that comes out in what I call "the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves when we wake up in the morning", may also be more constraining or suffocating than wanted.
Who among the world's best positioned politicians absolutely must have The Top Job and why?
The students martyred at Lal Masjid unwittingly brought about a national referendum on their cause. Instead of inciting an immediate and broad Islamic revolution, they forced the military into the Waziristan and other areas less integrated in the Federal system, essentially turning an army formed expressly to defend them into one defending Pakistan itself and its future from them. Whether elected president, general by coup, or elected prime minister, that's the job, the same as Lyndon Johnson had as U.S. President through the thick of the Vietnam War: you would have to be nuts to want it for other than the honor of serving a country, and even that calls for a bit of malarkey inside the head.
1. "Lyndon B. Johnson." Wikipedia, as experienced September 6, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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