Independent coverage of municipal elections in South Lebanon from Hibr.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Municipal elections in South Lebanon
Independent coverage of municipal elections in South Lebanon from Hibr.
It's Beirut, no contest
If I were to write out a list of pros and cons about leaving Beirut, you would assume that I'd be ecstatic about returning to Washington.
PROS
CONS
I used to live for the moment, but I finally found a moment I like and it has to end. C'est la vie.
PROS
- Clean air
- No smoking
- People speaking my language
- Live baseball
- Functional internet
- Clean city
- Sam Adams and varieties in beer
- Indian restaurants and any other kind of food you can think of
- No idiotic honking
- Cars driving between the lines, stopping at traffic lights, and using turn signals
- No Lebanese pop music blaring from cars and stores
- Time zone
- No World Cup insanity
- Not risking death just crossing the street
- Service in restaurants
- Substance over style
- Bike lanes
- More time and structure for work
- Not running all over Beirut trying to get to meetings without a car
- Public transportation
- Will get more than three or four hours of sleep a night
CONS
- No Evergreen Pub, no Amigo, no Johnny or General or Ahmed or Issam or Nabil or Ash (when he gets back to Beirut), no more listening to Amigo's excuses for losing at darts
- No Hamra - no filthy, beat up, tired old Hamra
- Washington is expensive
- Closing times in bars
- No office view of the Mediterranean, or window in general
- No beach, no sea
- No By the Way Pub or Rock Inn in the wee hours of the morning, no listening to Amigo's life stories or crazy ideas about the world over cardboard steaks or thyme-drenched pastries and laughing about how it's daylight.
- Back to using email instead of having face to face conversations for work
- Same old tired hangouts in DC
I used to live for the moment, but I finally found a moment I like and it has to end. C'est la vie.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Circumstance
A yellow crane stands tall amidst the backdrop of a deep blue sky and a tangle of wires and antennae as I sit on my balcony contemplating the string of events throughout my entire life that have led to this moment and how very little I actually had to do with it.
I wasn’t even born when the war started in Beirut, and I grew up with news images depicting an apocalypse in the city in which I now sit. If there had never been a war, there’d be no need to be here. If Hitler hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be here, for the state of Israel wouldn’t exist and there’d be less conflict in the Middle East. If the Ottomans had won World War I, I wouldn’t be here. If the Crusaders had crushed the Muslims, I wouldn’t be here. If the South had won the American Civil War, I probably wouldn’t be here, either, because the United States would not be the economic powerhouse it is today.
Why is each chapter of history books marked by the beginning or end of another war?
Last night I learned that a friend’s son had been killed in an automobile accident. He was 21 years old. I thought about the circumstances of our friendship and how odd it is that we even met at all – me, a well-educated American and she, a Ukranian whose profession is considered unsavory in most circles of the world. Next week she was supposed to go back to Ukraine for six months. Instead, she is leaving today to go bury her son. What were the circumstances that led him to be in that car at that exact moment? Think of the billions of possibilities that could have put him two seconds behind. He’d have woken up today and his mother would cook him dinner next week.
My friend Ash told me “Time does not exist” but I keep trying to convince him he’s wrong. I tell him “time” is just a word humans created to help them talk about an abstract concept. Human language is so limiting because most human beings are either unwilling or unable to comprehend things that exist outside their minds. They invent things like God to explain away the things they can’t explain and believe words are static and narrow. But Time and God and Fate are all the same unknowable concept. They should be understood as something mathematical, for everything in the world is mathematics. E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Our bodies are mathematics, too, just combinations of molecules, chemicals derived from various combinations of electrons and protons and smaller miracles. Mathematics is what distinguishes a human being from an ashtray. (Not a reference to Ash but to a conversation I had with Amigo last night when he tried to tell me there is no difference between a human being and an ashtray.) I’m human because the energy worked to create carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in the right numbers. The ashtray is an ashtray because the energy combined differently to create different elements.
