Through the hyperlinks in the text, this piece can turn into an interactive book about life and literature in Egypt

Since 25 Jan we have had, in addition to the Islamist and official media, Al Fara’een: a satellite political-commentary channel of such irrational and duplicitous orientation I believe it is worse for the health of the average Egyptian than cholesterol. (By the average Egyptian, I mean the relatively sane, minimally rational follower of the news — including those who, out of fear or despair, might actually be opposed to the revolution.)

Initially, few understood what Al Fara’een was about, other than the fact that it was the mouthpiece of unreservedly counterrevolutionary sentiment, purporting to represent the so called Silent Majority: perhaps the greatest lie of all, that silent majority, since while a majority might possibly be against change, silence would make its position irrelevant. Al Fara’een does share many of the views of the Honourable Citizen as SCAF must imagine him, expressing — first and foremost — concern over the Stability of the State, the catchword of the Mubarak regime and all that it stands for: besides culturally articulated incompetence and corruption, in other words, not only stupidity and ignorance but also an astounding capacity to defecate from the mouth. In this sense Al Fara’een is the patron channel of a particularly spurious and/or deluded version of the social as well as the political status quo; in such modes of discourse, where anything we don’t know is suspect though we hardly know anything, and where anyone in any way different from the speaker however otherwise similar deserves instant elimination, whether a statement is spurious or deluded matters little.

Fara’een is the less literate term for the plural of “pharaoh”; and the channel’s owner and principal anchor, former National Democratic Party MP Tawfik Okasha, is the “nationalist” grand Pharaoh of the political landscape Al Fara’een portrays.

Though founded prior to the stepping down of Mubarak, the channel’s sole purpose, as it turns out, is to promote the Okasha for the presidency: a not only implausible but also very insolent ambition, even by pre-25 Jan standards. Patently obvious to anyone with an ounce of anything brain-like, the Okasha is unqualified as president of a reactionary news channel. The Okasha was also one of Mubarak’s least sophisticated and most fawning defenders — which, since 11 Feb, has not prevented it from literally, passionately cursing the father of Mubarak’s mother on air (I say “it” because there are serious questions about whether the Okasha is fully human, or at all). Otherwise it is best known for bending over double to kiss the hand of former information minister Safwat El-Sharif — not only a pillar of the Mubarak regime but also, for decades on end, perhaps the one most notorious for corruption. In the context of the very provincial conventions by which the Okasha itself purports to abide, kissing the hand of another man is of course a sign of extreme submission — unequivocal loss of dignity; aside from a loyal son showing deference to some venerable patriarch, it is something only a grovelling beggar might conceivably do.

Most of Al Fara’een’s air time, aside from Fox News-like patriotism and first-anti-25 Jan-then-pro-SCAF propaganda, consists of the Okasha addressing its nonexistent constituency in the informal and (to use its own word) “mastaba” manner of a well-to-do fellah dictating opinions to a loving, presumably equally non-human gathering of villagers (there is evidence that such creatures do exist, but let’s hope they are no majority). Unlike its oily, accent-less pre-25 Jan image — the one in which it is known to have said, to the word, “I hold President Mubarak sacred” — the Okasha’s present, mastaba-bound demeanour is so utterly like that of a wicked old peasant woman, one with neither the upbringing nor the intelligence to maintain even a veneer of respectability, that it tends to induce laughter more than any other response. But aside from the Okasha being a comic diversion — people laugh at faeces, after all, precisely because it is nauseating — the Okasha poses distressing questions about dignity, reality and the fellahin.

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I first heard of Al Fara’een from a taxi driver with a Limbi-like speech impediment (El Limbi being comedian Mohammad Saad’s alterego, a slum-residing criminal retard). He was explaining to me how it had been proven that Wael Ghoneim, the earliest hero of the revolution, was an American agent bent on destroying the country. Not only was Ghoneim Palestinian-Lebanese and Iranian (i.e. Islamist), he was also Communist, Zionist and Masonic; the so called revolution he and his fellow agents had started was nothing but a global conspiracy to spread chaos, bring over the Americans (as in Iraq), split up the country… “Where did you find out about this?” I asked. “But where else,” he coughed, with a worryingly self-assured grin. “Al Fara’een Channel!”

After this chance encounter I saw Tawfik Okasha on screen for the first time: clip after clip of infuriating and absurd things it had said on Al Fara’een would turn up on Facebook or Twitter; for the longest time, knowing what to expect, I would avoid listening to anything longer than a few minutes — and it always made me physically uncomfortable — an illness. But for some reason the other night I decided to seek the Okasha out, enduring some three hours of it talking on YouTube. I may have developed an immunity, but it was a very edifying exercise.

To some extent, among dishonest quasi-politicians, the Okasha’s “fellahi” attitudes had all been seen under Mubarak: political participation reducing to kissing the right hands the better to be allowed to accumulate assets; political discourse reducing to the occasional, gusty expression of xenophobia, sectarianism or conspiracy theory inconsistent with actual policy-making, the better to play on Honourable Citizen sentiments… But, aside from the fact that they were a byproduct of the complete absence of any but the weakest semblance of political life, such attitudes were considerably more polished; more often than not, they were alloyed with something, anything vaguely recognisable as human. You could dismiss them as part of the institutionalised practice of seeking out private interests at the expense of morality and public welfare, or you could accept them as diehard residues of Nasserist discourse (perhaps even present-day aspects of Islamist discourse). Never and nowhere has dishonest fellahi identity politics taken so clear and concentrated a form as it does in “presidential hopeful” Tawfik Okasha.

I will mention only three of the Okasha’s maneuvers by way of example: based on his Yemeni ancestry, the way in which it took issue with Bilal Fadl, a pro-25 Jan political commentator of impeccable integrity, for being non-Egyptian; its tendency to respond to criticism by a woman with statements to the effect that that woman is a slut; and the fact that it challenged Mohammad ElBaradei — who is a constant reminder to the Okasha of its own dire inadequacy — to tell it how ducks are fed in the Nile Delta before he could qualify as a plausible presidential candidate.

It is always interesting to try and work out the truth in the lie, what motivates an Okasha to tell or be it; and perhaps this is the reason I succumbed to my three hours of exposure to this Okasha. Sadly, while even Mubarak could occasionally muster the appearance of a head of state, for example — the truth of his de facto place in the world, an aspect however ugly of his humanity — the Okasha’s only truth is inferiority. The Okasha does not even have the wherewithal to work its insecurities into anything resembling an ideology (Islamist, Arab nationalist, grassroots essentialist, even straightforward fascist…) Its inconsistency is such it ends up saying nothing beyond, “I am a cowardly, snivelling opportunist of the lowest order, but you will support me because, being a fellah, I am who you are; and we, you and I, are such cowardly, snivelling opportunists we cannot abide change unless we can, in the meanest, least truthful way imaginable, benefit from it — if someone else says we are appalling and atrocious, they are obviously not enough of a cowardly, snivelling opportunist to be a fellah and they must be eliminated. Long live the fellahin!”

It is this, I realise now, that makes the Okasha and its version of fellahi politics so amazing; and it is this that Al Fara’een is about: one looks for a sign of humanity, any indication of the capacity for rationality, pride or fellow feeling. But one finds only it.