Opportunity

I took this in the souk in Marrakech, possibly the most mercantilist place on earth. I was thinking about the word 'opportunity' and came to this picture by a convoluted route. When I was starting out, communism was the Great Enemy, and we the West defined ourselves as capitalists, and capitalism as 'good'. The problem with communists, we were told, was that they didn't have the freedom to consume Pepsi. It took me a long time to work out that life was more complicated than that, and by the time I'd worked it out, the Great Enemy had vanished and we were at the End of History.

Obviously, this was utter nonsense, and we knew that even back then. Already we saw where things were heading: the Iranian Revolution, Gulf War 1, the Balkans... Radical Islam has its roots in the West's Cold War crimes. It took the idiotic War on Terror to promote Islam as the new Great Enemy of the West, though. Trouble is, how to define the enemy in black and white terms as we did the previous Great Enemy? Our leaders use the same clichés to mobilise our fear and hatred of the unknown. But "freedom" and "liberty" don't really work so well as a stick with which to hit Islam. We've been told for so long that "freedom" means "opportunity" and that "opportunity" means "consumerism" - the freedom to buy an SUV and eat Big Macs and dress in polyester and water your desert lawn with a sprinkler - that we've forgotten the real meaning of the words. Islam isn't anti-consumer; Islam has its roots in trade. The 6th century settlements of Mecca and Medina existed only because they controlled vital east-west trade routes; the Prophet Mohammed came from a wealthy family of merchants; Islam spread along trade routes and the Caliphate allowed global trade to flourish, helping Europe emerge from the Dark Ages.

Words are tricky. They can be twisted. We should be wary of clichés. Perhaps, by our standards, opportunities for women and minorities in some Islamic countries are restricted. Perhaps there are regimes in the Middle East which are undemocratic. But who are we to preach? Democracy should mean that the people hold power, but in most western participative democracies, all it means is that we get a chance every four or five years to chuck out one bunch of corporatist plutocrats who've behaved spectacularly badly and appoint a virtually identical bunch, who will stay in power until they in turn behave so spectacularly badly that a decade later we are forced collectively to turn back to the first lot. In some so-called democracies, even the limited choice available is abused. And who are we to preach freedom when our own freedoms are blithely ignored? So when our leaders tell us that our values are under attack, and that we need to invade some poor country on a transparently false pretext in order to defend those values, we should kick up a fuss.

This doughnut seller in Marrakech seemed happy enough to pander to my consumerist desire for deep-fried goodies. He was pretty friendly. I don't think he was a threat to my values.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm, exposure not recorded. Marrakech, Morocco, December 1989. Placemark (approximate).