Our Man in Beirut

Sometimes it’s tough to figure out how you’re supposed to feel about being Lebanese. I got called unpatriotic for not getting behind the Vote for Jeita campaign. Apparently, I had to blindly support something purely on the basis that it was something everyone in the country agreed on. Presumably we can all also all agree that kittens are cute, so let’s go ahead and put one on the flag. It’s not like we have many Cedar trees left anyway.

My main problem with the Jeita campaign was the, now well-documented, fact that it reeked of con-artistry. It felt like a scam from the very beginning. But then we Lebanese are suckers for a good scam. We get scammed about a dozen times a day, and we grumble in silence to ourselves.

Earlier, I was pounced on by a bunch of friends because I had no desire to go watch Where Do We Go Now?, Nadine Labaki’s latest cinematic offering. It was my patriotic duty to watch it apparently. Well, I don’t know how you decide on your cinema schedule, but patriotism doesn’t have much to do with it. I saw the trailer, it bored me half to death, so I decided not to watch it. The same happened to a lot of Americans with Transformers 3, but they weren’t ostracized or placed on the town square for all to see.

I have an Almodovar DVD box-set I’ve never touched. Does that mean I dislike him? Does it mean I hate Spain? No. No, it doesn’t. It just means I’m lacking culturally because I haven’t had the curiosity to delve into them yet, and I should be less trigger happy when I shop on Amazon.

That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of the fact she’s getting a ton of international recognition, and winning awards, quite the contrary. I just chose not to watch it. I probably will someday, and from what I gather, I’ll like bits and pieces of it. But the vitriol to which you’re subjected for not toeing the party line, is quite shocking. The level of discourse in general is reaching worrying levels of incivility. In a way I avoided watching it because I was concerned I wouldn’t like it, and that would put me on the defensive when discussing it.

We’ve slipped into a worrying pattern in Lebanon, where intelligent conversation is frowned upon. We’ve turned into a nation of Dubya Bushes, where every conversation has to reach the inexorable conclusion that “you’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Any form of independent thought is prescribed outright. You cannot claim to be non-political. You cannot argue with something patriotic. Basically, you are faced with the impossibility of rational thought…

The last week has been what you would call the opposite of a slow news week. It started off last Friday when a delusional terrorist (is there any other kind?) decided to take the lives of 68 innocent people in Oslo. The following day Amy Winehouse was found dead in her apartment at the age of 27. Then, during the week, a beloved Lebanese landmark was supposedly threatened with destruction, and a Lebanese singer was briefly thrown in jail for a song he recorded three years ago.

What do these events have in common? Not much on the face of it. I guess, in a way, they show various aspects of the tragedy of the human condition. Heavy stuff. But on a far simpler level, all these events took over my Facebook news feed over the last few days, and quite rightly so. Where LOLcats, Justin Bieber jokes and wedding photos once reigned supreme, people were now discussing terrorism and addiction.

However, I have some observations I’d like to share. I can almost hear your sigh of exasperation seeping through the screen, but bear with me.

Let’s take the first two events. The day the bombing and subsequent mass-shooting took place in Oslo, I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had to reread the story a few times before it sunk in. This was human atrocity at its basest level. I sent out rather pointless messages to my Norwegian friends, which were more of a sign of shared humanity than anything else. But at this point my news feed remained rather barren. Then, the next day, Amy Winehouse passed away. And suddenly my mini feed was packed full of condolences and heartfelt agony. And this got me rather angry.

A day after no one had reacted to one of the worst terrorist attacks in years, everyone suddenly seemed to be bereft over a celebrity who had been on a path to self-destruction for years. So I posted a status to that effect, wishing for some perspective on the scope of human tragedy. And the comments started pouring in. People angry that I was comparing tragedies that weren’t comparable.

They might not have been comparable as tragedies, but they were comparable on Facebook as entities of concern. I obviously can’t quantify human suffering, but I can quantify responses to it. And the disproportionate amount of people who cared more about Winehouse than about Norway felt rather grotesque.

It seemed to completely exemplify our obsession with celebrity over the past decade. Most of the comments were along the lines of “Amy touched me with her music, and I knew more about her, so it affected me more”. Well I’m sorry, but the day you identify more with a multi-millionaire drug addict than with innocent teenage bystanders, there’s something wrong with the world….

