Persiflage & Paroxysm

We dedicate our lives to understanding the meaning and purpose of life, hopefully through scientific inquiry, but what we fail to realize is that we are using imperfect tools, namely ourselves, for which the instruction manual has long been lost. We set about observing life and hope through that act alone we can gain a better understanding of life, but we also fail to realize that through our observation of life and indeed our participation in life we alter and pollute the final results. We call ourselves dominant as a species, and yet we have created a world where knowledge of and fear of the unknown paralyzes us and confines us to a world of superstition rather than motivate us to find answers. Progress and increased knowledge do not equal advances in human civilization if they ever did, in fact the opposite may one day be proved to be the case. Think of what the revolution in personal computing and communication has done, it did not make us better human beings, only better c...

After being the most ineffective and weakest US President since William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore, Obama has turned to global warming as a new cause celebre to get back some of that love that continues to elude him and which so overflowed from both within and outside the US when he first got elected. You only need to look at his choice for foreign secretary, John 'snooze and lose' Kerry, to know what Obama thinks about foreign policy. Bush may have been a monumental asshole, but you knew where you stood with him and he did project US power effectively if clumsily. Obama's trampled red lines and his dithering and indecision with regards to Syria is pathetic and only encourages countries like Russia and Iran to ignore the US completely. He will likely be the President to preside over America 's demotion from its long held position of dominant global power and if you ask me it's about time too! It’s quite obvious that global power brokers Chin...

It was naïve for the Arab youth to think that they could create real radical political change with just good intentions, the will and courage to face water cannon and tear gas, the stamina to hold out and the support of other ordinary well meaning and open minded citizens. It’s sad to see so many still think this way. I don’t blame them, I too would love to embrace such a beautiful delusion, but the fact is once an old established order is toppled those who usually take over are the best prepared and those with the most money and resources at their disposal. Enter the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt , riding roughshod over all that was once held sacred by the secularists in that country, but most tragic of all for the rest of us in the Arab world is that the rule of the Ikhwan ended an era in which Egypt was the compass and undisputed leader of the Arab world. Today, Mursi’s Egypt follows the lead of the Wahabi Al Sauds who today command an impressive alliance of money and power, an ...

The Lebanese do not wish other Lebanese well; not really. They are consumed by jealousy. They see the success of other Lebanese as a threat to their fragile egos and will do their best to thwart their compatriot’s success, or at the very least diminish it and reduce it to insignificance. My late father used to put it thus: “In Lebanon, as you are climbing the ladder you will always find most people below you tugging at you trying to pull you down. In other countries, people who see you struggling to climb the ladder give you a boost so that when you reach the top you extend a hand and help them up also. Many in Lebanon who reach the top against the odds tend to unzip and piss on everyone below them. Can you really blame them?!”   As a result, most people in Lebanon rarely rise up through the socio-economic ranks unless they win the lottery or go abroad to work. Even at the very top the struggle for power and position is unrelenting and motivated solely by jealousy and covetous...

Its hard to know which career paths to recommend to our young people. After all, a bad career choice can lead to a lifetime of regrets. Below are a few I came up with off the top of my head. Top ten best and most exportable Lebanese professions: Entertainers: Singers, actors of stage and screen, dancers, TV presenters, news readers. Graduates of conservatories or Arab Idol only need apply! Food and beverage professionals: Proprietors of Falafel and Shawarma shops, Lebanese restaurants, Lebanese bakeries and sweets shops, chefs, cooks, maître d'hôtel. We have a decent school to train F&B professionals Marketing and advertising professionals: All you need is a quick wit and a smooth tongue and a couple of neat suits, plus a basic college degree and some experience and you are all set to go Tailors: Training needed is minimal, artistic flair and self confidence counts for a lot. It’s easy to dismiss a lowly tailor’s life...

It has been a year since I last wrote about Lebanon ’s ‘cold civil war’, as I called it back then (May 2012), and a lot has happened since that only made a tense situation even worse. The situation in Lebanon today can be called a ‘low intensity’ conflict. To recap: we have Alawite and Sunni communities in Tripoli sniping at and rocketing one another every now and again with the intensity of clashes escalating gradually, we have seen rockets land in the Bekaa and Baalbek fired from the Syrian side of the Anti Lebanon mountain range, an area controlled by rebels, and we still have no government. To top it all off, the level of discourse between political parties in the country has reached an all time low from the low level reached a year ago, as accusations and counter accusations are exchanged on political talk shows. Hezbollah’s victory in El Qusayr has placed the Lebanese Government (Mikati's caretaker administration), in which Hezbollah is represented, in the...

Life is full of contradictions, like one invisible supreme being telling one group of people one set of unchangeable sacred truths while telling another group of people another set of unchangeable sacred truths, then watching while they butcher one another. It boggles the mind why He would do that. I am equally confused by those who condemn one group for being radicalized and resorting to violence, calling them terrorists for struggling for their freedoms and their rights, while accepting that another group, like those militarist bullies who run nation states, have the right to resort to violence in defense of the same rights and freedoms. Life is funny that way, people are just as funny, in fact I would say most people are ludicrous and silly. Think of someone dressed in a turn of the 20th century outfit walking down the street today, he would probably look quite ridiculous. But people who judge others most harshly rarely look in the mirror at themselves and when they do their own ...

My mother told me it was located on ‘ Banks Street ’ in Down Town Beirut , the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square . On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai , for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut ’s Down Town is synonymous with! A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Aust...

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky talking to his friend Count Pierre Bezukhov, from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: "Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! Yes! Yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you marry expecting anything from yourself in the future, you will feel at every step that for you all is ended, all is closed except the drawing room, where you will be ranged side by side with a court lackey and an idiot! Tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret. If you only knew what tho...