Or maybe what we’re hearing in Al-Akhbar is prosaic hate. But either way, the reality was that it had been almost thirty years since the last war between Egypt and Israel. Americans in my parents’ generation were pretty mad at the Japs. They got over it. And by the 1970s they were driving Datsuns.
I flew to Luxor. Trying to understand a culture by being a tourist is famously useless. But trying to understand Egypt without being a tourist would be worse than useless. Egypt is the cradle of tourism. Herodotus was a tourist here in the fifth century B.C. And the First Dynasty of the pharaohs was as far removed in time from Herodotus as he is from us. Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt “never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.” Thus the concept of the “inscrutable Orient,” the idea of the “mysterious East.”
Luxor is the site of the ancient sacred city of Thebes, 419 miles upstream from Cairo. The Temple of Luxor is downtown, and nearby are the Colossi of Memnon, Karnak Temple, Hatshepsut’s Temple, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the Ramesseum, with the gigantic shattered statue of Rameses II that inspired Shelley to write “Ozymandias.”
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and
despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck other than ticket
booths, soda-pop stands,
souvenir stalls, dozing guards, and
200 men in galabias asking,
“WhereyoufromYoubuypostcardokay?”
At the Sheraton Hotel in Luxor a few tourists were braving the geopolitics—some Europeans, a couple of Japanese, and a scattering of doughty American retirees of the type who can’t get along without L.L. Bean boat bags. I heard a voice in the Sheraton bar saying, with a plummy English accent, “The reason I got fired …”
My guide in Luxor, Ibrahim, was one of those people—rare among tour guides—who are impelled to tell the truth. His description of the mummification process was sickening. I asked Ibrahim about the war on terror. “Egyptians support America’s actions in Afghanistan,” he said, and paused. “Most do. But I must tell you the truth, others do not. Maybe thirty percent do. I am Christian. All Christians support America’s actions.” He paused again. “But maybe ninety percent of Egyptians are opposed.”
Luxor’s tombs and temples were interesting—briefly. Ibrahim would recount the attributes, the ancestry, and the avatars of every mythological figure portrayed. He came to a brief, embarrassed halt only at Min, who is represented with a healthy erection. And so Min might well be represented, given the lissome and un-burka’d female deities on the tomb and temple walls. The ancient Egyptian pantheon seems to have read the Amazon.com best-seller Look Great Naked in an earlier edition.
But the mild thrill of anachronistic eroticism wears off, the gimmick of puppy-headed gods palls, and a satiety with ritual mumbo jumbo sets in. Too much Egyptian art in a day produces moods that go rapidly from Hobbit-jaded to childwizard-bored to the feeling of being in a vegetarian restaurant with a blind date who’s talking feng shui. Ibrahim took me to just such a restaurant near the Valley of the Kings, although it became vegetarian, for me, only after Ibrahim suggested I look in the kitchen.
From the restaurant’s terrace I could also look up and down the Nile. The land of Egypt is nearly seven hundred miles long and, for most of that distance, effectively about seven miles wide. How did this affect a culture? Did people try to make their lives long and narrow? The funerary monuments around Luxor are a huge pharaonic Keogh plan meant to fund an eternal hereafter just like the therebefore.
I could be wrong. What will be left of our civilization five thousand years hence? Probably the ruins of our interstate highway system. The tourists of some future age will wonder, as I wondered at the Valley of the Kings, “Why were these people so obsessed with where they were going instead of where they were?”
But our rest stops won’t present the same opportunities for looting. (“A New Jersey Devils snow globe!”) All the ancient Egyptian tombs were robbed, many by contemporaries of the deceased. Even the famed trove of Tutankhamen was picked over not long after it was sealed. Suspicions arise of an inside job. A pharaoh’s kids had motive, means, and opportunity. They’d been bilked of their inheritance, knew where the tomb was, and were paying the salaries of the guards.
“Didn’t Grandpa have a set of solid-gold dinner plates just like this?”
“Finish your papyrus fries.”
Nowadays the tombs are well protected. And so are their visitors. After the 1997 terrorist attack at Hatshepsut’s Temple, the corps of black-clad elite Tourist Police was expanded and given special training. I saw one of them sitting in a squad car with a Furby hanging from the rearview mirror.
The Tourist Police were present in force at the Karnak temple complex. Karnak covers almost as much ground as Disneyland. The Great Hypostyle Hall alone has space enough for a heck of an Ancient Egyptian Adventure ride—whizzing among the 134 gigantic stone pillars. Indeed, visitors once came to Karnak with a more Disney-fied attitude. In tintypes of nineteenth-century tourists, we see that there’s room for a hundred men to stand on the capital of one of these columns. This was the kind of culturally insensitive thing tourists used to do. Now they’re herded into sound-and-light shows.
