Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • rumblings
to be a steadier hand than Sadat, who grew increasingly paranoid in the
year before his death, and skepticism because Mubarak was the opposite
of anything like the charismatic leadership that Sadat and Nasser embodied.
Mubarak was also, at least early on, something of a joker himself. Not
long into his reign, he quipped that he had never expected to be appointed
vice president. “When I got the call from Sadat,” he told an interviewer, “I
thought he was going to make me the head of EgyptAir.”
For decades many derided Mubarak as “La Vache Qui Rit”—after the
French processed cheese that appeared in Egypt in the 1970s along with the
opening up of Egypt’s markets—because of his rural background and his
bonhomie. The image that dominated Mubarak jokes during that period
was that of an Egyptian archetype, the greedy and buffoonish peasant. One
joke I remember well from the 1980s played off Mubarak’s decision not to
appoint a vice president after he ascended to the presidency: “When Nasser
became president, he wanted a vice president stupider than himself to avoid
a challenger, so he chose Sadat. When Sadat became president, he chose
Mubarak for the same reason. But Mubarak has no vice president because
there is no one in Egypt stupider than he is.”
The Jokes Turned Bitter in the 1990s as Mubarak consolidated his
power, started winning elections with more than 90 percent of the vote,
and purged rivals in the military. One oft-retold story had Mubarak dispatching
his political advisors to Washington to help with Bill Clinton’s
1996 reelection campaign after the U.S. president admires Mubarak’s popularity.
When the results come in, it is Mubarak who is elected president of
the United States.
But Mubarak jokes really settled into their current groove in the early
2000s, when Mubarak entered his mid-70s and a nationwide deathwatch
began. One joke imagines a deathbed scene, the ailing Mubarak lamenting,
“What will the Egyptian people do without me” His advisor tries to
comfort him: “Mr. President, don’t worry about the Egyptians. They are a
resilient people who could survive by eating stones!” Mubarak pauses to
consider this and then tells the advisor to grant his son Alaa a monopoly on
the trade in stones.
In another deathbed scene, Azrael, the archangel of death, comes down
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