Pick a street in Beirut. Any street. Look in front of you, behind you, above you. Chances are, within your line of sight, there is an ad for some form of physical enhancement, a woman who looks like a cross between Najwa Karam, a disco ball and a Czech pornstar and a guy who has consumed enough steroids to make Schwarzy look like a girly man whistling at her. This unholy trinity of visual queasiness is starting to get very annoying.

I am by no means conservative when it comes to social mores. I’m a Godless libertarian. But the socio-visual landscape in Beirut is becoming repugnant. I actually wouldn’t mind it if everyone was actually bumping uglies, but it’s the blatant hypocrisy of it all. Our society has become hypersexualized, with a distinct lack of actual sex.

Let me explain. I don’t mean no one is having sex, obviously. I mean, Beirut is one of the rare cities I’ve seen where they sell every kind of Durex condom under the sun at the Duty Free checkout counter at the Airport. You know, in case you’re thinking of joining the Mile High Club and you haven’t planned ahead. What I’m saying is that if you walk into a club in the UK, your chances of leaving with someone and getting up to no good are about 70%* (*highly unscientific guess). Your chances in Beirut, where I would say everyone is dressed and acting about the same, is 15% (*again, highly unscientific guess).

There is something misleading about the way we function. Everyone is always dressed up to the nines. Everything is enhanced. Breasts are augmented, fat is reduced, hair disappears. Eyes go green. Lips go red and plump. Pecs appear, bisceps bulge. And yet, very little actually every happens between the sexes on a casual basis.

I know I keep coming back to the opinions of tourists I meet, but they’re a highly useful objective and external vantage point. Every time I take them somewhere, they gasp and say something like “Jeez, it looks like everyone here is getting some tonight”. I proceed to explain the complex dichotomy between appearance and reality, which is an immense buzz kill to the pack of marauding horny Italian Eurotrash men.

Much like the oversexualized women in Arab pop videos, Lebanese women are expected to be alluring and seductive, yet remain virginal. Walking through a shopping mall or making limp-wristed vaguely Oriental dance moves in a club, most seem to be reprising their role as themselves in the movie of their life. It’s a symptom of the Blingification of the world. Everyone wants to be in a hip-hop video. So the men and women of Lebanon flock to Skybar (Note: Other Rooftop bars are available), tanned and toned, their bloodstreams a mix of vodka and champagne, their nostrils flaring at the smell of fireworks. They sway and flirt. But there is no dancefloor. Ever. There is no communal space for people to interact and meet, dance and sweat together.

Everyone lives in a proverbial music video for a few hours. Then they leave the blinged out universe of faux-independence and fleeting adulthood and return to their parents’ homes. Their parents’ homes replete with marble floors and gold chandeliers and expectations of virginal daughters.

Of course, for the men it’s different. They are coached from their earliest age to have double standards, namely that Lebanese women are pure and respectable and foreign women are to be used as vessels for sexual discovery. Many Lebanese men have their first sexual experience at the hands, quite literally, of Eastern European prostitutes in seedy hotels North of Beirut filled with the pungent odour of desperation and lost youth.

Men then go on to embrace this concept of the “Western Whore” and consider anyone remotely blonde that they meet ripe for the taking. Like unevovled cavemen, they whistle and gawk and grope. It’s an embarrassing sight. When I dated a Russian girl in London for two years, and I’d tell anyone in Lebanon where she was from they’d give me a knowing wink and I suppose they’d imagine her with her legs wrapped around a pole, upside down, her blonde hair caressing the stage floor. When I would explain she wasn’t a stripper, or blonde and was the epitome of class, I’d get confused looks for a few moments. It was as if I was pulling the rug from under their every assumption about relationships and sexuality. Then they’d chuckle, as if to say “I’ve just erased what you’ve said, and gone back to my parochial social dynamics. Phew, that was close”. Sigh….

I got a message from a French friend of mine the other day asking if Beirut was a safe place to visit. I’m never quite sure how to answer that question. And it comes up quite a lot. On the one hand, walking the streets at night in Beirut is probably safer than anywhere I can think of. There are no hooded youths on the streets waiting to steal my Blackberry and use it to film me as they go about on a happy slapping rampage. On the other hand, we tend to pepper our existence with Ak-47s and the occasional car bomb. Armed with these two realities, I gave my usual answer, which is “it’s safe until it’s not”.

