The Egypt I saw when visiting there very much paralleled McCarthy's description of the country. Most Egyptians seemed to be getting along with their lives. Yes, the country is poor but has much more middle class than anyone in the West imagines.
Cairo's drivers are undisciplined and its traffic jams are legendary. Few of us know that the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, west of Alexandria, is wall-to-wall vacation condos for 40 miles or more. Visit here in winter and the area is a modern ghost town, thousands of newish buildings with nobody around. In summer the cool breezes off the Med draw hundreds of thousands of people escaping Egypt's blistering heat.
My bottom line is that Egypt is complicated, there are many different strands of public opinion at work. McCarthy's notion that it may go the way of modern Turkey makes sense.
