New Lebanon, New Hell

By Hani Bathish

 

The new Lebanon, the country that is today emerging amidst the chaos and fog of uncertainty that envelops us all as oppressively as does this stifling humidity, is going to be a very different place indeed. The new rich will be the former hoarders and smugglers, the black marketeers, the sellers of gasoline by the can at exorbitant prices, those smugglers of heavily subsidized diabetes, heart and cancer medication out of the country to sell for astronomical profits, these people will be the new faces of Lebanese high society in the years to come. 


New Wealth


While the newly rich are still tainted by their actions today, their fresh greenbacks will be enough to clean their reputations in the eyes of the materialistic Lebanese. Mark my words and don’t express indignation too quickly, yes the desperate and hungry can and will do almost anything to survive. 

 

We have all watched Egyptian movies of the 70s and 80s, where the theme was nearly always poor boy loves poor girl, poor girl’s father refuses to give her hand in marriage to this poor boy, father gets into dire financial straits and finds a rich man to help him, the rich man asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage in return for helping him, father blinded by the man’s wealth prostitutes his daughter against her will. It’s a well-worn theme or Arab cinema and often the rich man is portrayed as a smuggler or black marketeer or worse a drug dealer or a builder of cheap buildings that fall down in a light breeze or someone politically connected to shadowy and corrupt higher ups. This isn’t fanciful entertainment, but often it is a reality. Soon, it will be Lebanon’s reality too, more so than it already is.

 

The former and currently impoverished middle class is out of the picture and struggling to find an income abroad and to keep their heads above water. Many of the best will be snapped up by other countries, those that are left will have to accept poverty or find poorly paid jobs in the region or further afield. This is the picture as it is. The forces of evil as embodied by the banking cartel gambled with our money and lost it all, and we are supposed to accept the loss and move on and even bear some of the responsibility. That’s alright, we are a dignified class and we don’t believe in revenge, it’s a futile and wasteful emotion. Many of the smartest among us have moved on and have considered their hard earned nest egg lost.

 

But for the hard working laboring classes who’s salaries were never enough in the best of times, they can expect further indignity as the new rich come out from the shadows, leave the world of the low-paid criminal to enter the world of the highly-paid, suit-n-tie white color crook, the ranks of the respectable thieves association will swell with new inductees. But these newly rich, I warn you, may have cleaned up and turned respectable on the surface, but underneath they still carry with them the attitudes and values of the smuggler and hoarder and drug dealer. If you end up working for some of them, it will be a hard life devoid of dignity and I know that the Lebanese value dignity a great deal!

 

Many of the new scions of business and finance in the new Lebanon will no doubt be out of the ranks of base criminals, they are the ones with money, the owners of cash only businesses will follow and join the ranks of the new rich, but the big money in the hundreds of millions being made from smuggling today is going into someone’s pockets somewhere and soon enough, when all the dust has settled, these people will come out of the shadows and emerge as the new bosses of economic life in the new Lebanon. You thought today’s Lebanon was hell, wait a few years…!

 

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