Pity The Nation

Pity the Nation

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and emty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bull as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.

Khalil Gibran
The garden of the Prophet (1934)

Robert Fisk's journalistic account of the Lebanese Civil War is rightly praised as a chillingly accurate account of Lebanese civil war. The book actually works on three levels: as a history of the major events and players in the fifteen-year conflict, a personal account of one journalist's experience and feelings as his world and his city (Beirut) collapsed around him, and as a commentary on how the media covers the Middle East. It is this last level which I found to be the most interesting. Fisk, one of those 'super-journalists' who get to write books and appear on panels, and whose writing and reporting commands international respect, savagely critiques the failure and cowardice of the media as it falls back on loaded words and lopsided analysis in order to compensate for its lack of courage and critical insight. Fisk writes:
"The art--or craft--of reporting in Lebanon was being debased by a style of writing that reduced complex and tragic events to a common denominator which both insulted the victims and mocked their suffering. Television journalism, with its dependence on the image, its subordination of words to pictures, contributed to this process. So did radio journalism, especially in America where a 35-second time limit is normally imposed on each foreign report. The news agencies--which catered for radio and television as well as newspapers--helped to create the unreal world in which the crisis was framed. I began to suspect that the cliches that governed so many reports and headlines about Lebanon actively hindered our task to telling the truth about what was happenning there."
Some examples: Syrian weapons were always described as "Soviet-made", while Israeli or Phalangist weapons were never described as "American-made". Israel "captured" people, while Hezbollah and the PLO "kidnapped" them, and Israel-occupied Lebanon was described as a "security zone." Fisk also has an excellent section on the use and abuse of the word "terror" and "terrorism", that helps contextualize much of the current overheated rhetoric on this misunderstood concept. For if it is terrorism for Palestinians to fire rockets over the border at Israeli civilians, then surely it is terrorism when Israel bombs entire apartment buildings, killing everyone inside. Surely it is terrorism when the US incurs over the Syrian border chasing an al-Qaeda operative and kills civilians in a village. Fisk and other journalists on the ground in Beirut actually began to refuse to use the word in their reports. Better to call an "attack" simply an "attack" and avoid the emotional bias of the word "terror" as a descriptor.
I could go on with insightful examples from this remarkable book. But instead, you yourself, should go out and get a cheap copy and read it.

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Beirut: Celebrating Obama's Win

Woke up early and came over Mount Lebanon to Beirut from Damascus in a taxi with a Christian couple who sat with their one year-old daughter speaking a dialect of Aramaic...YES, Biblical Aramaic, as we ground efficently through the border posts. It costs $10 to exit Syria (you have to love whoever thought of that policy) and we were on our way, descending through orchards and bullet-marked buildings to Beirut's smoggy valley.
We stashed our stuff at the hostel in a room with two odd characters who refused to speak to us; one was reading a book called, I Was Dr. Mengel's Assistant. In the lobby a pale-skinned skinhead in dark-glasses pumped our hands with a soldier's grip, and spoke flawless Arabic. Spooky.
On our walk down to Le Chef to eat lunch, a guy called to us from the doorway of a hardware store, "Yo, homeboy, how's it going?!" I thought I was in DC cause the brother sounded Latino. But no. He continued with a welcome that was a reminder of some of the forces that have torn Lebanon apart in the last half-century:
"Welcome to OUR side of town. You guys, watch your step on THEIR side."

Later that afternoon I watched rich students making the rounds at American University of Beirut, girls with heads uncovered, talking and walking with men, wearing Western clothes. It was a far cry from Sultan Qaboos University; I didn't see any seperate corridors for female students.
At AUB, we tried to go swimming in the Mediterranean; it was a perfect November day. The female security officer gave us the rundown:
"The tunnel is closed this year, but you can jump the fence...no problem, you guys are American!"
I felt some type of way about this--a combination of guilt and confusion--was she joking? Being sarcastic? Expressing some type of recognition of the American the-world-is-my-playground attitude?

A few other things stood out about our visit: The friendliness of the people, of course--the "dragonfly bite" (Fisk's words) of hospitality and beauty; the notorious Phalangist militia headquarters down the street from our hostel; the bustle and burning trash of the Palestinian camp; the old Mercedes taxis, and the haunting images of the burned bodies of children at the memorial for the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia. For those looking for more information on Lebanon and modern Beirut, I can do no better than to recommend Robert Fisk's work Pity The Nation (At least until my colleague GP unleashes his cold-blooded analysis of Lebanon's agricultural sector on the world.)

Ferouz sang of Beirut:
to Beirut--peace to Beirut with all my heart
and kisses--to the sea and clouds
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
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?

The following day, I stood with a group of Americans in the Captain's Cabin bar as they cheered their asses off at 7 o'clock in the morning. We watched bleary-eyed, as Barack Hussein Obama became the next president of the United States. A change had come. Peace to America with all my heart and to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran, and Congo, and Sudan and every forgotten corner of the globe where they huddled over TVs and radios listening to President Obama's moving acceptance speech.

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