Reflections: Friends, Frasier, flotsam By Hani Shukrallah The Free One, in the feminine form, as in "the free woman" -- though in this case the allusion is to the channel (which is feminine in Arabic) -- is the most recent initiative dreamed up by the neo-con administration in Washington to trick the American public out of their tax-dollars and, much more significantly, intellects, since it fails to con, let alone convince, any of its supposed audience. It is truly pathetic that The Free One, and its various sisters, Sawa (music radio) and Hi magazine, are the best our imperial masters can muster to win our hearts, minds and consent to be ruled from the White House. Needless to say we have no control at all over which group of ruffians runs the global show. Irrespective of the actual intellectual abilities of "the lip", as the leader of the civilised world reportedly nicknamed himself while in high school, we tend to assume that the American system of government is considerably more complex and sophisticated than to be reduced to dependency on the IQ of whichever member of whichever first family is residing in the White House. Ideology and world view certainly come into play, if only because ideological blinkers have a way of making otherwise intelligent people appear stupid. But ideology always carries with it the question of how much its proponents actually believe -- rather than manipulate -- it as a fundamental instrument of hegemony, or in Orwellian terms, of mind-control. The millions of American tax dollars now being squandered on the Free One and her sisters, the aim being to sell the highly lucrative business of the perpetual "war on terror" to a susceptible, if increasingly dissatisfied, American public, would suggest the latter is in operation. Ideology, believed in or cynically manipulated, is, after all, the only thing The Free One and her sisters are about. Now they are in the process of starting up another "free" TV channel in Farsi, allegedly to support the reformist trend in Iran. All this child's play is premised on an equally childish view of the Arab and Muslim world, that presumes we "hate America" because we are mired in a backward culture of hate, one that the Arab media, in alliance with religious fundamentalism, continually reproduces and expands. The solution, therefore, is simple, Americanise Arabs and Muslims. Show them just how good we are; how superior our civilisation, cultural values and products are to theirs. The world, after all, is a market place. All that needs to be done is to break down the barriers to free market activity, smash through, or bypass, Chinese walls of all sorts, and the shoddy goods of backward culture and civilisation will give way before the superior, better-packaged and marketed products of Western, particularly American, culture and civilisation. Not that the neo-cons have any intention of obliterating Arab and Muslim culture and civilisation. A nice mix of imported and indigenous prejudice, ignorance and feeble-mindedness has always been the ideal formula for keeping the restless masses in line. I don't buy any of it. Hurra, Sawa and Hi have not been giving me sleepless nights, just yawns of boredom. The ludicrousness of the American cultural invasion (or, if you will, aggressive marketing drive) is equalled only by the ludicrousness of the Arabs' and Muslims' paranoid conviction that a cultural invasion is actually afoot. The whole ideological edifice behind the two mirror- image sets of notions is simply false. It's not culture, stupid, it's politics. Seen an Arabic video-clip, lately? The fact of the matter is that Arab and Muslim societies are already Westernised/Americanised in profound ways. Indeed, the past few years -- the same years which have witnessed a record number of American flag burnings on Arab streets -- have seen an amazingly swift Americanisation of the Arab world. In Cairo, Friends -inspired Central Perk-style coffee houses have been proliferating like mushrooms, literally sprouting out of the ground. The American sit-com, itself, is probably as popular in Arab middle-class households as it is in the US. And when exactly did Valentine's Day become an Egyptian national holiday, let alone a Palestinian and pan-Arab one, as Azmi Bishara's recent article in this newspaper seemed to imply? And what of the dozens of multiplexes that have mushroomed in Cairo and provincial cities in the past few years, showing not only the latest American films, but the new brand of shababi (youth) sit-com-like Egyptian films that have become all the rage over the past couple of years? And what of the Internet, the ceaseless online chatting and text-messaging of our young, the satellite dishes that have transformed the skyscape of Arab cities, and not a few villages, during the past decade? Westernisation in Egypt is at least as old as Napolean's campaign (1798-1801), while Americanisation has been with us for well over a hundred years. Pick any one of the hundreds of Egyptian films produced since the 1920s until today, from the nonsensically awful to the masterpieces of Youssef Chahine, and you'll see Hollywood's shadow looming large. And what of music, song, dance, theatre and literature? Simply put, not just Western culture, but also a distinctly American culture, is as integral to modern culture in Egypt as it is to the rest of the Arab world. And just like the American people, we get heaps of garbage and quite a few gems. The other day Hurra was showing an excellent documentary feature on the evolution of life on the planet; earlier on the same day I was reading an article in the Sunday Times about Georgia banning the teaching of the theory of evolution in its schools, an article that quoted the US president as having given his learned opinion that "the jury was still out" on evolution. But besides the odd good documentary, most likely bought from the BBC, Hurra is astonishingly shabby; as shabby, indeed, as Egyptian TV, even if its remarkably inept presenters and anchors have slightly better dress sense than their Egyptian counterparts. So while I switch the channel, looking for the latest episode of Frasier, American readers of this column might want to call their Congressman and ask for a tax refund.
