Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, Hiding in Plain Sight

I couldn’t quite glimpse Hosni Mubarak from my balcony in Garden City, but simply knowing that his portrait was nearby made me unable to shake the sensation of being watched. Not exactly towering over, but nudged by its rooftop mechanicals above the rooflines of the neighborhood’s decadently decomposing 19th century apartment houses was its home, the khaki hulk of the Ministry of Social Solidarity — more Orwellian in name than purpose. Mounted on its façade, the multistory banner depicting the longtime Egyptian president — slumping, casually, in shades — was what really gave the place its authority. I never encountered a more affirming symbol of Mubarak’s power than his pose on that photo: the longstanding ruler was so calm, collected, comfortable.

Dictators survive by avoiding blame and instilling awe. Both served Mubarak well. Russian peasants were said to have hated the czar’s officials — who constantly interfered in their daily lives — but to have loved the distant czar, whom they imagined, were he in touch, would ultimately set their lives right. Perhaps that’s why it was relatively hard to find, in Cairo, many more of the trappings — monuments, murals, political paraphanelia — that mark personally invested, ideologically rigid, and, hence, vulnerable regimes. It’s possible that, walking through Bolshevik Petrograd or late Maoist Beijing, you could have somehow put the omnipresent slogans and statues out of your mind, but in Cairo there seemed to be far less need.

True, Mubarak’s visage still gazed out from many posters, murals, and portraits, but their relatively low degree of frequency reflected the fact that his regime was more of a shadowy, bandit kleptocracy than a mass-murderous personality cult. Every classroom in Egypt apparently had an image of the president mounted on its wall, but they must have only made the president appear as a fixed, unresponsive certainty of daily life, or else an image that would recede in memories as quickly as algebra and playground fights. Many of the old posters were already fading by themselves. The bridges, streets, and stations named after the former president made him seem like a figure from distant history rather than someone who could be held to the consent of the governed.

By refraining from stuffing itself into Egyptians’ fields of vision, the regime also ensured it did not become a default excuse for the sometimes crumbling condition of the country or its inhabitants’ stagnant fortunes. That few, casual images of Mubarak produced — such as the one that hung from the ministry — spoke volumes about his removal from the people. As the revolution that broke out in January helped attest, they made the old ruler seem out of touch. Their isolation, for the longest time, made him seem untouchable.

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Pursuing the NYPD’s Panopticon

During New York’s wild real estate boom, nearly every brownstone in Harlem seemed slated for renovation. So when the NYPD introduced its latest surveillance technology, Sky Watch — a mobile, collapsable prison-style surveillance tower equipped with at least half a dozen cameras — it was a foregone conclusion that its deployments to locales like 129th and Lenox Avenue were harbingers of the gentrification wave, reassurance for paranoid urban prospectors.

After all, military-style security booths had long dotted the darker residential streets of Morningside Heights, reassuring the parents of students at Columbia University and Barnard College that their children were under guard. Still, Sky Watch appeared to take the NYPD’s hired “eyes on the street” to the next level — literally.

Like Bentham’s panopticon, Sky Watch’s intended purpose is to instill discipline, deterring crime where it has spiked. That’s made its recession-era whereabouts a bit surprising.

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The Ethics of Urban Documentary

Vancouver is many things, but perhaps most of all it is Terminal City, a place to which people escape. Movie stars and Cantopop celebrities flee there to escape the stress of their lives in Hollywood and Hong Kong; the less affluent find in Vancouver a place to get away from the constraints and conventions of society. Two films produced by the National Film Board of Canada look at some of the city’s more vulnerable people and their attempts to escape — and they also raise questions about the ethical obligations that documentarians (and, by extension, journalists and other members of the media) must confront when dealing with marginalized people.

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Cops and Crowds

Police officers on Ste. Catherine Street, Montreal

The Baby Cops’ Debut

Every summer, Montreal’s police department sends its most fresh-faced cadets to patrol Ste. Catherine Street. For police headquarters, it’s a way to train their newest recruits and ensure a police presence on the street without shelling out for real, fully-salaried traffic cops. For the cadets, who are sometimes known as “baby cops,” it’s more like a hazing ritual. Baby cops, you see, are entirely powerless: they can’t issue tickets and they can’t arrest anyone — they can only call for backup. Their job is to attempt, as best as they can, to control a river of downtown pedestrians swollen far beyond its normal size by the summer heat.

It’s entertaining to watch them. Montrealers normally waste no opportunity to cross against a red light, but they generally become more obedient when a police cadet is around. Even then, though, just about every red light involves a lot of whistle-blowing and a cadet yelling at someone to stay out of the street. In most cases, when pedestrians ignore the cadets and cross anyway, the cadet does nothing but look annoyed. On a few occasions, however, I’ve seen them break down and start screaming at the jaywalkers at the top of their lungs. If they can’t handle the stress of a summer afternoon on Ste. Catherine, can that really be a good sign for what’s to come?

Still, I have to give them my respect, especially considering the amount of taunts and verbal abuse they must put up with. It takes a lot to stand there, with about as much authority as an elementary school crossing guard, and try to shepherd a huge flock of unruly pedestrians. In fact, I respect them enough to actually wait for the light to change. Sometimes.