The Importance of Ownership
Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent newspaper, is not known for his support of the United States, and in particular the United States of the eight years of George Bush’s presidency. There was little, if anything that Bush did in the Middle East that didn’t arouse the scorn and often the anger of Fisk.
Now, today, in an article in the Independent entitled, “Why does life in the Middle East remain rooted in the Middle Ages?”, Fisk is sharply critical of the Arabs for not having led their peoples into the modern age, an age which, inspite of the huge mistakes of George Bush, does have much that the Arabs could acquire for their own and to the great advantage of their peoples.
Why don’t they? Fisk gives a number of reasons for their failure to do so. I come away with just one. Ownership, the lack of ownership among the Arab peoples of the Middle East, the failure of Arab leaders to allow and encourage their people to acquire a sense of ownership and responsibility for their own lives and most important for the places where they live and work.
For example, Fisk reports, “Arab homes are spotlessly clean but their streets are often repulsive, dirt and ordure spilling on to the pavements.” I take this to mean that once they leave their own private living spaces they enter on foreign soil, a kind of no man’s land that is not their responsibility to preserve and protect.
“Even in beautiful Lebanon,” Fisk writes, “where a kind of democracy does exist and whose people are among the most educated and cultured in the Middle East [and where Fisk is currently living], you find a similar phenomenon. In the rough hill villages of the south, the same cleanliness exists in every home. But why are the streets and the hills so dirty?”
Fisk concludes, and I’m sure that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove would agree with him, “that a real problem exists in the mind of Arabs; they do not feel that they own their countries.” This is very Western, very American to feel that we own our own country. We might say of many of our own impoverished inner city dwellers, whose physical neighborhoods are often filthy that they too need to “own” those neighborhoods.
(Fannie and Freddie’s push to create more home owners probably came from this same belief, that ownership makes us better citizens. But there are limits to this sort of thing, including you can’t make something out of nothing, and as we’ve seen to Fannie and Fredie’s efforts came to great grief for them, for the new home owners, and for the country.)
Fisk again, “I think [the Arabs] do not feel that sense of belonging which Westerners feel.” Or we might say if speaking of our own inner city, ghetto dwellers, that sense of belonging that the middle class suburbanites feel. And Fisk continues, “… they feel “ruled over.” The street, the country as a physical entity, belongs to someone else.”
Isn’t this the plight of the “underclass” everywhere, to feel left out, ruled over? And why aren’t we working together, all of us in the world, to change things in the direction that Robert Fisk recommends?
With just a few critical changes to his text, I can usefully apply some of his words to both our most troubled inner city neighborhoods, more and more home to minority and immigrant populations, and the French, in particular the Paris banlieux where mostly African and Muslim immigrants are living.
In Fisk’s words (with my changes or additions in italics), “If you can no longer bellyache about the outrageous injustice [of your situation] then perhaps there are other injustices to be addressed. One of them is domestic violence, which – despite the evident love of family which [you profess], is far more prevalent [in your world than you might want to admit].
Fisk concludes, “I also think that, militarily, we have got to abandon the Middle East. By all means, send the Arabs our teachers, our economists, our agronomists. But bring our soldiers home. They do not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice upon which the al-Qaedas of this world feed.
“No, the Arabs – or, outside the Arab world, the Iranians or the Afghans – will not produce the eco-loving, gender-equal, happy-clappy democracies that we would like to see. But freed from “our” tutelage, they might develop their societies to the advantage of the people who live in them.”
Should we no longer send the police into our ghettos? No, here the analogy breaks down. But again, he mentions ownership: “Maybe the Arabs would even come to believe that they owned their own countries.” George Bush and Barack Obama would have wished the same for our out of work and out of sorts minority and impoverished city dwellers.
