Three minutes into Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali’s speech on the two weeks of protests in his country, his phone rang. Already moving through his address in maladroit prose, the president became visibly more stiff and uncomfortable as a cell phone rang through several sections of his speech. He leaned inward, clasped his hands together, extended his arms out — palms down on a wide desk — and then leaned back again. It seemed as if Ben Ali believed that by moving his mouth toward the cluster of microphones sitting in front of him he could drown out the generic ring-tone chirping in the background. The mysterious phone phone call has become the butt of many jokes among Tunisians (and other Arabs). Continue reading