Amigo was right, in a way. Human beings put too much emphasis on words. We call the yellow thing in front of me a crane because it’s a heck of a lot easier to say “crane” than to describe the physics and chemistry that allow it to exist and do the work it does. Mathematics. Look at how we transmit data these days – in series of zeroes and ones. I am listening to a man from Cincinnati sing about our wobbly world at the moment, but his voice isn’t real – it’s just a series of zeroes and ones translated by the miracle of Microsoft.
Oh, the things you talk in a pub about when politics and religion are banned topics of conversation. Anyway, it’s time to go play darts with Ash and Amigo and show them how poor my math skills really are.
I wasn’t even born when the war started in Beirut, and I grew up with news images depicting an apocalypse in the city in which I now sit. If there had never been a war, there’d be no need to be here. If Hitler hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be here, for the state of Israel wouldn’t exist and there’d be less conflict in the Middle East. If the Ottomans had won World War I, I wouldn’t be here. If the Crusaders had crushed the Muslims, I wouldn’t be here. If the South had won the American Civil War, I probably wouldn’t be here, either, because the United States would not be the economic powerhouse it is today.
Why is each chapter of history books marked by the beginning or end of another war?
Last night I learned that a friend’s son had been killed in an automobile accident. He was 21 years old. I thought about the circumstances of our friendship and how odd it is that we even met at all – me, a well-educated American and she, a Ukranian whose profession is considered unsavory in most circles of the world. Next week she was supposed to go back to Ukraine for six months. Instead, she is leaving today to go bury her son. What were the circumstances that led him to be in that car at that exact moment? Think of the billions of possibilities that could have put him two seconds behind. He’d have woken up today and his mother would cook him dinner next week.
My friend Ash told me “Time does not exist” but I keep trying to convince him he’s wrong. I tell him “time” is just a word humans created to help them talk about an abstract concept. Human language is so limiting because most human beings are either unwilling or unable to comprehend things that exist outside their minds. They invent things like God to explain away the things they can’t explain and believe words are static and narrow. But Time and God and Fate are all the same unknowable concept. They should be understood as something mathematical, for everything in the world is mathematics. E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Our bodies are mathematics, too, just combinations of molecules, chemicals derived from various combinations of electrons and protons and smaller miracles. Mathematics is what distinguishes a human being from an ashtray. (Not a reference to Ash but to a conversation I had with Amigo last night when he tried to tell me there is no difference between a human being and an ashtray.) I’m human because the energy worked to create carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in the right numbers. The ashtray is an ashtray because the energy combined differently to create different elements.
Amigo was right, in a way. Human beings put too much emphasis on words. We call the yellow thing in front of me a crane because it’s a heck of a lot easier to say “crane” than to describe the physics and chemistry that allow it to exist and do the work it does. Mathematics. Look at how we transmit data these days – in series of zeroes and ones. I am listening to a man from Cincinnati sing about our wobbly world at the moment, but his voice isn’t real – it’s just a series of zeroes and ones translated by the miracle of Microsoft.
Oh, the things you talk in a pub about when politics and religion are banned topics of conversation. Anyway, it’s time to go play darts with Ash and Amigo and show them how poor my math skills really are.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Take a break!
You are lying in bed still awake after two hours. Sleep will not come to you. Your boss has asked you to do something impossible at work; you know you will fail. You've been in a fight with your significant other and wonder if the two of you will break up. You just had a car accident after a truck full of goats drifted over the line and sideswiped you. Beiruti car horns light up the night, drivers unaware that honking does not get them there faster. Tick tock tick tock tick...Get away from it all. Strap on your hiking boots and take advantage of Lebanon's natural beauty. Give your lungs a vacation from the pollution. It's time to be an ecotourist!
Where to start? Why not hike some of the 491km Lebanon Mountain Trail? Learn about Lebanon's literary history on the Baskinta Literary Trail. How about heading to the village of Ehmej to visit some of the feeder trails to the LMT and the new Forest Conservation Center? Need a trail guide? Check out organized hikes with Baldati or Esprit Nomade.
Ecotourism is a rapidly growing industry in Lebanon and has the potential to employ thousands of rural workers and create many new businesses in areas outside the urban glare of the nation's capital. And guess what? Trekking through the mountains is good for your health! So get out there! Live life! Enjoy Lebanon!
