Media types like to talk about “the narrative”: News is just another form of
storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others. The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. “I
believe that children are our future,” as the late Whitney Houston once
asserted. And, even if Whiney hadn’t believed it, it would still as a
point of fact be true. Any media narrative involving young people
presupposes that they are the forces of progress, wresting the world
from the grasping clutches of mean, vengeful old men and making it a
better place.
In the West, young people actually believe this.
Thus, in 2008,
Barack Obama, being the preferred choice of America’s youth, was by
definition the candidate of progress and the future. In humdrum reality,
his idea of the future doesn’t seem to be any more futuristic than the
pre-Thatcher statist wasteland of Britain in the Seventies, but that
didn’t stop the massed ranks of fresh-faced youth chanting “We are the
Hopeychange!” in adoring if glassy-eyed unison behind him at every
campaign rally. Four years later, half of recent graduates can’t find
full-time employment; Americans’ college debt is now larger than
credit-card debt; the number of young people with summer jobs is at a
record low; and men in their late 20s and early 30s trudge upstairs
every night to the same bedroom in which they slept as a kindergartner.
And that’s before they’re permanently buried by interest payments on
the multitrillion-dollar debt and unfunded liabilities from Medicare.
Yet in 2012 the rubes will still vote for Obama and be congratulated by
the media for doing so. Because to be young is to vote for hope and
change. Likewise, halfway across the world, the Arab Spring was also
hailed as the voice of youth, tweeting its universal message of hope and
change. A year on, it’s proved to be rather heavier on change, and ever
lighter on hope. Egypt’s first freely elected head of state is a Muslim
Brotherhood man.
In the parliament of the most populous Arab nation,
the Muslim Brotherhood’s party and its principal rival, the Even More
Muslim Brotherhood, between them won nearly three-quarters of the seats.
In traditionally relaxed and secular Tunisia and Morocco, elections
have been won by forces we are assured by the experts are “moderate
Islamists” — which means that, unlike the lavishly bankrolled American
protectorate of Afghanistan, they won’t be executing adulterous women in
the street, or at any rate not just yet.
So what are they doing? In Libya, British Commonwealth war
graves have been desecrated, something that never happened under Colonel
Qaddafi even at the very lowest of low points in relations between him
and the West. But hey, one can forgive Libya’s suddenly liberated young
men a spasm of very belated anti-imperialism, right?
Meanwhile, in northern Mali, the dominant Ansar Dine group is
currently engaged in destroying the ancient shrines of Timbuktu,
including the famous door of the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque that was
supposed to be left closed “until the end of the world.” Bring it on,
baby!
No Britons or Europeans were involved in the creation of these shrines.
Rather, it’s a dispute between the region’s traditionally moderate
Sufi Islam and the ever more assertive Wahhabist model exported
worldwide by Saudi Arabia with Western petrodollars.
The shrines are
official UNESCO World Heritage sites, but then so were the Buddhas of
Bamyan blown up by the Taliban in Afghanistan a decade ago. What’s next
on the condemned list? Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of
Sheikhs” (he’s like a supersized sheikh) has invited Egypt’s President
Morsi to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin
al-As could not” — a reference to the Muslim conqueror of Egypt back in
the seventh century.
Less controversially, Egypt’s Salafi party does not see the need to
destroy the Pyramids but does favor covering them in wax.
The Pyramids
are the last of the Seven Wonders of the World still around in the 21st
century, but that’s no reason not to destroy them, as part of the new
pan-Islamic identity’s contempt for any alternative claims of allegiance
— cultural, national, or historic.
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