Two cameras, a few hundred meters apart, recording footage at the same moment. The left, Al Jazeera shows a police van that had been dragged from an alley, torn apart, wracked, smashed, and burned. The air is thick with smoke and when the camera zoomed out, people were running. The right, state tv declares that the curfew has been successfully declared, the day is done, and the city is a tranquil set of lights made from electricity and filaments, rather than gasoline.
Now the military has moved in to Cairo to enforce the curfew, with outcome unknown. A state is, first, the unshaken declaration that the image on the right is the right one, despite the existence of an infinite set of other cameras fixed on the wreckage, and second, it is the savage labor of closing between the distance between the two images, until it can admit and even trumpet those other images in order to say, yes, there may be fire, but it no longer means anything more than the sputtering index of what has been crushed.
Hope from here that all in Egypt make that thin white line splitting the screen into left and right break down into a pointless, spent, porous thing.
"And if Egypt goes, the entire region goes..."
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