The GARBAGE COUNTRY OF LEBANON

Now that I am back to this cursed country, the first thing that hits me in the face is the RAMPANT DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT.

Wherever you go, trash is everywhere. Mountains of trash roll down the ravines from roadsides. Not one meter goes by, as you drive in the remotest mountain hideouts, without the spectacle of PLASTIC BAGS, PLASTIC BOTTLES, and CANS.

The Lebanese people have an inferiority complex: They pick up everything trashy about western culture and make it their own. Now that the West has begun throwning away the idea and consumption of smoking, soda, diet soda drinks, chips laced with all kinds of chemicals, etc... the Lebanese now master the consumption of these items. They are a backward people because they do not see or understand the intrinsic value of things, whether bad or good. They just do what they think will make them "look good". Appearances, looking good, imitating others.... are highly regarded values in the minds of the Lebanese brutes. So, maids, cars, cool clothing, etc... are all priorities. Even my own brother who is bankrupt and whose lazy wife has never worked in her life has a maid. He borrows money from his family to survive, but he will never let go of the three cars and the maid...

Because the environment is not a commodity that the imbecile Lebanese can exploit to his social "looking good" advantages, it is the least of his problems.

TRASH, TRASH, and then some more TRASH in this trashy, superficial, extremely religious and backward country called Lebanon. When will it end?

Every morning, around 5:00 am, as I look down toward Beirut and the Mediterranean, the air is relatively clear and the view acceptable. But within a couple of hours, as traffic picks up on the coastal highway and up and down the main roads between the mountain and the city, a heavy smog lifts and blankets the city and the view...

As you drive anywhere in Lebanon, trucks, busses, and all large utility vehicles spew a heavy black smoke from their exhausts. In this land of cronyism and corruption, the lobbies behind these vehicles (all companies and institutions owned by the politicians) prevent the ban of cheap highly toxic diesel fuels. The drivers of these vehicles claim they will lose their livelihoods if they are forced to use cleaner gasoline, and they demonstrate and block roads whenever someone honest tries to impose such a ban. What they do not know, or choose to ignore, is that as they make their livelihoods with dirty toxic diesel fuels, they are poisoning the air for themselves, for their children and their fellow Lebanese, and all of them stand to grown cancers and other diseases... I told you: The Lebanese are so stupid in their pursuit of the immediate buck, that they would sell their mothers and their health for a quick buck. They have no sense of the future, let alone a sense of community.

This behavior by the Lebanese reminds me of the philosopher who once studied intelligence by performing the following test on a chicken, a dog, and a monkey, and in the analysis, I find the Lebanese to be the most stupid, just like the chicken, because he has no brain or chooses not to use it. He is too obsessed with the immediate urge that he just cannot do the smart thing.

Faced with a fence that stands as an obstacle between the animal and a piece of food:
- The chicken will keep butting its head against the fence to reach for the food, but never gets it.
- The dog will butt his head a couple of times against the fnece, but then will at some point run back, away from the food temporarily, and around the fence and gets the food.
- The monkey does even better. If you place a couple of boxes anywhere in the area, the monkey will stack the boxes on top of one another, climb over them, and jump over the fence to get to the food. He knows how to make tools to get to his objective.

The dog and the monkey are by far smarter than the average Lebanese who does not see the benefit of waiting, deferring the immediate gain in order to secure a longer term gain. Just like the chicken. Stupid. The Lebanese does not see that by cleaning their country, by stopping its pollution, by no longer trashing it with plastic bottles and bags, by respecting their physical environment like they respect the inside of their homes, they will make a lot more money with successful tourism, they will preserve their country for future generations and benefits, they will live happier and healtheir lives.... etc. All lessons that decent civilzied countries around the world haver long known and practiced.

In France, Paris in particular, the sidewalks are larger than the street. Which is why it is such a beautiful city to walk and enjoy. The city is designed FIRST FOR THE HUMAN ELEMENT, then for the cars. The streets of Beirut, on the other hand, have no sidewalks to speak of. When there is a sidewalk, it is very small, crumbling, taken over by electric poles and by cars parked everywhere. But generally there is not even a sidewalk. BEIRUT is a city where the HUMAN ELEMENT IS THE LAST CONCERN. And the Lebanese have the gall to call their shitty capital, with its trash, its pollution, its congestion, its lack of any decent structure for human beings.... the Paris of the Middle East. IT IS NOT.

In Paris, the Seine River is worshipped. It is maintained and the nicest boulevards and bridges run around it and across it.

In Beirut, the Beirut River, which once ran down from the mountains to enter Beirut near the ancient Jisr El-Basha Roman bridge, a more beautiful sight I could not remember from my childhood, is now a dirty, dried up, concrete-bound canal, laced with heaps of plastic trash. Why? BEcause the LEbanese people are a mindless bunch of neanderthals worried more about the fucking show-off high-priced dinners they will have in some dirty, vulgar restaurant - only to brag about the high life they have - than about rivers, trees, and a decent environment in which to raise their children.

No wonder that the children continue to leave the country, and when they discover the decent civilized peoples and countries around the world, they will never want to return to the big garbage dump called Lebanon. Out in the "Ightiraab" (Diaspora), the Lebanese cling to the images of a once beautiful Lebanon, and tell their friends about how beautiful their country is... but deep inside they know they are lying. They know that Lebanon is not what they say it is. In fact, they are ashamed of saying they are from Lebanon...If they open restaurants, they call them "MEditerranean" or "MIddle Eastern"... They are ashamed of calling them "Lebanese"....

