That was in the northwest of the U.S. where a police
station lying on the borders between Canada and the U.S. was receiving those
coming from Canada. My wife and I had a valid visa for entering along with a
bunch of Canadian citizens. A while after dawn, we submitted our passports and
were asked some questions like: Do you have a cigar? I answered: Yes. Again
they asked: where it was made and how many one do you have? Then I realized the
deep trouble I got myself into as I was told to strip the cigar of its brand label
for it was Cuban cigar and there was an embargo on Cuban goods. I promised to
do so but I forgot until I was hit by the question, so I said half the truth. I
mentioned the number but claimed that I forgot where it was made and asked to
go back to the car to check about this. At the car– like one committing a crime
–I removed the label off the cigar then threw it in my mouth, chewed it well
then spat it. I came back to them saying: Here is the cigar and it’s
Egyptian-made!!
We waited for a relatively long time until they let us
in to Washington State then, as I said before, we set off on our way to Mexico
passing by the States of Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California. Before
setting out on this trip, I had already finished re-reading the first volume of
the book titled “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” written by Edward
Gibbon which I believe is a very important book.
After setting off through the vast American mid-west
where not a single human is seen for hundreds of kilometers, I thought about
when and how the contemporary American empire can decline and fall. Therefore, I
tried to pay my attention to many things I saw and heard throughout the
25-day-long journey during which we stopped many times for fueling, eating,
drinking, using bathrooms and sleeping in motels spreading on the high-ways. In
some of those motels the room was directly looking over the road, and so the
customer must close the door well and never open it until he’s sure of the
identity of the one knocking. As to the public W.C.s on the high-ways, most of
them are too horrible to use and I will not go on describing them!
As I will finish the episodes of our journey in open
nature by the end of this article hoping to continue later, I will tell you
about what I think are impressions indicating collapse and deterioration. First
of them is the lack of feeling safe, as despite the U.S. is the greatest power
worldwide now, and perhaps the greatest ever known by humanity throughout
history, the individual citizen, family and also groups, all of them have feelings
of fear and insecurity. This explains to me the insistence on having a license
to carry a firearm and use it in many cases, as you can shoot, hit and kill
anyone getting close to your land or house, and also because you are always advised,
in case someone wants to snatch your bag or steal what you have, not to play
courageous or resist, rather give him what you have. Here the ugly popular
saying stating that “If you’re gonna be raped no way… then don’t resist and
enjoy” emerged!! Probably it’s directed to women.
I saw with my own eyes a robbery which I was about to
lose my life in, as we were in a fish restaurant near Washington D.C. Next to
the restaurant was a crowded car park. After finishing our fish meal, we went
out to the car and waited for those late in the bathroom when a black Cadillac
of the very long model– having six doors –stopped and an African American
driver stepped out of it. He left it running, closed it well and headed to the
restaurant. In seconds, a man jumped off a pick-up car holding a metal bar
looking like a saw metal part. Quickly, he pushed it near the window glass and
passed it alongside the car door that opened, then he drove it and fled. The driver,
meanwhile, came yelling and screaming: My car… my car. Like a foolish coming
from the south, I got my hand out of my pocket and pointed towards the pick-up speaking
to the man in English saying: This is the car. Suddenly, several gunshots were fired
towards us– me in specific –when someone grabbed me forcibly to get me down
pushing me beneath the nearest parking car. The pick-up fled away, the situation
came to an end and I was rebuked: “Are you crazy?... what do you think you were
doing?!!”
After fear comes ignorance, as one may receive a
question– like I did –asking: where do you come from? I said Egypt. Then the elegant
gentleman asking demonstrated his “knowledge” saying: “Ooh… Egypt… the Far East”!!
I tried to tell him about Africa, the Pyramids, the Sphinx… but in vain. When I
told him that I come from “British Columbia”, the “enlightened” man said: “Ooh…
Latin America”…etc. Also, some of the Americans almost know nothing about Roosevelt,
Truman or Mao Zedong. There is an unbelievable level of ignorance in the
country that has the greatest contemporary library and state-of-the-art
revolution of information and communication technology.
Here comes the turn of poverty or more specific
neediness, as while we were having breakfast in a hotel in San Diego city and
the TV was broadcasting footage of violence, war and death in Iraq, there was
an American family in the restaurant bidding farewell to its 20-year-old son
joining the Marines and going to Iraq. The son got married recently, for the
financial reward given to the married is much more that of the single. Outside the
restaurant, there were some who got discharged from the Marines’ service
standing at cross-roads lifting signs searching for jobs and asking for help. Some
others, meantime, were looking for food in garbage bins. Moreover, there in the
huge cemetery of martyrs of American army men one can find graves written on
its headstones that the deceased martyred in one of the two World Wars or in
Vietnam when he was in his thirties. Other gravestones state that the late was
21 and martyred after the year 2000!!
In addition, you hear about American citizens keeping
a paper in their pockets saying that in case there was an emergency to get
admitted to a hospital, it’s better to leave them until they die outside it so
that their folks do not incur the high expenses of their medical care. That means
they go to die in wars for the money, and they also suffer from hunger and
sickness because of neediness or poverty.
Now we come to addiction to gambling or poker, as the
American spends his daytime in work then he spends what he earns in poker
machines in the evening where a medal key holding his credit card hangs from
his trousers to a slot in the machine that directly withdraws money from his
bank account. They also put food and beverage within his hand reach so that he
can keep playing and not get distracted away from the machine. When a machine beeps
declaring that someone won, others hope to hear the same beep coming out from
their slots, and so they remain “tied” to them.
Finally, we come to obesity and over-weightiness as it
is said that rates of legs’ amputation due to diabetes which in turn is a
result of unhealthy diet are very high in the U.S. to the extent that airliners
think of changing the chairs’ capacity!
After all this, I asked myself: could fear, ignorance,
neediness, addiction to poker and obesity be the weevils infesting the body of
the American empire and are they symptoms for the decline and fall like what
happened before in past empires? However I realized that it’s still too early
since the U.S. possesses vast capabilities and natural resources and unlimitedly
diverse weather. I hope there will be another chance to talk about the open
nature.
Translated into English by: Dalia Elnaggar
This article was published in
Almasry alyoum newspaper on December 6, 2017.
To see the original article,
go to:
#almasry_alyoum
#ahmed_elgammal #america #usa
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