The funny thing about the failed country of Lebanon is that it typically alternates between two different periods, one BETWEEN GOVERNMENTS and one DURING GOVERNMENTS.
1. The period between governments: Paralysis, haggling, complexity, barbarism, political immaturity, sectarianism, narrow interests, foreign intervention..... all of these make this period LONGER than the period when there is a government. Right now, Najib Miqati has been 3 months trying to fashion such a government without much success. What I do not understand is, first, why do the Lebanese think that being a billionaire qualifies one to be a Prime Minister. Second, I did not know that the Lebanese Muslims have all these billionaires in their ranks. Didn't they use to complaint that they were the underdogs in the Maronite-dominated, but prosperous and functional and world-respected, Lebanon of yesteryear? These days, the Muslim-dominated Lebanon, run by billionaires for the last 20 years or so, has become the laughing stock of even the Third World with poverty and unemployment, corruption, lack of basic services (water, electricity, the highest cell phone rates in the world, and by contrast, the slowest Internet in the world, etc...)..! The Lebanese Maronite presidents, in contrast, for the past 20 years have been poor (when they step into power), but become themselves billionaires when they step out, for obvious reasons!
2- The periods when there is a government. (easy, I just copied-and-pasted the line from the previous paragraph): Paralysis, haggling, complexity, barbarism, political immaturity, sectarianism, narrow interests, foreign intervention...but also wars, street fighting, militias and lawlessness running amok, tourist kidnappings, assassinations..... And this period is usually SHORTER than the previous one. It therefore seems to me that it is better for Lebanon NOT TO HAVE A GOVERNMENT because the country is at least stable, though as dysfunctional, but at least the tensions of forming the government seem to keep everyone frozen in an obsessive focus on how many seats they are going to get in the next government that they forget their innate violence. Once the government is formed, then they let go at each other and the cycle is repeated.
As the present time shows, forming a government in Lebanon is an excruciating and difficult process involving squabbling, haggling, hustling, threatening, buying, selling, whoring and sleeping around, devising prototypes and short-term pilot testing of cabinet line-ups, let's-pretend or what-if alliances, and minute hair-splitting delicate balancing between one million or so domestic stakes (shares allotted to each fucking religion and sect and the myriad of enmeshed alliances and hatreds) on one hand, and the other million regional and international stakes (what Syria wants, what Saudi Arabia wants, what Russia wants, what Iran wants, what Turkey wants, what the US wants, what France wants, and these are just the big wigs.... Egypt has a say, the Emirates too), and every fucking son-of-a-bitch out there has a hand in clobbering together a Lebanese government. I suggest that the self-proclaimed smart-ass cunning Lebanese (who truly believe they can outsmart everyone else on the globe) should develop a computer algorithm that will integrate all the variables and have the computer just spit out the government line-up, because one human brain cannot comprehend the complexity of this process of forming a government in such a tiny finch-asshole size of a country.
The sad thing is that once this painful process is completed, the rewards that the country gains from having assembled a government are in contrast abysmally poor, because the resulting government is as useless as the finch's asshole, crapping around for months and years without any accomplishments whatsoever, with the squabbling continuing ad libitum and the paralysis so pervasive that all the basic services in the country remain fossilized in the Stone Age and the people drift between unemployment, emigration, poverty and - when all of the preceding becomes unbearable or boring - warring and fighting and killing and massacring... That is, in short, the condition of the country of Lebanon for the past 50 years or so.
So, in essence, it doesn't matter if the country has or does not have a government. Things continue to operate - albeit dysfunctionally - as they always do. The reason is that Lebanese society is of a primitive kind: tribes and religions that do not believe in a government, preferring instead to hoard power inside the tribe or the religion, instead of venturing outside of the narrow tribal and religious and sectarian confines into the bigger and wider world of the national. In other words, the Lebanese are - politically speaking, still the small, narrow-minded quadrupedal brutes and primates who have yet to step down from the trees, let go of their branches, and venture out in the plains where they have to think in a bipedal erect posture and start using their cerebral cortex and their hands to be useful at something. Otherwise, they will remain the world's beggars and buggers, and the lowest country on the evolutionary scale towards modernity.
Hanibaal
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