The Karnak son et lumière began with Wagnerian music and male and female recorded voices bouncing back and forth between widely separated speakers in the manner of sound-effects records from the early days of stereo. I forget what the female voice was pretending to be. The male voice was AmonRa—a Middle Kingdom syncretism of Ra, the sun deity, and a local goose god, the Great Cackler, who laid the cosmic egg.
The language of the performance was as poetic as anything that bin Laden was snapping his fingers to in the coffeehouses of the Shah-i-Kot Valley. “I am Amon-Ra,” said the male voice. “The waters of the Nile sprout from my sandals.” The lumière part consisted mostly of plunging us into darkness while we hung around in the supposedly spiritual ruins. Some of the tourists took flash photos of the opacity. “Yes, definitely spirits,” I heard one woman tourist say.
A Ramadan service was being broadcast over the loudspeaker of a mosque outside the Karnak walls. The son et lumière producers turned up their volume. The Muslim clerics turned up theirs. The producers responded in kind. So did the clerics.
If the pious Muslims had had Ibrahim translating the son et lumière into Arabic, there might have been more than a war of words. “I am the father of fathers, mother of mothers,” announced Amon-Ra very loudly indeed. “… the salvation of Amon, the salvation of Ra, also the salvation of the crocodile, offered equally to all the compass points of earth and to you, new pilgrim to Thebes.”
I was reminded of nothing so much as my dad in a fez, headed out for a night with the boys. Dad was a Thirty-second Degree Freemason and a member of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. It’s hard to imagine a worse case of cultural misunderstanding than the cultures of Egypt and Arabia represented by Dad on a midget motorcycle in the Fourth of July parade. Or maybe Dad knew more than I thought. During the late nineteenth century Egypt’s King Tawfiq was a member of a Masonic lodge, as were many of Egypt’s reform-minded liberal elite.
The next night I visited the Temple of Luxor, mercifully in silence. Luxor was consecrated to the “Thebean Triad”: Amon-Ra; his earth-mother consort, Mut; and their moongod kid, Khonsu. The temple was constructed about 1300 B.C. and restored by Alexander the Great, who built a new sanctuary for Amon-Ra. “In the wrong place,” said Ibrahim. “Properly it should be in the last room of the temple, not here in the antechamber.” Alexander’s sanctuary stands just inside the antechamber’s original w
alls. One set of hieroglyphs and reliefs was carved a thousand years later than the other.
“You see the difference,” said Ibrahim.
I didn’t. There is a supposed dynamism to ancient Egyptian art. According to Cyril Aldred, “It is often possible for the expert to date a specimen to within a few years by its stylistic features alone.” So the expert says. But the ancient Egyptian language, Aldred himself points out, “has no genuine active tense.” He notes that the ancient Egyptians did not adjust their calendar with the addition of an extra day every four years. They just let it slide for a millennium and a half until it got back into phase. When it came to art, I think the ancient Egyptians had a look going and decided to hang with it for three thousand years.
“Notice how the quality of decoration degenerated,” Ibrahim said. An important part of cultural understanding is to understand that not all cultures progress.
Ibrahim and I went across the street and had dinner at McDonald’s, where the quality of decoration had degenerated much further.
6
NOBEL SENTIMENTS
To mark the December 2001 hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Francis Crick, Nadine Gordimer, and José Saramago “in consultation with an extensive group of Nobel prize winners”—as the press release put it—issued a call to do something. The statement was signed by 103 Nobel laureates. It is printed in full below, with parenthetical exegesis by someone too dumb to ever get a Nobel, or even a MacArthur genius grant.
The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed.
(According to Nobel statement coordinator John C. Polanyi [Chemistry Prize 1986], the laureates’ pronouncement was written before September 11. Don’t rely on tips from Nobel laureates to win the Super Bowl office pool. And “irrational” is an interesting word choice. Aren’t Nobel Prize winners supposed to understand how rationalization works? Maybe they mean “bad.”)
Of these poor and disenfranchised …
(Why do political bien-pensants roll “dispossessed,” “poor,” and “disenfranchised” together, as if they have a natural correlation—like “ice,” “cold,” and “beer”? The Dalai Lama [Peace Prize 1989] is dispossessed. Your parish priest is poor. And Alan Greenspan, as a resident of the District of Columbia, is ineligible to vote in congressional elections.)
… the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most.
(Did you see global warming coming out of left field? Anyway, blaming the onset of earth-is-toast on “the wealthy few” seems a tad unscientific for a document that is signed by sixtyfive recipients of Nobels in chemistry and physics. The earth had temperature cycles when the wealthy few were lucky trilobites with extra-rich muck to delve in. And how are we going to solve the problems of those who “live a marginal existence in equatorial climates” such as that of Washington, D.C., if we don’t produce more of the industrial prosperity that boils their weather? It’s going to take a bunch of Nobel laureates to figure that out. Or not.)
Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust.
(Nice verb tense. In Congo, Haiti, Cambodia, and Liberia their situation right now is … ?)
It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich.