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Beirut Story
A young man stood beneath the ruins of what had once been a glorious Venetian-style building smoking a cigarette and wearing his idleness proudly upon his sleeve. He watched as the people walked by, watched a fat mother pulling along a crying girl in a bright yellow dress, watched the hijab-clad women walk behind those for whom modesty was no concept, watched the taxis go by leaving trails of exhaust behind them. The relic above him had been spared most war damage but was desecrated by years of neglect and disuse. Trees grew from the crumbling concrete balconies while the street level of the building held a stylish eye glasses shop, a cell phone store, and a tiny market selling useless junk, its windows covered in posters of a politician running for municipal elections who looked suspiciously like Alex Trabek. Flags of various countries competing for the World Cup hung from a rope outside. The American flag was noticeably absent, as it was in all the shops with World Cup displays across Beirut.
“Kifak?’ the young man suddenly shouted in greeting another young man across the street.
“Mneha. Shu fi ma fi?” The newcomer, a light-skinned man in his early twenties, narrowly avoided being hit by a motorscooter driving the wrong direction down a one way street as he walked towards his friend. He ran his hand through his curly hair and laughed.
“Where are you going?” the first man asked in English.
“Library. I have a paper due tomorrow.”
“You always have papers!” he replied laughing.
“Because I study a real subject!” His friend playfully slapped him on the shoulder.
“We go to meet for a drink tonight. Will you come?”
“If I finish. Wayn brooh?”
“Evergreen.”
“Tayib. I will call. Ciao.”
The first young man threw his cigarette butt on the ground as his friend walked away and reached into the pocket of his jeans to start a new one, pulling out a piece of paper with the pack. He mechanically read what was on the paper before throwing it to the ground.
Call me – 71693199 – Molly
Molly was an Irish chick he had met at the pub to whom he had paid a little too much attention. He didn’t like Western women. He told himself this was because they were too sexually liberal, but occasionally he recognized his dislike of the strength and confidence they exuded as a result of Western gender equality. Molly also worked for an international NGO, and he despised these neo-imperialist organizations who felt they needed to “fix” his country.
The old man who ran the small junk shop sat outside it in a white plastic chair. An empty one sat beside him until another man arrived to fill it. He was younger than the shop owner and what remained of his hair was still black. The two of them jabbered on in Arabic for a time before an old man shuffled up and greeted them with boisterous hand gestures that contradicted the limited mobility of his legs. The younger man stood up.
“Sit down,” he said in Arabic as he extended a hand to the place where his corpulent body had been.
“Yislamu, yislamu,” the old man replied in gratitude.
“Ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan. Kifak, ya Fadi?”
“Mneha, alhamdullah.” The conversation continued in Arabic among the three of them with the younger man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to pedestrians who had to squeeze by him to pass. The old man pointed to the young man standing idly and smoking another cigarette.
“Look at these young people standing around all day doing nothing. They are spoiled. Their parents provide them with fancy cars and money to go to nightclubs and shopping and they do nothing with their lives. Nothing!”
“But there aren’t enough jobs for all of them,” the younger man replied.
“Of course there are but they won’t do them. Look at the construction works in this city – the Palestinians and the immigrants do the work because the Lebanese young people won’t do it!” He sighed. “This construction. They are destroying Beirut in a different way than the war. They build these skyscrapers that have no soul. I used to be able to see the sea and the mountains from my window. Now I see nothing. Nothing! Only ugly high rises. A tragedy in concrete!”
The shopkeeper lit a cigarette and kicked a candy wrapper on the ground. “I don’t recognize my city anymore. Downtown has no character. I remember running around in the days of my youth. Oh, the nightlife! Now it is Western chain restaurants and exclusive nightclubs for the superficial young people who only care about materialism.”
The old man broke into a song by Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse, Fairouz.
