Uh Oh! Hosni Mubarak and Wile E. Coyote

I’ve been so busy doing one thing and another that I haven’t had time to make any substantial posts, not one doing a wrap-up on Porky in Wackyland, nor one on anything else.

And that includes the situation in Egypt. But I saw an Al-Jeezera clip that suggested a way to combine Looney Tunes and the Egyptian revolution into a single post. The clip involves a discussion between Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar, and Slavoj Žižek, philosophical provocateur. Žižek suggested that Mubarak is facing a situation covered by one of the best-known laws of cartoon physics: A character who is suspended in space will remain in suspension only until he realizes that fact. Once he realizes that he’s standing on nothing, gravity kicks in.

Žižek’s comment starts a bit after 20:30 in this clip:

Here’s an elaborated example from a Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoon, Zoom and Bored. In this shot Wile Coyote’s situation (not to mention Road Runner's) is obscured by a dust cloud:

Of course, we don’t know what’s going on. For all we know, Wile and Road Runner are standing on solid ground – the default assumption. Now Wile senses that something’s wrong:

And so he explores the situation:

At this point we too know what’s wrong and know more or less what to expect, but not exactly when it will happen. Just how long will Wile probe the air before he's forced to conclude that he's no longer on solid

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Finally, the dust cloud begins to dissipate and Wile takes yet another fall:

As the dust completely dissipates we’ll see that Road Runner is standing on a jutting promontory.

My sense is that the Egyptian situation is currently somewhere between the second and the third frame grab. Mubarak & Co. know that something is wrong, but they don’t quite know what. Nor is it at all obvious that the protesters are on ground as firm as that supporting Road Runner. Even if Mubarak goes, which does seem likely, his cronies might remain in power.