(I won’t make a wisecrack about “cannot be expected … to await the beneficence of the rich.” Specifically, I won’t make the wisecrack “and should go get a job.” This would be “manifestly unjust” to the hardworking poor—and dispossessed and disenfranchised—people of the world. Besides, if they got a job, it would worsen global warming.)
If, then, we permit the devastating power of modem weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.
(Oh, I don’t know. We did that in Afghanistan, and it was mostly the Taliban that got conflagrated.)
The only hope for the future lies in cooperative international action …
(Obviously, when it came time for war with Iraq, the cooperative international action-takers at the UN weren’t listening to Nobel laureates.)
… legitimized by democracy.
(Well, we’re a democracy—except occasionally in Florida, during electoral college vote counts.)
It’s time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek to shelter behind walls.
(Good point. Walls collapse. On the other hand, concrete barriers that keep car bombs from being parked too close to public buildings are useful. So is baggage screening, and maybe a missile shield.)
Instead we must persist in the quest for united action to counter global warming and a weaponised world.
(“Weaponise” is my favorite new verb. The pen is mightier than the sword—until you weaponise your ballpoint to fight a man with a scimitar.)
These twin goals will constitute vital components of stability as we move towards the wider degree of social justice that alone gives hope of peace.
(I thought “cooperative international action legitimized by democracy” was “the only hope.” But I guess Nobel laureates, like anybody else, are entitled to change their minds. So “social justice” it is. However, you’d expect Nobel laureates to do the math on this. Divide the gross domestic product of the world by the world’s population, and everyone gets $7,200 a year. What kind of basketball are we going to have if Shaquille O’Neal has to take a $21,422,800 pay cut? And a family of four in Tanzania making $28,000 will buy a used Toyota, which brings us back to global warming.)
Some of the needed legal instruments are already at hand, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, the Strategic Arms Reduction treaties, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
(And don’t forget the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the League of Nations Charter, and the Oslo accords.)
As concerned citizens …
(The rest of us aren’t worried at all.)
… we urge all governments to commit to these goals that constitute steps on the way to the replacement of war by law.
(As in the Jim Crow laws, Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, South Africa’s apartheid code, whatever legal gimcrackery Stalin used to prop up his show trials, etc.)
To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way.
(They said it. I didn’t.)
As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.
(No—other way around. The future of all depends upon the self-interested good of each. Adam Smith did a lot of work in The Wealth of Nations showing this to be the case. See Book 1, Chapter 2: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Although Adam Smith may be a little right-of-center to win a Nobel. Also, he’s dead.)
To sum up, here we have a statement beginning with a thesis that had been disproved before it was uttered and ending with a palpable untruth. The logic meanders. The ideas are banal. The text exhibits a remarkable prolixity, considering that it’s only 284 words long. Is this the best that 103 Nobel Prize winners can do?
Of course, it’s always tempting to make fun of the Nobels. (Sidelight: Alfred Nobel owed his wealth not only to the invention of dynamite [see “combustible human landscape,” above] but also to investment in his brothers’ successful exploration for oil in Azerbaijan [see “combustible human landscape,” above].) Making fun is especially tempting to those of us who will receive invitations to Stockholm only in the form of Scandinavian cruise-ship brochures. Let me give in to the temptation.
Ernest Hemingway but not James Joyce? Toni Morrison but not John Updike? Dario Fo? Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf? (She wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a fanciful account of a young boy�
�s travels across Sweden on the back of a goose.) And allow me to be the millionth person to point out that among the Nobel Peace Prize winners are Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (“If the mushroom cloud doesn’t clear up, call me in the morning”). For all I know, the lists of prizewinners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics are just as wack. I’m not competent to judge. Although Cambridge University professor Brian Josephson (Physics Prize 1973) says, “There is a lot of evidence to support the existence of telepathy.” And the codiscoverer of DNA, James Watson (Medicine Prize 1962), was, at age seventy-three, researching the effects of sunshine on sex drive.
Yet let us be generous. Prize-giving of any kind is no cinch. Nobel committee screwups notwithstanding, Nobel Prize winners are smarter than we are. And Nobel Prize winners are doubtless as morally alert as we are. Even the Peace Prize winners are probably, on average, decent people. I scanned the list of hundredth-anniversary-statement signatories and didn’t notice anyone in obvious need of a swift kick—the possible exception being statement coauthor José Saramago (Literature Prize 1998), a Portuguese Communist who wrote a novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, in which Jesus tries to get out of being crucified and sleeps with Mary Magdalene. Henry Kissinger and Yasir Arafat did not apply their John Hancocks.
One hundred and three Nobel laureates have provided us with counsel on the political and social future of the world. Any such advice must be worth listening to, and I guess that includes the advice they’ve given us this time. But where are the words that stir men’s souls? That turn their hearts? That change their minds? Where is the “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”? Where is even the “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? For that matter, where is the “Where’s the beef?”
Peace Kills Page 11