Shame on this country. Shame on its people for trashing their country. Shame on its people for electing politicians and worshipping stupid Gods and religions who treat them like cattle and, together with them, continue the rape of Lebanon.

Hanibaal

Next: Saudi Arabia

Prediction:

The next Arab Spring revolution is coming to Saudi Arabia.

Two reasons for this predicition: All the Arab revolutions so far have been centered on two axes: A secular liberalizing democratic dictatorship-toppling one on one hand, and an Islamic revolutionary Muslim-Brotherhood-led one on the other. In both cases, there is a strong current of "we, the people" against the established order, but this is far from the Western concept of "we, the people". For the liberals, this means toppling the dictator, but they have no idea what to replace him with. For the Islamists, this means toppling the dictator and replacing him with a theocracy.

In most cases, the Islamists have won the immediate battle and are now put to the test: Can they run fair governments? Are the Arab Islamists, who claim the Turkish model as theirs, capable of bridging the gap between the typical Islamic theocracy (which is another dictatorship in principle) and modern secular tolerant forms of government? In my opinion, they cannot run this guantlet without suffering tremendous injury to either their base ideology or to their claims of running decent government. There is an inherent conflict between any ideologically-based government on one hand, and its ability to run a fair and truly tolerant system of governance, and the Islamists of Egypt, Tunisia and others are already facing this conflict. For instance, how long can the Morsi government in Egypt maintain the peace treaty with Israel before its base starts reminding him that for decades the Muslim Brotherhood ran on an anti-Israel platform? How long can the Morsi government continue to rely on handouts from the enemy - the US - etc...?

Saudi Arabia is literally the custodian of the Islamic order around the world. The Saudis maintain the only holdout of a fundamentalist elitist Sunni form of government, against which (and despite of which) many Islamic governments around the world measure themselves.

Therefore Saudi Arabia is the perfect storm: A restless Shiite minority population; a growing educated westernized younger generation eager to stand up to par with other wountries around the world; a restless and educated female population tired of being treated like cattle from the Stone Age of humanity; a powerful religious establishment that does not wish to lose its grip on power; a divided royal family between reformists and traditionalists; a tribal society divided upon itself and with historical grduges between the tribes; and finally, the only remaining large Arab country with immense resources to not have experienced any upheavals in recent decades. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has managed to hold the untenable balance of being the most fundamentalist Muslim form of government on earth with close friendliness to its theoretical enemy, the US.

The question is: How long can Saudi Arabia maintain this precarious balance that no longer has the pillars that sustained it for more than half a century? In my opinion, not anymore. I predict that, once the dust settles in Syria, we will witness the beginning of a clash between all the forces at play in Saudi society, regardless of how much money the Monarchy throws at its people or how much superficial reform is brought to bear on women's rights and other stakeholders. In the final analysis, Saudis are just like Egyptians and Tunisians and Algerians.... They will rise up for the most basic of needs: individual freedom. Nothing else matters.

For those paranoid readers (whom I despise) who love conspiracy theories (and I don't), the "others" now plotting against Saudi Arabia might include the following actors and factors:
- Oil revenue is likely to begin falling as new energy research begins reducing the world's dependence on oil.
- The West - US in particular - has hypocritically allied itself with their natural enemies, the Saudis, only to maintain the flow of oil. In return, the Saudis have kept the anti-Israel sentiment at bay for decades, just like Mubarak and Assad did in Egypt and Syria, respectively. The US would much prefer to part ways with the Saudis if it could, and the window to do that is fast approaching. The US will abandon the Saudis as soon as they did Mubarak and Assad. In fact, a troubled unstable Saudi Arabia is the best that could happen to deter Iran and to keep many generations of potential Islamist terrorists busy killing other Arabs, instead of bombing New York or Madrid or London...

Meanwhile, in Europe, the anti-Muslim backlash has begun, despite all the Muslim-loving governments of France and elsewhere. There is a grassroots uprising beginning that will take ugly forms at times, but the tipping demographic point is fast approaching, and ordinary people feel the threat and will not wait for their governments to do something about it. Welcome to a Europe in the midst of a civil war between its natives and its immigrant Muslims...

Yalla, I have my tomato patch and parlsey مسكبة here in the Lebanese highlands... We suffered - and continue to suffer - from all these people: Saudis, Syrians, Americans, Europeans...who traded us and sold us for pennies to all the dictators and all the terrorists... We have been at the forefront of the clash of civilizations from the 1960s, with car bombs, terrorism, invasions.... only to be admonished for wanting better and for wanting a modicum of decency in our way of life. We have been abandoned so many times in the past that we no longer fear anything. No one can subjugate us up here in the rugged mountains... We will survive. But from these heights where I contemplate both perennial snow on one side, and the Mediterranean far in the distance on the other side, I cannot wait to watch the fireworks in Saudi Arabia and every other so-called "Arab" country around, as well as the upcoming fireworks in Europe. Like I feel about the Syrian war, I wish all these people many wars to come for many decades to come. I have no feelings for what is happening in Syria: Neither Assad - whose family decimated my country for 40 years at the behest of Americans, Saudis and Europeans - nor the fundamentalist Sunni "rebels" fighting him who are being helped by Americans, Saudis and Europeans, can draw from me any sympathy. I wish them both equal ill. And let the scum battle the scum for many decades to come, and as we say in Lebanese خلّي الخرى يطبش بعضو .

Hanibaal