This particular French friend was planning on visiting as a tourist but was also interested in the ins and outs of life in Beirut, beyond the security situation, because she intends to move here to take up a rather exciting job opportunity. She asked me how easily I thought she’d make friends, because she doesn’t know anyone in town and she’s a bit concerned about that. I chuckled to myself as I told her not to worry, everyone in Lebanon loves foreigners and that she had the added advantage of being both French and Female.

There was a time when the word tourist in Beirut basically meant anyone from the Gulf who couldn’t be bothered to make it all the way to Europe for a long weekend intended to smoke a chicha at Grand Café. And that was about it. I don’t have a problem with that kind of tourism, but it’s the Lebanese equivalent of a lobster-red English tourist in Mallorca in a Newcastle United shirt who thinks he’s mastered the Spanish language because he can say “Oi, Manuel. Dos cervecas por favor. Innit.”

It also meant hordes of returning Lebanese expats, with bulging wallets. But even though the Ministry of Tourism loves counting them in its statistics, they aren’t really tourists at all. They sleep at home with their extended families and basically use the country as a large spa for the duration of their stay. They get medical checkups, see the dentist, get a haircut, load up on zaatar and head back to work….

Marcel Proust famously answered a personality questionnaire when he was aged 13 and then later when he was 20. The questionnaire has gone through a bunch of iterations, probably most famously on the back page of Vanity Fair. As I was moving some books yesterday, I found a book that included the responses of various public figures to the questionnaire and it made me want to take it myself. So here goes.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I grew up in the UK, we tend to favour wistful melancholy. Happiness just isn’t a very English trait, or a very Lebanese one for that matter. If I had to answer at all costs, I’d say being with friends and family around a swimming pool at night, with bossa nova playing in the background. But then it would probably rain or something.
What is your greatest fear?
Failure. But that’s a fear that’s surmountable, through success. Oh and people dressed as rabbits. That scares the bejesus out of me.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Mr Bean.

Which living person do you most admire?
At the risk of sounding like an immense cheesball, it’s very honestly my parents.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
The fact that I feel compelled to make up silly dances everytime I go out, and I force everyone around me, including strangers, to learn the moves.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
The inability to park correctly, or signal when making a right turn. And a general lack of respect.

What is your greatest extravagance?
It used to be spending copious amounts of money on spirits in plush West End clubs in London, trying my best to convince Eastern European goldiggers that I was incredibly wealthy. Which I was, and am, not. Now, I’d probably have to say it’s travel.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
What’s a virtue?

When and where were you happiest?
Happiness? Again? Was Proust American or something?

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
I’m a large hairy Lebanese man. There’s a lot to dislike.

Which living person do you most despise?
Pretty much anyone who has neon lights under their car. And anyone who double parks.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Fuck. Dude. Enno.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Leaving a promising yet soul-destorying job as a banker in London to become a penniless struggling writer in Beirut. Best decision ever. And I can live off crackers and water, right?

On what occasion do you lie?
Never. Or always. I can’t remember which.

Which talent would you most like to have?
I’d like to play the accordion. And look cool. Preferably simultaneously.

What is your current state of mind?
Contemplative. I’m mainly contemplating what sandwich to have for lunch.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
The pleat in a Hollywood starlet’s Lanvin skirt.

What is your most treasured possession?
My books. All of ‘em. Even the shitty ones I used as coasters.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being surrounded by bubbly happy people talking about inane matters. And being alone when I don’t want to be. That’s no fun.

What is your most marked characteristic?
I’m 1m96, 110 kilos, with a full beard, I’d say my most marked characteristic is my eyelashes.

What do you most value in your friends?
Their silence. Badda bing. Eh, fuggetaboutit.

Who are your favorite writers?
Bukowski, Beigbeder, Flaubert, Easton Ellis, Baudelaire, Hage, Brooker, Hunter S. Thompson. Any self-destructive womanizing alcoholic basically.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Captain Planet. You know, because he was our hero, and he was going to take pollution down to zero. And he did.

Actually, hang on…

How would you like to die?
Not anytime soon, thank you very much.