His mournful wail was but a pale reflection of Fairouz, but the pain and soul was just as deep. His lamentation was interrupted by the clatter of screeching tires, crunching metal, and angry shouting. Two cars had collided at the intersection. Culpability laid with one of the drivers who had refused to obey the recently installed traffic lights of Beirut. Despite driving through the red light, he still blamed the other driver.
A crowd gathered around the accident, more because it was something that happened rather than out of curiosity. The three men in front of the shop halted their conversation to stare at the scene before them, and the young man gravitated towards the corner because it was something to do. He flicked away his cigarette butt and lit another with the indifference of a child who gets clothes for Christmas.
The owners of the wrecks did not stop yelling even as they exchanged insurance information. They drove away without involving the police and the street returned to its bustling idleness.
“I am out of cigarettes,” the young man told the shopkeeper, who disappeared inside the shop before retuning with a pack. The exchange of money must have triggered something in the young man’s brain, because he took out his mobile and made a call.
“Allo, Fouad? Kifak? Mneha, mneha. Shoof, bedi birooh Costa. Yalla. Ok, see you in a few minutes.” He would meet his friend at the Italian coffee chain. The old man made a sucking sound so typically Lebanese and shook his head.
“See?” he began in Arabic. “The young people are the reason we lose our city. If they do not go to the Western coffee shop and pay four dollars for a fancy Western coffee drink, these chains would not be destroying the soul of Beirut.”
“What do you want?” the younger man asked. “We have war for fifteen years. Where does money come from to rebuild the city?”
“Hariri rebuilt downtown with no regard for the people of Beirut,” the old man replied curtly. “He wanted more money. Money, money, it’s always about money! Money and power! That monstrosity downtown is not a mosque; it’s a temple for Hariri!”
“Hariri, God rest his soul, did much to rescue us from our own destruction,” the shopkeeper replied rather timidly.
“Why did he not rebuild the buildings as they were? Why did he have to take the sea away from the people?”
“He’s not the only one building high rises,” the shopkeeper replied with an arm gesture that mimicked the skyscrapers.
“These rich people, they left like cowards during the war and made money in America and returned to take advantage of Lebanon being weak from the war!” The old man was shouting, but no one seemed to notice. “They cheat their fellow Lebanese. It is shameful. Shameful!”
“They are trying to make reforms,” the shopkeeper said. “Insha’allah, the government will make regulations and…”
“The government! What good is the government? They are all the same people who tried to destroy the country, or they are their sons! What good is the government, I ask you. They are the ones responsible for destroying Beirut during the war and now!”
Neither the shopkeeper nor the younger man could disagree.
“These men are not Lebanese – they’re slaves to the Syrians and the Iranians and the Saudis and the French and the Americans – especially the Americans!”
“Some of them aren’t.”
“Hizbollah are slaves to the Americans, too, because they are obsessed with the Americans! They would rather destroy Lebanon than stop obsessing about the Americans!” The old man threw his hands into the air. “Hizbollah is the whore of Lebanon!”
The younger man could not help but smile at that statement.
“When is Lebanon going to be Lebanon?” the old man continued. “When will we stop being puppets?”
Across the street, a young American sat at an outside table at the locally-owned coffee shop, sipping a cappuccino and trying to follow the conversation across the street with his limited understanding of Lebanese Arabic. His ears had swallowed the word “Amrikiin” and he could not help but listen. Despite being critical of American foreign policy and the materialistic way of life of Americans, he found himself increasingly defending America, which surprised him because he had left his country in disgust.
A young girl who should have been in school approached the American trying to sell him lottery tickets. She would be prevented from growing up to be a beautiful woman by the curse of poverty, a circumstance resulting from the coincidence of her birth as a Palestinian in Lebanon.
“Please sir,” she begged in Arabic. “Please sir, please,” she said as she pushed the lottery tickets under his nose.
“La.”
“Please sir.”
“La. La, la!” Her insistence made him angry. He shooed her away like a stray dog. He pretended to stir his coffee so he didn’t have to see the shame in her desperate eyes. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven but had lost the innocence of childhood long ago. As she drifted away the American tried to push guilt from his mind.
