Monday, August 16, 2010

Lebanon, Man

It always starts off commonplace. A one-hour bus ride from Tyre to Sidon, great chance to nab a nap without feeling guilty. Watch the banana plantations pass by out the window, eyelids getting droopier, head lolling forward before snapping violently back. Halfway through there is some kind of commotion, which brings us to a standstill. We're at a many-directioned intersection, with ramps and roundabouts and a Hezbollah statue rising Phoenix-like at the centre of it all. And smoke. There is smoke billowing up in raw, expanding puffs just ahead of us, pitch-black. A further look and there's fire, something ablaze on the road, with people gathered around.

You know what they say: 'You should avoid any large gatherings or demonstrations as they could turn violent.' Well, this is that. I'm not typically disposed to hysteria, but this isn't my typical world. Look real close and that unknown, burning object morphs into two hysterical possibilities: car bomb, or martyr. The bus tries navigating its way around the mess, but it's a total, constipated logjam. No one's going anywhere, fast.

So but now everyone else on the bus seems only coolly pissed off. It's strange -- they're gotten-to, but differently to me. I don't think it's the event they're seeing, but the connotations: she's going to be late for an appointment, he's going to miss out on dinner tonight. These people actually live here, so they're numbed to this unruly shit. We manoeuvre around some more, backwards and sidewards and aboard another ramp, pointlessly. Someone broken-Englishes me what's up: They're protesting. Against the government. No electricity.

Ok, I can handle that. Outside, massive black clouds are pluming up high (from a distance: bomb-like). The protesters are burning tyres, branches, any old refuse they can dredge up. Except none of this is slapdash -- it's finely co-ordinated. They have managed to simultaneously lay blockades of this refuse, now ablast with roaring flames, across all the roads in every direction of this elaborate intersection.

We manouevre around some more, deboard one bus for another. Honk, turn, try and outflank the by now terminal vehicular hemorraghing. But we only hit another impasse. Over the far side, cars are driving the wrong direction down the road, writing their own rules. Some of them creep up to blockades with ideas of running the gauntlet, or maybe sweet-talking their way through -- but they are quickly and imposingly deterred by the protesters, who are now shirtless, soot-faced, and waving sticks. Their countenance is militia-like. Mobs of them, angrily alive. Some of the younger ones start hurling rocks at the many engulfing billboards, bringing panels thudding down to the ground. All this time I've been debating what to do -- I don't care for photos, or experience, or expressing solidarity with the disaffected. About now I just want to get the fuck out of here, to preserve my own personal arse.

Me and an Egyptian guy, middle-aged and been-through-it-all, summarily jump the bus and beat our own path forward. We walk towards a blockade -- me with false calm, his for real -- hoping they'll let two meagre, foot-bound pilgrims through. But they just look at us fiercely, raise a stick. We defer, divert, walk through a litter-strewn ditch, scale an embankment and skirt quietly around the edge -- this marginal area somehow remaining unchecked. It feels good, self-reliant. It feels plain, real.

Suddenly the terrain opens up into the highway to Beirut, flowing freely. Our escape hatch, found that easy. I look back to be met by this: a morass of cars and buses and trucks facing every which way, with protesters scrambling madly from one vehicle to next, ordering them to stay at bay, to not do anything rash, threatening and terrorising them with wielded sticks, as four or five demonically black smokestacks rise up and dissipate into the sky above, polluting everything.

We hitch a lift back to Sidon on a bus. It happens to be the very same driver who drove the me in the opposite direction to an unrelated place the day before. No small coincidence, so we smile and nod and genially shake hands. The Egyptian guy is rolling his eyes, more jaded than relieved. 'Lebanon, man. This country is fucking crazy.' Without a hint of irony, without a shred of colloquialism. The day after, I check the internet: no mention of any incident along the Tyre-Sidon highway. No escalations, no news. A total non-event. More or less it didn't even happen.

Friday, August 6, 2010

What is Beirut?

