Persiflage & Paroxysm

I recently stumbled online on an opinion I wrote for The Daily Star in December 2007 at a time, much like today, when political deadlock paralyzed the country, its parliament and cabinet. I'm just glad The Daily Star has all my old articles archived and available free for all to browse. As the English language newspaper of record for the Levant the DS online archive is an invaluable resource for researchers and journalists. While some pundits today try to point to the fact that with everything unraveling at the pace it is all around us, economically and politically, Lebanon is weathering the storm quiet well without many bumps, so far. We still live in a country where protests are rampant but for the most part allowed and considered nothing exceptional. As for political deadlock over who gets which ministerial post: No government, no problem. But still our country cannot remain for too long without an effective executive branch to take all the vital decisions like buying fuel for...

It floored me when I looked at and compared the before, during and after shots of Burj Square. It’s like a living, breathing city center and public space had been torn clean off, and in its place an asphalt tarmac, a huge emptiness, a gapping hole in our city and our collective memory. We are the lost generations of Lebanon, we can’t find our bearings and it’s not because we are faulty or defective in any way, but because we have been robbed of our center of gravity, of the city we never had a chance to know. They stole Saht-el-Burj (Burj Square) from us and replaced it with an alien looking landscape and at its center, an armless, bullet riddled statue. They removed the name ‘Burj’ from the urban Beiruti dictionary and with it any sense of national cohesion that Burj once represented. I came back to Lebanon with my parents in the early 1990s for a visit; the first place we went to, the ruins of ‘el-Burj’ and ‘el-Aswaq’, the trouble was my parents couldn’t find them at first, all lan...

"There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures," Brutus, from William Shakespeare's Julius Caeser, Act 4, Scene 3

على كف ألقدر نمشي This, in fact, should be our national motto. I saw those words scrolled on the side of a truck; one of those big dump trucks whose brakes seem to fail at a particularly tight corner down a steep mountain road, causing the truck to crash into and crush several cars in its path. Similarly, our country seems to lack a capable driver at the helm or a sound set of brakes. The Lebanese rarely think of dealing with a problem until it becomes too big to ignore, only then we find out that the problem has taken on a life of its own and any solution becomes more complex and costly and takes longer to implement. The real cause of our civil war was one group’s deep feelings of disenfranchisement, a group that was getting an inordinately small piece of the national pie. In 1975, the battle cry of one camp was the preservation of the authority of the state, a state which unjustly favored one sect, keeping executive powers firmly in the hands of the Christian Presidency. The other ...

We are like Lemmings, that is how I would describe the Lebanese, this is not in reference to the popular misconception that Lemmings, a kind of rodent, commit mass suicide when they migrate, but rather it refers to the Lemmings’ biological instinct to migrate in large numbers. It’s remarkable how similar we are to Lemmings when you think about it. They tend to migrate when population density in one location becomes too great. Expert swimmers, Lemmings try to swim across bodies of water in their migration effort; many drown when the body of water they are trying to cross turns out to be too wide. They just overextend themselves and die of exhaustion. This was often misperceived as some form of organized mass suicide, which it is not. Nature creates creatures like this every now and then, like the Dodo bird, whose behavior seems to fly in the face of self preservation and common sense. In that tradition, the Lebanese seem to follow most faithfully. A bickering troublesome people in their...

(Dieters Beware: Drink and Food Figure Prominently) I thought to myself the other day: almost everyone knows about all the bad things in Lebanon, but few people think of focusing on the few good things about this country and there is plenty to be thankful for in a country beset with troubles and tragedy. Below are my top ten good things in Lebanon this season: Spring in Lebanon, warm bordering on hot one moment then a cool to cold breeze blows the next building in to a fierce gust. There is nothing like the sight of those yellow wild flowers blooming everywhere, they make you feel like stopping your car on the side of the road just to enjoy the view. The thawing snow and all the springs. Easter in Lebanon, enough said. Gardens and gardening are a real joy especially in spring when everything blooms. Getting lost on the many winding mountain roads of Lebanon and discovering a small quaint village where people young and old wave to you as if you are a long lost relative. Lebanese wine, a...