On Wisconsin: The View from Pakistan
ISLAMABAD, February 22 – One of the stock lines I use in my public speaking around the U.S., when I’m trying to interest Americans in Pakistan and/or Haiti, goes something like this: “I grew up in an all-white town in Wisconsin. When I tell childhood stories, my wife says it sounds like Lake Wobegon. If you go from small-town Wisconsin to Haiti at age 16, as I did, you never go all the way back.” I say this not to caricature or lampoon my home state, but to share a sense of how much the world opened up to me once I left Wisconsin, how much I’ve learned by traveling outside the United States.
So I want to note how apt it feels that, nearly 30 years later and just as I’m hitting the ground on my latest visit to Pakistan, one of the most interesting places on our planet is Wisconsin. I feel proud of the public employees who, while taking care to say that they’re willing to negotiate on wages and benefits, are refusing to succumb to the Republican governor’s bullying over their basic right to be unionized. (No writer has articulated the stakes in Wisconsin better than Paul Krugman.) I’m proud of the tens of thousands of citizens who have been occupying the state capitol and the square around it, in sub-freezing weather, just at the far end of State Street from my alma mater.
And I’m proud of the Democratic state legislators who are currently in undisclosed locations in Illinois, helping force the issue by highlighting where responsibility for the situation lies. They’re doing honor to the great home state of Liberace and George Kennan and, more to the point, Fighting Bob La Follette. In 1964 Norman Mailer wrote, memorably, that “so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America.” Well, guess what? There are finally politics of consequence in America again, and it makes me proud to be an American and, equally and more specifically, a Wisconsinite.
I recently asked what the revolution in Egypt might mean for Pakistan. The answer(s), of course, is/are that you can’t draw a straight line from Cairo to Islamabad or anywhere else, and that history is perpetually surprising. As Mosharraf Zaidi rightly notes,
The intoxicating images from Tunisia and Egypt have inspired people all around the world, but that doesn’t mean every country that gets Al Jazeera on TV is about to ignite with popular protests against ineffective and corrupt governments, swarming into the streets and demanding change.
But as we watch with fascination and horror the carnage unfolding in Bahrain and now in Libya (at least I hope plenty of Americans are watching), we’ll do well to reflect that it has more to do with us than “only” its effect on the price of gasoline. I don’t mean to be glib along the lines of “Cairo in the Midwest,” as the New York Times has styled it. (East Coasters are always surprised when people from what they patronizingly call “the heartland” turn out to be intelligent and engaged and college-educated, and not just a bunch of hicks.) Protesters aren’t being gunned down in the American Midwest, though they have been before (Kent State, May 4, 1970).
The point is that no self-respecting human being likes to be bullied or humiliated, whether in Tripoli or in Madison. And in America, less urgently than in Libya but urgently enough, it’s high time we reclaimed an honest and legitimately popular politics. It won’t always be pretty, and it’s probably too late to forestall some severe disruptions in our economy and society. But taking matters into our own hands is vastly preferable to allowing the dinosaur that is the oligarchic and corrupt American establishment to continue lumbering along as it’s been doing.
In 1994 in Kathmandu (where I had been a student in 1986-87 with the University of Wisconsin College Year in Nepal program), I had the honor of interviewing Ganesh Man Singh, the late revered “Gandhi of Nepal.” Nepal at the time was undergoing its first political crisis since the semi-revolution of 1990. I asked Ganesh Man Singh how the military might figure in the coming events.
“It affects the people how much?” he replied. “That is the question. The police and army will make the people scared. If the government is successful, they will keep the people scared. But I don’t think we will be scared.”
I’ve always remembered what I learned that day: that the world is of a piece.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?
One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.
But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.
This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.
My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.
But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.
My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered
were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
