This Must Be How Marc Antony Felt

The events in Egypt have been running a little ahead of me, sometimes on a camel, brandishing a whip. I know to keep my distance. There are things evolution has given us a natural aversion to, for the sake of our safety, like pocupines, cacti, nuclear power plant cooling towers and whip-wielding camel-riders.

And while the camel-riders are bad news for those in their path--journalists, women and women journalists, from what I gather--I can't help but think of what a tremendously invigorating breath of life this is for some almost-dead anti-Arab stereotypes. I mean, a literal camel-jockey. What a gift for the disconcertingly large portion of America south of the GED Line. It's like having video of a Chinese guy eating a dog or a black man having sex with a white woman. We all have to endure at least six more months of our Local "Hey, I'm just calling it like I see it" Guy.

Speaking of the uneducated, the joke is that Americans learn geography after the war starts. We're not threatening to invade Egypt (that I know of... come on, Wikileaks!) but TV and internet news make this kind of the same sort of scenario. The idea behind the anti-American preconception is that we're uncurious about the world outside until events propel us into a crash course in cultural apprehension, which ends about how you'd expect anything involving the word "crash" to end, with lots of twisted, smoking metal.

Events are moving fast in North Africa, the Levant and elsewhere in the islamosphere, to be sure. And in the rush to keep up, in our existing state of Zero, it's tempting to look to others to color in the outline for you. This is where Glenn Beck makes a lot of money, but consider: it's been 10 years in Afghanistan, and what do we really know about the place? Taliban, burqas, opium poppies. Even though it's closer and far more westernized, I'd say we know less about Egypt since our perception of it is warped by the historico-magnetic fields generated by pyramids and Cleopatra. Go back and watch the beginning of Despicable Me. But for the shrink-ray, it's a nature documentary.

We should be doing better. This is the information age, after all. The worst commercials going are the Microsoft Bing! ones where they seem to suggest that search engines giving you lots of results for things you're looking for is a problem. We should use their search engine, the argument goes, because their search engine does less of a good job, saving us from the labor of discernment. In cases like this, with Egypt for instance, I'm not completely sure they don't have a small point. The volume of information to be had is staggering. If only it weren't Microsoft, I'd almost trust them enough to try it out.

It's lazy of me, but instead of fighting the tidal wave, I've picked a couple of fiberglass-wrapped polystyrene vessels to float me in, mostly Anderson Cooper on CNN and Andrew Sullivan's site. One gives me raw pictures and the other an idea of what people who think about this stuff are thinking. But I don't let them carry me all the way to shore. Part of that is a bit of contrarian-fed self-respect; I want to do some of the work myself. The other part is that I don't want to let the water get too close to shore as, from what I understand, camels swim.