Only a few days before the awaited June 30 protests, President Morsi announced that he was going to make an important speech. Morsi was like our own George W. Bush. He never failed to provide the show with the best material.
With everything happening in the country this might have been his most important speech to date. Hoping (for absolutely selfish reasons, like having a good show) he would really screw it up, we all gathered in our theater to watch it live. It was like we were watching a predictable sitcom where people laughed and cheered at every calculated punch line. The speech was a total disaster. It sounded like one given in a minor banana republic, where you’d have renegade warriors shouting and cursing American imperialism, “global conspiracies,” and some made-up enemy. But Morsi’s weren’t made-up enemies; he was actually naming names—journalists, other media people, dissenters, etc. He stood there saying that, as the president of Egypt and as the supreme leader of the Egyptian army, he demanded respect, and that an insult to him was an insult to the entire country. The writers and the producers looked at me and clapped. I had made it into the presidential speech!
The guy had clearly lost his mind. He was adopting a sort of demagogic rhetoric that I heard only in movies. Here was a man who made the Emperor from the Star Wars franchise sound like a pansy.
The arena was filled with the Muslim Brotherhood youth cheering his every word, just as previously people had cheered during Mubarak’s speeches, Saddam’s speeches, and all the way back to the 1930s, when they’d cheered the propagandist films of Leni Riefenstahl. Morsi announced that he had commissioned the minister of youth to start summer camps for more than a million young individuals under the supervision of the government. Call me paranoid, but the way the Muslim Brotherhood “supervised” the young in the streets during protests was hardly confidence boosting in terms of how they might “supervise” a million young men in summer camps. Whether they employed violence or brainwashing to do so, the outcome, I imagined, wouldn’t be too appealing. Morsi’s plan echoed similar initiatives with youths in countries like Iran, where the ayatollah indoctrinated millions of young enthusiastic citizens to defend his ideologies.
Morsi didn’t forget to kiss up to the army and the police. Right there in the front row was the minister of interior, aka “the Butcher,” who had far too many kills under his belt and was hailed by the Muslim Brotherhood members as someone who was “protecting the legitimacy” of the presidency with his brutal powers.
Next to him was the guy who would lead to big changes very soon. His name was General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the minister of defense. Remember that name. Sissi. (Pronounced “see-see,” not like the “sissy” that he is.)
Morsi praised both of these men, as if he were saying, I am about to come down on everyone, but at least I’ve got you on my side, right?
A few days later the minister of interior and Sissi would kill many of the young people sitting in that very arena, cheering for Morsi to kill his opponents.
For weeks, the Islamist newspapers published headlines hailing Morsi for deploying army troops in major cities. “The army is performing its sacred duty to protect the president and his legitimacy,” they said.
The anti-Islamic channels were hysterical because the “naming game” was at McCarthy-era levels. There were rumors about a list of media figures and politicians to be arrested once the thirtieth of June came and the alleged revolution failed. I was later told by people who were investigating the Brotherhood movement that I was the second name on the list. That made me a bit jealous. Why second? What would I have to do to beat out whoever was first?
Rumors aside, what happened as we were preparing for the episode was real: we had warnings from the Muslim Brotherhood government and the media authorities controlled by them that any sarcasm directed toward the president would be dealt with swiftly and that “any channel hosting a show that would air such material would be closed down immediately.” Well, that’s comforting!
After a very long night of editing and writing we managed to make the airing time. We were all half asleep, but had written one of our best episodes yet. But what really stayed with our audience is how the show ended, when we actually used Morsi’s own words. In his speech he had gone on complaining and whining about how certain people and “powers” were abusing democracy and attacking the presidency. He wanted everyone to know that he had been patient for a very long time, for a whole year, even, but now, “one year is enough.” Did he just put a cap on democracy in this country? Okay, guys, enough fun and games, free speech is out. I ended the episode by saying, “You are right, Mr. President, one year is enough,” implying that his time as president should come to an end.
I had just put myself in direct confrontation with the authorities.
As I was getting questions from the audience during the commercial break, I was asked the same exact question I was asked in all my interviews during that time: “What do you think will happen on the thirtieth of June?” I said that I really didn’t know but I was worried more about what would happen after the thirtieth of June. Islamists had made it very difficult for anyone to work with them. And moreover, to them, the thirtieth of June was more of a survival issue. There was no compromise: I was afraid that if they continued to be in power after that date it would prove that all the efforts of the liberal forces meant nothing and they could comfortably crush whoever stood in their way. This was not a mere assumption. The disastrous “jihad” rally that Morsi attended in the stadium was a big clue of what kind of craziness could occur.
It wasn’t a laughing matter anymore; the shit was just about to get real. And in a few days we would all get to know what surprises were waiting for the whole country.