What is your motto?
Some people never go crazy, what horrible lives they must live.

Lebanon’s recent past has been consistently been characterized by a pervasive sense of joyful insouciance, a kind of permanent amnesia that allows us to convince ourselves the biggest decision in our day is what shirt we should wear or what bar we should head to tonight.

Given the ambient carefree attitude, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Bermuda or Andalusia, not in a country in a volatile country in political deadlock for years. There is something vaguely grotesque about how we go about on a daily basis, oblivious to the fact that so much in Lebanon remains unresolved.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. I can hear you shouting at your screen “But that’s the Lebanese way, we’re brave in the face of adversity, we’re famous around the world for our resilience in times of difficulty. We partied under the bombs”. That’s all well and good, and the Lebanese spirit of steadfastness is admirable beyond words. Everything somehow continues to function regardless of what state the country is in.

However, there is no denying that our inability to deal with our past is a considerable problem. I mean a country doesn’t go from a 20-year free-for-all of murder and destruction to a peaceful having of foreign investment overnight. Something is wrong with that process. The fact that the political discourse 20 years after the end of the war is so bitter is the most glaring illustration of how unhealthy our attitude to the past is. You only need to scratch the surface of any conversation/confrontation and you’ll find people digging up various vile episodes from our prolonged periods of civil strife….

Weekend escapes are a somewhat of a vacation oddity. You don’t really feel like you’ve taken time off anything, because it’s the weekend anyway, yet you feel invigorated by the feeling of discovering a city in two short days.

There’s something ephemeral and almost hypnotic about it. You don’t even realize you’re in a new city; your mind doesn’t process your short trip to somewhere new. The sights and sounds seem oddly familiar and alien at the same time. They feel mundane because you were sitting at home just hours ago, but in truth they are anything but. You’re in a trance, being pushed along by throngs of tourists in a similar state. And you start tp go through the motions of visiting the city.

By the time it sinks in that you’re somewhere new and wonderful, it’s Sunday afternoon and it’s time to head home. It happens just as you’re getting your bearings in the city. You’ve figured out the Metro map. You’ve chosen a favorite restaurant, a favorite bar. You’ve picked up a couple of unpronounceable words that can make a local cringe or laugh with you. But it’s time to check out of the hotel, and drag yourself to the airport.

You get that sinking feeling as you approach your gate. Just as landing in a foreign airport for the first time is the closest we can get to rekindling our childlike wonder in our adult lives, the departure gate on your back is probably the starkest reminder available of your adult responsibilities and constraints.

That’s more or less the feeling I’ve always gotten coming back from a weekend, wherever I’m based. Heading back to Beirut, there’s an added level of frustration. Dozens of people who’ve been acting in a perfectly civil manner for the last few days, suddenly revert to their basest instincts. As if to satisfy every cliché, they start trying to queue-jump, they want preferential treatment from staff. “Who’s flying the plane today, is it Zouzou? Tell him it’s Fadi, he loves me. I want to sit in First Class and harass the stewardess for whisky for the next 2 hours. Don’t you know who I am?”

As I flew back from Istanbul on Sunday, after one of the most eye-opening, interesting and fun weekends I’ve had for a while, I had a bemused look on my face as I observed everyone’s slow relapse into a Lebanese state of mind. Once on the plane, things got a little nastier. About 20% of the passengers decided they didn’t like their seats and caused a commotion. Typical situation on a Middle East Airlines flight, right? 300 people want an exit seat and everyone feels entitled to sit next to their 20 friends. But then one man’s request to change seats caught my attention…

Anyone who’s ever met me knows I’m pretty obsessive compulsive. I arrange everything in a neat grid system on my desk in what can only be described as a veritable orgy of parallels and perpendiculars. I fluff up the cushions on my couch the second someone gets off it, much to the dismay of my houseguests. I have even been spotted at the supermarket rearranging unkempt aisles of cereal boxes or sloppy magazine displays, making sure the spacing is just right. I basically love the sight of things neatly organized. I guess you could say I’m OCD Light.

