Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteLyndon Baines Johnson refused to run for a final term in office.
Richard Nixon resigned amid scandal.
Hosni Mubarak, who has kept himself Egypt's "president for life" for 30 years, and he might just make it all the way, has gone the other direction, refusing responsibility for the massive demonstrations and violence expressed toward his tenure and dismissing the Egyptian government rather than himself.
Good luck with that.
Of course, one might admire his staying seated and not caving to a popular will run amuck; one might nonetheless have expected acknowledgment of what he has done to Egypt by maintaining himself for so long as an imperial head of state.
As have autocrats in similar straits, Mubarak long ago learned how to blackmail the west wth the dark phantom of the failure of his government, a too familiar drill: unless an open society supports the dictator, what comes next will only be worse: i.e., a brutal and unbridled Islamism that turns day into night, women into cattle, and lofty notions about "universal human rights" into whining against God Almighty himself, or so the Brothers and like-minded mullahs might have it.
Today, perhaps, has marked the beginning of the end to all that.
Obama's Administration watched from the sidelines and kept its mouth shut, neither voicing support for Mubarak's continued tenure nor getting behind "the people" -- a handy phrase in rhetoric, but in realpolik the question always comes next: "which people?" Instead, it chanted the mantra of human rights and open communications.
Possibly, Mubarak's deflection of responsibility for the passions of the mob reflect also what is worst in the character of some leaders and constituencies in the middle east: if it is bad news, someone else must be responsible for it, one reason for keeping handy such as the "dirty khafir Zionazi American Dutch cartoonists" along with the Mossad and CIA (whom, we shall soon see, will turn out in some screwed-up publication the entities most responsible for the day's fires).
Islam in Egypt no less than elsewhere will not progress to any place good while continuing to deflect responsibility for the adverse conditions in which it finds itself.
Economic, ecological, and social carrying capacity should be part of a dialogue in Egypt as much as in Haiti or any other crowded and dismal neighborhood on the planet, and decent universal education, development planning, and economic foresight and strategizing a part of the vocabulary of those who were aligned today against Mubarak's regime.
While there may be a fashionable intelligentsia armed with man-the-barricades attitude and rhetoric, what may be wanted most is a comprehending intelligence groomed on foresight, informed by compassion, and of a practical a turn for discerning what is possible, good, and feasible here and now.
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