I am sitting at my work desk at school on the edge of the desert, near the outskirts of Cairo, where the wealthy developments have moved away from the slums around the Nile. Here the government is talking about building a new city Akhenaten-style away from the bustle of Cairo, which has been the seat of some of the Egyptian government for most of 4000 years. Cairo itself is an Islamic city, but the Hellenistic Roman settlements that made up coptic Cairo were right near by and so was the ancient capital of Memphis and the tomb complex at Giza. The reason for this is that Egypt has had to make hard choices: float the currency to get more imports in and hurt the poor, or continue subsidies but get have no cash to buy imports and hurt the poor that way. Given the number of impoverished here, either choice was politically destabilizing potentially and, which the five year anniversary of the “revolution” that spring from the Arab Spring coming up, the atmosphere is tense. This and Occupy Democrats are the ashes of the hopes of Occupy and the rebellion against politics as usual.

Politic as usual, however, deserved what it got. These politics will have costs and the costs are painful. In it not just in “revolution” that breaks a few eggs but the march of change breaks this period.

It is with this in mind that write about Donald Trump and the US election. Sleeping through the early stages of polls being called because I was in seven hours in the future thanks to magic of the curve of the earth, I awoke at 5 am Cairo time to my social media feeds in a frenzy of panic: “I hate America,” “Jill Stein cost us a woman President,” “All those who voted for a third party showed that they didn’t value my life, or the people I loves life.” Rachel Maddow apparently almost crying on national television. I have never seen so much panic...

[read more from C Derick Varn at Symptomatic Redness]

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