No idea. This place is insane. I've been here 24 hours. The quality of life, the development, seems insane given the place's history. Given the war. Which, in like 5 - 10 year cycles over the past half century, lovely Beirut has found itself fallen prey to in a serious, push-the-country-back-years kind of way.

Some French weenie, well into international politics, the other day told me how a recently-released White House dossier predicted armed conflict between Lebanon and Israel within the next year and a half. What my own research tells me: the reason it's been so quiet since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah clusterfuck is because of a kind of apocalyptic fear: Hezbollah's arms build-up is now so menacing, thanks to Iran and Syria's abettal, that any kind of declared war is bound to devastate the region in a whole new way, in a whole new league of battle. Iran would be drawn into it. And Syria. A thing of such scale that it would spill into the civilian realm in a way not seen for some time, devastating magnitudes.

In Beirut you deboard your bus and look around and hail a taxi and suddenly you're looking out the window at this: Miami-style condos of every imaginable colour pushed hard up against one another, hot-shot cars gliding around between them -- burnt orange Ferrari, Hummer, sexy upper-end BMW -- driven by men and women of a genepool more spectacular than anywhere else I've been or will g0 to, usually with a mobile phone pressed to their ear. There's that. And then in-between in like a 10:1 ratio is this: bulletholes in destitute buildings, bombed-out tenements, bulletholes in still-operative roller-doors and balconies and whatever, you name it. Walking down the street is a challenge, you get drawn into phantasms of how it must have been: soldiers running around in residential areas, firing shots at snipers hidden up high in some real Lebanese civilian's (with a name and a story of their own) abandoned home. The street quiet and deserted but for the odd volley of gunfire, sight-snatch of a gunman moving to find a better vantage point. I write it here in words, but walking down the street in 2010 with Lebanese life buzzing healthily around you, it's impossible to comprehend. Yet it's all you can try to do. I've been drawn to Google-image things like 'lebanon civil war rue gourad' (the name of a main street, where now all the hip, expensive bars lay), just to see what it was like. To print out the image and others like it, so as to be able to walk along those very streets and pinpoint where those exact photos were taken, to get that exact view and experience the ghost of it all over. Do it. Google 'lebanon civil war.' Look at the pictures.

I haven't found the cinema yet, which I make a concentrated effort to do at least one time in each country I visit. But I have found a bombed-out version thereof. Have you ever wondered about superstructure of a cinema, what it looks like in truss-and-beams form? This cinema sits more or less in the centre of town, a giant egglike shell with pieces missing and bulletholes decorating, a giant egglike shell stripped back to its skeleton of sick grey concrete and sick brown undergirding, a giant egglike shell literally ripped into half of what it once grandly was: a massive airy room where people watched movies in the dark. War movies.

It must be what Sarajevo's like. Or: 15 years ago here must have been what Sarajevo's like now. The perfect time to be a tourist here would've been then, 15 years ago. The rebuilding process still in its early stages, the bombed-out buildings holding sway over the redeveloped multitudes. Why would that be perfect, for me? Something to do with living history. Modern history, where the ash is still smouldering. I've come to realise this has become my travel-bent. Seeing and researching and understanding the now-history of these places, the history-in-action, history-up-for-grabs. Screw the Romans and their still-standing ruins. Piss on your ruins, Marcus Aurelius. Your stony relics have no bearings on me and my travails (unlike your books, which are great. Keep it up!).

In any case, the move from Syria to Lebanon has been even more dramatic than I had anticipated. There are mountains everywhere. The heat is wet heat, not dry. People speak English better than me. And every time I hear a firework, I duck. Every time I hear a police siren, I think 'air raid.' Where Damascus fights war by proxy, Beirut does not. I am here in the jewel of the Middle East, fake-boobed woman running around at 5-star Mediterranean beach clubs, McDonald's serving chicken Big Macs to girls in hijabs, all this wonder and tawdriness and modernity -- smack-bang in the line of fire. This is Beirut.