“I can’t buy from every beggar who approaches me,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t save them.” His cappuccino was topped with liquid chocolate in a pattern resembling a spiderweb. “We are all trapped in our own way,” he continued. A burly man stared at the muttering American as he walked past the coffee shop, but the American was unfazed by the attention. “Why are there no American flags in the World Cup displays? What kind of propaganda do these people hear?” The burly man disappeared around the corner, but not before the old man spotted him.
“Khalas!” he screamed. “This is one of Hariri’s slaves!” He nodded towards the burly man. “I knew his father. He was a very bad man and so is his son and his friends. They would eat from the floor if Hariri told them to. They cannot think for themselves! All of them are rotten!”
As the old man said nothing further, the younger man said, “Well, I should be going,” and left the shopkeeper to the ramblings of the old man. The American had lost interest in the conversation and was only waiting for his check when a young Lebanese man sat down at his table.
“Alex!” the Lebanese man said.
“Hey, Jad, what’s up?”
“We are going for drinks tonight. Will you come?”
“I don’t know, Jad. Anna and I were planning on dinner…”
“Bring her! And other Alex, too! It will be our own United Nations pub!”
“I just don’t know if I should drink tonight. It’s too much…”
“Every night is good for drinking!”
Alex’s eyes wandered to the flower boxes full of red geraniums that lined the rails of the terrace as if they reminded him of something painful in his past.
“We’ll see,” was his reply. “These damn Lebanese waiters! I just want my check. Where is he?”
The old man across the street was right about the young people. Jad supposedly had a job but there he was a 3pm cloaked in overpriced jeans and an overpriced t-shirt that said “LOOK AT ME!” in large silver letters. It should have been the uniform for these elite youth. Jad’s position was supposedly that of “graphic designer,” the typical program of study for these elites who couldn’t be bothered to work hard or dirty their hands. Rather than building the country, they played around on computers all day holding the most inane conversations on social media sites in bad English and broken Arabic using the bizarre linguistic system that mixed the Latin alphabet and Western numbers rather than using Arabic script.
“You are in a bad mood; this is the reason to have a drink!”
A bus rolled by with two boys in pinstriped uniforms dancing in the aisle with no concern for the movement of their dance floor. They would grow up to be like Jad.
“Fine, I’ll go, but not for very long.”
“You always say that.” Jad stood to go and made the slightest of hand motions, prompting the waiter to come to the table. Alex paid his check and included a tip despite the poor service. As he wandered down the street and out of sight, he muttered curses about the Lebanese people and the chaos and filth in which they lived.
“Kifak?’ the young man suddenly shouted in greeting another young man across the street.
“Mneha. Shu fi ma fi?” The newcomer, a light-skinned man in his early twenties, narrowly avoided being hit by a motorscooter driving the wrong direction down a one way street as he walked towards his friend. He ran his hand through his curly hair and laughed.
“Where are you going?” the first man asked in English.
“Library. I have a paper due tomorrow.”
“You always have papers!” he replied laughing.
“Because I study a real subject!” His friend playfully slapped him on the shoulder.
“We go to meet for a drink tonight. Will you come?”
“If I finish. Wayn brooh?”
“Evergreen.”
“Tayib. I will call. Ciao.”
The first young man threw his cigarette butt on the ground as his friend walked away and reached into the pocket of his jeans to start a new one, pulling out a piece of paper with the pack. He mechanically read what was on the paper before throwing it to the ground.
Call me – 71693199 – Molly
Molly was an Irish chick he had met at the pub to whom he had paid a little too much attention. He didn’t like Western women. He told himself this was because they were too sexually liberal, but occasionally he recognized his dislike of the strength and confidence they exuded as a result of Western gender equality. Molly also worked for an international NGO, and he despised these neo-imperialist organizations who felt they needed to “fix” his country.
The old man who ran the small junk shop sat outside it in a white plastic chair. An empty one sat beside him until another man arrived to fill it. He was younger than the shop owner and what remained of his hair was still black. The two of them jabbered on in Arabic for a time before an old man shuffled up and greeted them with boisterous hand gestures that contradicted the limited mobility of his legs. The younger man stood up.
