From Democracy to Dictatorship

Syria's current president and wife...

It's the old story of what you take for granted. All our lives we've lived--Carrie and I--under a democratic form of government. One often hears accounts of people fleeing dictatorships (escaping being the more apt term, I imagine) and rushing into the arms of democratic freedom. Not too often does one hear of folks of their own free will leaving a democracy to wander under the big tent of a dictatorship. Yes, yes, as Carrie often reminds me: Syria's is a "benign" dictatorship. Since 1963 Syria has been governed by the Ba'ath Party, and from 1970 to the present the head of the party has been one of the Assad family, first the father, Hafez al-Assad (from 1970 till his death in 2000), succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who is, as mentioned, Syria's current president. The Ba'ath Party actually began around 1940 in Damascus (Syria's capital) as a secular Arab nationalist movement to unify Arab peoples against foreign domination/Western colonialism. In Arabic, the term Ba'ath means "renaissance" or "resurrection", and the binding philosophy was a weaving of Arab socialism, nationalism, and Pan-Arabism. The other historically relevant Socialist Ba'ath Party in the region was, of course, Saddam's Iraq. So into this dictatorship we are rushing headlong. It will be interesting, in the coming months and years, to detect the subtle and less than subtle changes in our daily lives while living in Syria. Neither Carrie nor I have any anxiety about living there, but it will be different, very different, in ways we cannot even conceive at present. How could it not be? We are, as Americans, very comfortable in our freedom here. So much so that we can even, in less reflective moments, feel free enough to accuse our own government of tyranny, as though ours is simply another kind of dictatorship with the Bushes and Cheneys in power. Well, this is certainly not the case. We have tremendous freedom here where it matters: to speak and write freely, to organize, even to form radical parties. What excites the most, on this American Independence Day, is the thought of finally getting out of our cultural skin, to see the world from inside another country, day to day life as Syrians live it, and not be through the lens of our prejudices. For none can flatten the contours of cultural perspective from the comforts of home.

It will be the small things, I'm guessing, that will have biggest impacts. "What do you mean you don't have Sierra Nevada on tap? I'm not asking for a Rogue or a North Coast brew! You can get Sierra Nevada in Turlock for chrissake...." Well, first thing's first: I'll need to learn how to say this in Arabic. It will take awhile to get the lay of the land, politically, culturally, socially, but we'll report what we find.