I am generally critical of nostalgia for purported ‘golden ages,’ whether that of the ‘liberal era’ or that of the Nasser years, depending on one’s political predilection. But I think my generation deserves a ‘De Lesseps’ moment, one akin to that which transpired on July 26, 1956 when Nasser, as the history books explain, signaled the take-over of the Suez Canal Company by using the Frenchman’s name as code word:

No doubt there are those who would identify Omar Suleiman’s announcement of Mubarak’s resignation as a ‘De Lesseps’ moment. While an occasion for jubilation, the announcement came from a man almost universally despised, and signified an end to an era rather than a beginning.

I had hoped the election of Egypt’s first democratically-elected President since independence would furnish a ‘De Lesseps’ moment for my generation. But SCAF has dramatically scuttled this hope with a transparent grab for power that is ‘constitutional’ only in the loosest sense of the term. I am told that the junta wants to make a spectacle of the swearing-in ceremony for the incoming President. In the absence of the parliament that SCAF has dissolved by force, the presumptive victor Muhammad Mursi will take his oath in the presence of unelected and electorally unaccountable judges and, of course, Egypt’s self-appointed rulers on the junta. A more transparent spectacle of Egypt’s democratic charade I can hardly imagine.

But then came the news, today, that Parliament is contemplating an open-air session in Tahrir, to expose that democratic charade and insist upon popular sovereignty. I won’t get my hopes up, but you never know: Perhaps, just perhaps, the ‘De Lesseps’ moment isn’t too distant, after all.