“Sit down,” he said in Arabic as he extended a hand to the place where his corpulent body had been.
“Yislamu, yislamu,” the old man replied in gratitude.
“Ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan. Kifak, ya Fadi?”
“Mneha, alhamdullah.” The conversation continued in Arabic among the three of them with the younger man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to pedestrians who had to squeeze by him to pass. The old man pointed to the young man standing idly and smoking another cigarette.
“Look at these young people standing around all day doing nothing. They are spoiled. Their parents provide them with fancy cars and money to go to nightclubs and shopping and they do nothing with their lives. Nothing!”
“But there aren’t enough jobs for all of them,” the younger man replied.
“Of course there are but they won’t do them. Look at the construction works in this city – the Palestinians and the immigrants do the work because the Lebanese young people won’t do it!” He sighed. “This construction. They are destroying Beirut in a different way than the war. They build these skyscrapers that have no soul. I used to be able to see the sea and the mountains from my window. Now I see nothing. Nothing! Only ugly high rises. A tragedy in concrete!”
The shopkeeper lit a cigarette and kicked a candy wrapper on the ground. “I don’t recognize my city anymore. Downtown has no character. I remember running around in the days of my youth. Oh, the nightlife! Now it is Western chain restaurants and exclusive nightclubs for the superficial young people who only care about materialism.”
The old man broke into a song by Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse, Fairouz.
“To Beirut…
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?”
His mournful wail was but a pale reflection of Fairouz, but the pain and soul was just as deep. His lamentation was interrupted by the clatter of screeching tires, crunching metal, and angry shouting. Two cars had collided at the intersection. Culpability laid with one of the drivers who had refused to obey the recently installed traffic lights of Beirut. Despite driving through the red light, he still blamed the other driver.
A crowd gathered around the accident, more because it was something that happened rather than out of curiosity. The three men in front of the shop halted their conversation to stare at the scene before them, and the young man gravitated towards the corner because it was something to do. He flicked away his cigarette butt and lit another with the indifference of a child who gets clothes for Christmas.
The owners of the wrecks did not stop yelling even as they exchanged insurance information. They drove away without involving the police and the street returned to its bustling idleness.
“I am out of cigarettes,” the young man told the shopkeeper, who disappeared inside the shop before retuning with a pack. The exchange of money must have triggered something in the young man’s brain, because he took out his mobile and made a call.
“Allo, Fouad? Kifak? Mneha, mneha. Shoof, bedi birooh Costa. Yalla. Ok, see you in a few minutes.” He would meet his friend at the Italian coffee chain. The old man made a sucking sound so typically Lebanese and shook his head.
“See?” he began in Arabic. “The young people are the reason we lose our city. If they do not go to the Western coffee shop and pay four dollars for a fancy Western coffee drink, these chains would not be destroying the soul of Beirut.”
“What do you want?” the younger man asked. “We have war for fifteen years. Where does money come from to rebuild the city?”
“Hariri rebuilt downtown with no regard for the people of Beirut,” the old man replied curtly. “He wanted more money. Money, money, it’s always about money! Money and power! That monstrosity downtown is not a mosque; it’s a temple for Hariri!”
“Hariri, God rest his soul, did much to rescue us from our own destruction,” the shopkeeper replied rather timidly.
“Why did he not rebuild the buildings as they were? Why did he have to take the sea away from the people?”
“He’s not the only one building high rises,” the shopkeeper replied with an arm gesture that mimicked the skyscrapers.
“These rich people, they left like cowards during the war and made money in America and returned to take advantage of Lebanon being weak from the war!” The old man was shouting, but no one seemed to notice. “They cheat their fellow Lebanese. It is shameful. Shameful!”
“They are trying to make reforms,” the shopkeeper said. “Insha’allah, the government will make regulations and…”
“The government! What good is the government? They are all the same people who tried to destroy the country, or they are their sons! What good is the government, I ask you. They are the ones responsible for destroying Beirut during the war and now!”
Neither the shopkeeper nor the younger man could disagree.
