Not another post about Egypt!

It's hard not to be fascinated by the events in Egypt this past week, and there's no end to internet articles on the subject. Egyptian citizens have unwittingly provided a laboratory setting to observe the dreaded "instant expert" disease which is an unfortunate by-product of life in the information age. It's not just your "friends" on Facebook who are graciously subjecting you to their informed opinion because they visited Egypt for a week a few years ago, or worked with a guy from Egypt once. This has infected much larger and "most trusted" sources for news and, more to the point, opinion. The few Westerner scholars and Arab world ex-pat experts news organizations keep on ice until something happens in places like Tunisia or Egypt are being thawed out, but not everyone has one handy. I certainly knew very little about Egypt society and government before last week, and so did you. We all did. But after a weekend of late nights with Google, suddenly everybody knows what's happening, why it's happening, and what should happen there. Granted, some of that is a no-brainer, and a simple "the people vs. a despised leader" narrative works to a point. It's the overall context and nuance of the op-eds, as well as the discussion of the future of the nation, where things get uncomfortable, especially since it all seems to be coming from the point of view of what's best for the United States.

I'm doing the same as everyone else and visiting all the usual news haunts, in my case the NYT (I know, I know), The Guardian, NPR and ZNet. These organizations have the resources and history with the region to do a fairly reliable reporting job, bearing in mind obvious biases and viewpoints. Al Jazeera is obviously the best places for expanded coverage and context, though I have to admit I only visit their site when something extra crazy is happening in the Mideast. The network was apparently blacked out across much of the U.S., but their website seems to be having no trouble at all. After spending time with the site, it all but renders the others I mentioned obsolete. I like peeking in and roaming around other sites, too, ones that don't seem as well-prepared to report from or comment on Egypt. I restrained myself from the voyeuristic/masochistic exercise of looking in on Fox, even after that ridiculous map they created in 2009 started showing up everywhere. Making fun of Huffington Post is like picking on a well-meaning classmate with limited intelligence and reasoning skills, but I have to hand it to them for straight up admitting they had to go to the ever-reliable, always thorough New York Review of Books for years of context. There's so much competing for our attention on this subject, NYRB seems to be a sober one-stop shopping source for a brief history lesson.