Kuwaiti singer satirizes Bush policies

Thanks to Juan Cole for the link to this 5-minute video, which is a hard-hitting anti-Bush satire energetically sung (and performed) by the Kuwaiti singer Shams. She sings a well-known Egyptian popular song of romantic repudiation. “Hi! How are you… You think you’re so great? I never want to see you again!” while hamming it up with a dizzying array of props representing aspects of Bush’s policy in the Middle East. And yes, that includes Washington’s “information” policies, too, with repeated visual references to newspaper stories and to round-table type TV talk-shows…
I’ve remarked before on the complex relationship between pornography and war. In this video– which was apparently shot in Cairo and used remarkably high production values– Shams does her own mocking (and I would say, extremely feminist) riff on that relationship… She sashays provocatively up to a cardboard image of Bush at the “presidential” podium before she takes over the podium herself… She stands dancing and primping in a sand desert in front of huge letters spelling out “DEMOCRACY” before hitting into the sand various heavily armed US soldiers undertaking operations all around her… She wanders with a “lovelorn” look around a sound-studio full of (male) talking heads hung from puppets’ strings around a table, and being manipulated by members of the Bush administration before, with a wicked smile, she snips the string of one of the puppets. (The string/rope left swinging there at the end is an eery visual reminder — same lighting and all– of the videos of the Saddam execution.)
You have to see how she blows the blond toupee off the head of an ageing Arab male journo, provocatively fans herself with the card holding her “detainee number” as she stands in a police line-up, or disports herself langorously along the top of the large letters “GUANTANAMO” laid out in front of (an image of) the White House…
In the fast-paced denouement of the video a cowboy-hatted Bush propositions her on top of a castle built in the sand in the form of an economist’s graph showing, I think, oil-price rises. She swats Bush off the castle (more Saddam hanging imagery here), then throws down on top of him a stone block that turns out to be an “E” that is rapidly joined by all the other letters of the word “LIBERTY”… which is then itself immediately placed behind iron bars… Finally, from a fortune-teller Shams learns that her future is to walk happily off into the sunset with… Naji al-Ali’s iconic, Kuwaiti-born child, Handala. (And if you don’t know who Handala is, or what he represents, then you probably need to find out. Hint: “old-fashioned” pan-Arab nationalism… )
As we all saw with the Saddam execution videos, rapidly distributed video imagery can have a massive effect on public attitudes. This one has been very cleverly crafted to satirize many, many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East from a broadly Arab-nationalistic perspective.
Another Kuwaiti woman, English-language columnist Muna al-Fuzai, presumably recognized this power in the video when she sputtered:

I watched the video recording of this song on TV yesterday and it made me sick to the gut. What I watched was not art but mockery. This video clip is an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for! Why is it so easy for Arab artistes to attack the Western leaders while they won’t dare say a word against their own rulers? Why can’t they get it? What on earth do they know about the art of criticism? Since the past couple of weeks, some dailies somewhat managed to cover bits and pieces of this song until they finally aired it on television. What a sick decision.
The essence of art is to appreciate as well as learn from it, but what I watched was pure adulterated [I think she means “unadulterated”?] insult and humiliation…

As a US citizen, I’d like to say that I don’t consider the video “an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for.” I think it’s an astute, well-crafted criticism of not just the content of George Bush’s misbegotten and ill-fated war against Iraq but also the hypocrisy of the wide-reaching propaganda effort that has surrounded his pursuit of the war. And if it’s produced in a way that makes its Arabic-language viewers laugh or even crack a small smile, that is fine by me. A bit of humor can really help a person to survive some tough and otherwise dispiriting times!
I do not see the video as unfairly mocking “all that Americans stand for”: I read the references there to “liberty”, “democracy”, etc., as introduced precisely to pinpoint the disconnect between the Bushists’ very public espousal of those values and their actual practices in places like “Guantanamo.”
For his part, Juan Cole called the video “the oddest thing, but certainly a ‘resistance’ video of a sort.” I don’t know why he sees it as odd. It is political satire presented in the populist genre of an Arabic-language music video. Not “odd”, but rather inventive, I’d say.
Anyway, if you have a fast internet connection, check out the video and tell us what you think.

Update, later Monday:

The Egyptian popular culture site Yallabina tells us:

After signing a two-million-dollar contract with Surprise, an American producing company, singer Shams video-clipped Ahlan Ezayak. The song is Egyptian, and it’s written by Ekram Assi, composed by Mohamed Rohayem and musically arranged by Dr. Ashraf Abdo.
The video-clip was directed by French director “Costas Mroudis”. A whole cast, of technicians and artists, was brought from France and other European countries to take part in the video-clip, which was shot in only 3 days.