“These men are not Lebanese – they’re slaves to the Syrians and the Iranians and the Saudis and the French and the Americans – especially the Americans!”
“Some of them aren’t.”
“Hizbollah are slaves to the Americans, too, because they are obsessed with the Americans! They would rather destroy Lebanon than stop obsessing about the Americans!” The old man threw his hands into the air. “Hizbollah is the whore of Lebanon!”
The younger man could not help but smile at that statement.
“When is Lebanon going to be Lebanon?” the old man continued. “When will we stop being puppets?”
Across the street, a young American sat at an outside table at the locally-owned coffee shop, sipping a cappuccino and trying to follow the conversation across the street with his limited understanding of Lebanese Arabic. His ears had swallowed the word “Amrikiin” and he could not help but listen. Despite being critical of American foreign policy and the materialistic way of life of Americans, he found himself increasingly defending America, which surprised him because he had left his country in disgust.
A young girl who should have been in school approached the American trying to sell him lottery tickets. She would be prevented from growing up to be a beautiful woman by the curse of poverty, a circumstance resulting from the coincidence of her birth as a Palestinian in Lebanon.
“Please sir,” she begged in Arabic. “Please sir, please,” she said as she pushed the lottery tickets under his nose.
“La.”
“Please sir.”
“La. La, la!” Her insistence made him angry. He shooed her away like a stray dog. He pretended to stir his coffee so he didn’t have to see the shame in her desperate eyes. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven but had lost the innocence of childhood long ago. As she drifted away the American tried to push guilt from his mind.
“I can’t buy from every beggar who approaches me,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t save them.” His cappuccino was topped with liquid chocolate in a pattern resembling a spiderweb. “We are all trapped in our own way,” he continued. A burly man stared at the muttering American as he walked past the coffee shop, but the American was unfazed by the attention. “Why are there no American flags in the World Cup displays? What kind of propaganda do these people hear?” The burly man disappeared around the corner, but not before the old man spotted him.
“Khalas!” he screamed. “This is one of Hariri’s slaves!” He nodded towards the burly man. “I knew his father. He was a very bad man and so is his son and his friends. They would eat from the floor if Hariri told them to. They cannot think for themselves! All of them are rotten!”
As the old man said nothing further, the younger man said, “Well, I should be going,” and left the shopkeeper to the ramblings of the old man. The American had lost interest in the conversation and was only waiting for his check when a young Lebanese man sat down at his table.
“Alex!” the Lebanese man said.
“Hey, Jad, what’s up?”
“We are going for drinks tonight. Will you come?”
“I don’t know, Jad. Anna and I were planning on dinner…”
“Bring her! And other Alex, too! It will be our own United Nations pub!”
“I just don’t know if I should drink tonight. It’s too much…”
“Every night is good for drinking!”
Alex’s eyes wandered to the flower boxes full of red geraniums that lined the rails of the terrace as if they reminded him of something painful in his past.
“We’ll see,” was his reply. “These damn Lebanese waiters! I just want my check. Where is he?”
The old man across the street was right about the young people. Jad supposedly had a job but there he was a 3pm cloaked in overpriced jeans and an overpriced t-shirt that said “LOOK AT ME!” in large silver letters. It should have been the uniform for these elite youth. Jad’s position was supposedly that of “graphic designer,” the typical program of study for these elites who couldn’t be bothered to work hard or dirty their hands. Rather than building the country, they played around on computers all day holding the most inane conversations on social media sites in bad English and broken Arabic using the bizarre linguistic system that mixed the Latin alphabet and Western numbers rather than using Arabic script.
“You are in a bad mood; this is the reason to have a drink!”
A bus rolled by with two boys in pinstriped uniforms dancing in the aisle with no concern for the movement of their dance floor. They would grow up to be like Jad.
“Fine, I’ll go, but not for very long.”
“You always say that.” Jad stood to go and made the slightest of hand motions, prompting the waiter to come to the table. Alex paid his check and included a tip despite the poor service. As he wandered down the street and out of sight, he muttered curses about the Lebanese people and the chaos and filth in which they lived.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
A walking disaster
I have been in Lebanon for a mere three and a half months, and it has really sought to destroy me. In that short amount of time, I have:
- Had food poisoning four times, once for a whole week that made Montezuma seem merciful.
