Persiflage & Paroxysm

Deny the worst part of yourself any avenue for expression. Suppress your innate Lebanese character flaws (which we all know well) and let the outside world see your most civilized visage. Lend your manner a gentle aspect. Suppress your arrogance and break the chains of fear that bind you to morbid tradition in the service of feudal overlords. Then and only then fellows will you have attained the rank of evolved mammals. I know that most Lebanese, and especially male Lebanese, were pampered and mothered well into early adulthood. Our expectations are therefore a little skewed, to say the least. We are a nation of big little boys essentially. Most male Lebanese walk peacock like, powdered and perfumed, feathers on full display behind classy cool shades and literally expect the world to fall to its knees and worship at the feet of perfection. Its little wonder then we have so many angry, disillusioned, middle-aged, pot-bellied balding men in this country. They were young once too. Think a...

The skirmish in the Bouj Abu Haidar district of Beirut has been dressed up by many political commentators to be much more than it probably was. Some have actually said it was a practice run for another ‘May 7th’. For the uninitiated in Levantine political parlance, that day saw Hezbollah’s armed take over of Beirut in 2008. We like using dates this way: March 14, March 8, May 7 it makes a birthday really special. Lebanese husbands no longer have an excuse to forget their wedding anniversary, although they may need to register their special day as a political party for copyright reasons! I wonder what we will use when we run out of days of the year. But I digress. Back to the Bourj: some television stations said the whole thing started as a result of an argument over who has right of way. Two cars driven by two persons of different political allegiances had words which later evolved into a punch up. One guy calls his guys, the other guy calls his guys and you had rocket propelled grenad...

The public power utility, EDL, has asked the Lebanese to be patient and not to resort to burning tyres and blocking roads in protest over the increased power rationing. We are also told that the austerity measures are partly due to exceptional pressure on the power grids of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, which we used to rely on to supplement our own grid’s shortfall at least in off peak hours. Well, thanks to the exceptional heat wave (God’s hairdryer) striking our region and indeed many other parts of the world, everyone has their air-conditioning switched on and gobbling up the megawatts like crazy. The midnight to 6am power cuts are the worst, even private generator owners cannot keep up with demand as their generators overheat. Many switch them off after 12 midnight, which leaves people to sweat it out until the morning. The heat adds to the normally high stress levels the Lebanese have to endure on a daily basis. But apart from the discomfort and irritability the unrelenting high tempe...

To tear ourselves away from the safe, trusted and warm embrace of our respective confessional units and the political groupings representing those confessional units, is the biggest challenge facing the Lebanese today. Without such a step we will never have a country only confessional-feudal cantons. Each of us has to move on and out eventually, whether from our parents’ house, from high school on to university, or from the old country to the new. Letting go is always hard, but we have to be weaned away from the feudal bosom on which so many of us depend. When you are jumping off a crumbling pile of rocks (confessional feudalism) and you can’t see where you are jumping to (a united and strong state) instinct naturally kicks in and keeps your feet rooted in place. Indecision and fear have paralyzed us. But jump we have to because the ground is fast disappearing beneath our feet. We all need to jump at once and while we can’t see the ‘rock of state’ we are aiming for we have to trust tha...