One thing I have lovingly organized is the bookmarks in my web browser. Besides the intricate folders and subfolders assorted by theme and region, I have a tab in my bookmark bar simply called “Morning”. It’s the first thing I click when I wake up and it basically opens up the world in 20 convenient websites. Facebook, Twitter, The Guardian, fffffound, Metro UK, Le Monde, Arts & Culture Daily, The Onion, Not Cot and so on. My morning dose of news, design, gossip, culture and escapism.

But once in a while I like to supplement this daily routine with something a bit meatier. Something that’s a throwback to my days studying politics and doing internships at the UN. So, a couple of weeks ago, I dug my teeth into an article in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. IJURR to its friends.
As with all academic papers, reading the title of the journal took me the better part of a week. Then there’s always the cryptic title of the article to look forward to. When I was studying for a masters in international politics at SOAS, I always used to give my papers unnecessarily complicated names casually sprinkled with words I didn’t understand and semi columns and subtitles. Things like “Pseudo Dualistic Dychotomies in Post-War Glasgow: How Factory Workers Overcame the Unicornification of Labour and Triumphed Over Plethorism”. Obviously, this was mostly to overcompensate for the fact that I’d done very little to no research and the essay itself was unreadable.

I glanced at the title of the IJURR article I had in front of me: Towards a Phenomenology of Civil War: Hobbes Meets Benjamin in Beirut.
Big words: Check. Semi colon: Check. Obscure academic reference: check. “This is going to be fun,” I thought to myself as I settled into my chair.

“Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

So it would seem we’re in for another few months of what foreign media outlets will inevitably euphemistically call turmoil. Last week eleven ministers walked out of the Lebanese government, leading to its collapse. Not that the difference is immediately obvious, given the systemic paralysis the country ritually suffers from. We’ve come to expect very little from our leaders, all the while bestowing them with demi-god status. The result is that most Beirutis are pretty self-reliant, providing themselves with essential utilities the state fails to provide, like water and electricity.

However, it’s still nice to know there’s someone in power somewhere taking care of things, however badly. Saying I’m not particularly fond of Lebanese politics is the understatement of the decade. I wrote a piece in l’Orient Le Jour a couple of months back detailing the extent of my disdain for a system that has forced me to live for decades in lands that weren’t my own. Despite having a father who’s a political analyst and journalist, and having studied the politics of the Middle East for years at university, I have absolutely no interest in the country’s politics.
Politics is a pretty fancy word to describe the Machiavellian machinations a cabal of self-interested ideologues. I find my level of happiness in Lebanon is exactly correlated to how little news I read in a given week. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few good people in the system on all sides, but the overwhelming presence of corruption and pettiness drowns them out, and I’ve stopped caring about them too.

All I want is to be able to go to work in the morning without seeing 15 tanks on the way there. Without the nagging suspicion that someone, somewhere today might grab his finest AK-47 and head out into the street. Knowing for sure that we’re not on the verge of armed conflict in the streets would be nice. You know, the simple things in life and whatnot.

I just want a normal life really…

I’ve recently embarked on a quest to find the perfect coffee table. And when I say perfect, I mean an adequate coffee table that won’t require me to sell my right kidney to an Uzbek organ dealer to finance it. That sounds pretty simple, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. However perusing the furniture stores of Lebanon isn’t as straightforward an experience as you might envision.

Products fall into three broad categories. First off, you have the ridiculously unaffordable foreign brands. “Ooh, look, such a pretty desk lamp. Oh wait, it costs three months salary”. Secondly, you have the highly talented local designers, who’ve appropriated tradtional approaches to craft and who make coasters that cost more than my undergraduate education. The final and most prevalent category is the plethora of nauseating “galleries” selling faux Louis XVI armchairs and gold-plated dog bowls.

So it is with wistful melancholy, in a showroom that redefined my understanding of how many shades of grey the world has to offer, that my mind wandered to Neasden. “Not THE Neasden!” I hear you clamour. “You mean the Neasden where the UK’s first McDonald’s drive-thru opened its greasy doors in 1988?” That very one, ladies and gents. The streets of this fair neighbourhood are lined with semi-detached houses with boarded up windows, and burnt out 1993 Ford Fiestas sit idly in their drive-ways. It’s what I like to call “ASBO chic”.

But my nostalgia for this bastion of urban decay and suburban squalor isn’t tied to the golden arches or the rolled up copies of the News of the World in the dash of every Transit van…