- Had several respiratory infections, two of which were pretty bad, one of which I tried to ignore and ended up passing it on to Amigo, who didn’t open his bar one Saturday night because he was so sick.
- Had shoulder tendonitis from playing darts – that was at the beginning. Apparently after playing so much for so many weeks, I have strengthened whatever tendons were inflamed and don’t have that problem any more.
- Hurt my back to the point where I couldn’t sit for more than an hour at a time without unbearable pain. I don’t know how I hurt it, but I think it was when I tripped over some random metal thing sticking out of a sidewalk.
- Had numbness in my left hand for a still unidentified reason.
- And the latest – Yesterday as I was walking home from the office, I turned to look at the progress made at the construction site next to the Roman columns downtown when suddenly I felt like my legs had been blown off at the knees. Turns out it was only a very hard park bench. Today not one but both knees are swollen enough that it hurts to walk.
Monday, May 10, 2010
World Cup Fever in Lebanon - it's an illness
I'm not much of a soccer fan. I mean, I played in high school and did some coaching, so it's not like I don't like the sport. It's just that I don't follow it. That being said, I do get excited for the World Cup. Last World Cup I watched the US lose to Ghana in the middle of Times Square. I remember going downstairs to the hotel bar at lunch to watch games with work colleagues and going to the Lucky Bar in DC to watch a couple of games.
But I am disturbed by what I find here in Beirut. World Cup flags are everywhere - every store sells World Cup merchandise, and it seems one out of five cars has a flag flying from its window. It's quite strange that people would be flying the flags of other countries like this. I mean, it's one thing to say you favor France or Italy because they have good players. It's another thing to detail your entire car with Brazil-related pictures, unless, of course, you are Brazilian. But when you're from a small dysfunctional country like Lebanon with no decent professional soccer league and you have no hope in hell of ever getting into the World Cup, what do you do? Cling to the role of the conquered you've played for nearly your entire existence by embracing the neo-imperialist flags of capitalism? While Lebanese people spout off their diatribes about the Evil West(TM), they've been suckered into one of the largest capitalist events in the world.
What's even more disturbing to me is the fact that of all the flags for sale, you can't find a single Stars and Stripes. I tell you what, that pisses me off more than anything I've experienced in this country. (Also notice the Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden masks in the window.) It's not America's fault they can't get along with each other. I'm tired of America being blamed for all the world's problems. We have our problems yes and we are aggressive, and when I'm in the US, I am very vocal and critical about these problems, so it's strange for me to have to defend my country in a way that mimics the America First crowd. But come on. America isn't the one keeping the Shia on the lower rungs of the food chain. America isn't the one preventing Palestinians from being able to work and live outside of concentration camps in Lebanon. We aren't the ones who created the culture of corruption and nepotism that keeps Lebanon from developing into a fully functional democracy. And we don't tolerate swastikas.
It took all I had not to egg this car sitting under my balcony. I had an egg in my hand. I thought of leaving a note on the window saying something like "$#@! you, you nazi scum." Well, at least the thought of doing it made me feel a little better about having to see that thing every day.Racists are cowards, the lowest of the low, mangy stray dogs who rummage in the garbage bins of human existence, and racism is sadly a part of Lebanese national culture. Mein Kampf is not only readily available in the bookstores of Beirut, but it is proudly displayed in the windows of the shops. Hitler, who is responsible for the death of 50-70 million people because he waged World War II, is a hero to many Lebanese. Please, please don't glorify this demon.
Does Israel suck? Yes, yes it does. The State of Israel is one of the world's most evil regimes, right up there with the Iranian nutjobs and the North Korean psychopath. But pointing fingers and wallowing in self-pity and hatred has never changed the world except for the worse. Until the Lebanese people stop tolerating swastikas and other forms of hatred, conflict will be a regular visitor to the country. Man up, Lebanon! Show some courage! Seek peace!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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