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"If war comes, it comes," says a shopkeeper in the Moussky. "There is nothing I can do except protect myself and my family and my business from bombs the best I can." The attitude seems typical of Cairenes, preoccupied with living through whatever lies ahead in the safest and most comfortable way possible. The daily task of hacking a way through the urban jungle is difficult enough for ordinary Cairenes, visible in the streets as ranks of sullen men in unpressed suits. Bitterly insecure, frustrated and angry, they might, in a less apathetic country, provide the base for a revolution. In Egypt, carefully watched by Nasser's security police, they care for neither politics nor war—nor, for that matter, the empty sands of Sinai.
A Closed Society
The most disenchanted of Egyptians are the educated, the middle class, the few merchants who have survived the socialist regime, and the middle-to upper-level government employees. They have the pay packets to travel and to buy their luxuries on the black market. But they cannot get uncensored news, and miss "most of all an open society," as one said last week. They freely complain that their life was better in the long-gone days of King Farouk, blame Nasser for dragging them into a war in Yemen that was none of Egypt's concern, and were for the first time convinced, by the 1967 war, that Israel is their real enemy. With little or no hope for the future, they respond in many cases by simply packing up and leaving Egypt for good, "to live instead of exist." An average of 150 a day file papers to emigrate to the U.S., and visas will probably be issued for 10,000 this year. It is a brain drain that Egypt quietly encourages in order to make way for the 140,000 Egyptians now in college or technical schools who will be clamoring for jobs once they graduate.
Cynical Egyptians have a saying that "in Iraq, Nasser wouldn't last six months. Here he can last forever." The reason is a pervasive, fatalistic apathy. One potent force for reform might be Egypt's students. Last year they took to the streets demanding an end to "the society of coined slogans" and of harsh regulations on their conduct. Nasser smoothly promised to grant every one of their requests—as soon as the Israelis departed from Egypt. With nothing else to be said, the students returned to class. "If we tore up the country, only the Israelis would benefit," said a Cairo University student last week. "On the other hand, if we don't reform the country, it won't be worth living in, so what can we do? Most of my friends say eat, drink and be merry, for there is no future; others are trying to emigrate."
Nasser is neither much threatened by Egypt's civilian population nor pressed by them into fresh military adventures against Israel. Politics in Egypt is essentially army politics. Some of the younger officers of the army bitterly recall how they were spat on in the streets of Cairo after the war, and would like to wipe out that memory. If there is an Egyptian alternative to Nasser, he is most likely